Acquired Podcast Quotes

4. What does your group think about similar products on the market? If you have a group of products you’re thinking about focusing on, you can start to identify “holes” in the marketplace by listening to what people are already saying. Read customer reviews and look at internet forums. You can also start vetting your idea by posting about it online. My buddy Moiz tried using Tom’s natural deodorant, and he hated it for a simple reason: It didn’t work. He thought, I wonder if I could do this better. So he started asking questions on online forums, getting feedback from other natural yuppies like him. From the response, he knew there was interest. He did a $500 round of prototypes and sold out immediately. That was the beginning of Native Deodorant, which was later acquired by Procter & Gamble for $100 million. It took Moiz only eighteen months to go from a $500 prototype to a million-dollar brand (and it sold for nine figures!). 5. Where does your person hang out with others? With an idea of what we might sell, we can start to think about where our first customers might come from. It’s much easier to make sales when you can drop your product in front of a group of your ideal people. Does your target customer listen to specific podcasts? Do they follow certain influencers? Do they belong to specific groups? Do they read certain blogs? Brainstorm where your ideal customer focuses his or her attention, and you will quickly know where to put your product in front of them. In the next chapters, you will also learn how to develop a micro-audience that is ready to buy your product from you. I also like to write down the names of ten friends who will get excited about a product because your ideal customers know other people just like them.

Spotify had learned its lesson. Deploying a powerful capability in the domain of your allies is a recipe for crisis. Sustaining a coalition requires disciplining your own urges and direction of growth. A corollary, however, is that deploying that same capability in a domain where you do not depend on critical allies can be a powerful growth accelerator. For Spotify, being forced to look beyond music clarified the potential of a new horizon in podcasts—audio shows in the spirit of early radio, covering an enormous variety of topics and themes. Within a year of dropping the upload service in the music arena, Spotify would spend over $1 billion acquiring exclusive content and content aggregators in the podcast arena,

Do you spend more time acquiring information—whether through podcasts, websites, or conversation—than you spend distilling what you already know?

How Should I Structure My Pricing? Pricing is the biggest lever in SaaS, and almost no one gets it right out of the gate. Fortunately, you don’t need a PhD to structure your pricing well. Like most things in SaaS, finding the right pricing structure is one part theory, one part experimentation, and one part founder intuition. I wish I could tell you a single “correct” structure, but it varies based on your customer base, the value provided, and the competitive landscape. Most founders price their product too low or create confusing tiers that don’t align with the value a customer receives from the product. On the low end, if you have a product aimed at consumers, you can get away with charging $10 to $15 a month. The problem is at that price point, you’re going to be dealing with high churn, and you won’t have much budget to acquire customers. That can be brutal, but if you have a no-touch sign-up process with a product that sells itself, you can get away with it. Castos’s podcasting software and Snappa’s quick graphic design software are good examples of products that do well with a low average revenue per account (ARPA). You’ll have more breathing room (and less churn) if you aim for an ARPA of $50 a month or more. In niche markets—or where a demo is required or sales cycles are longer—aim higher (e.g., $250 a month and up). If you have a high-touch sales process that involves multiple calls, you need to charge enough to justify the cost of selling it. For example, $1,000 a month and up is a reasonable place to start. If you’re making true enterprise sales that require multiple demos and a procurement process, aim for $30,000 a year and up (into six figures). One of the best signals to guide your pricing is other SaaS tools, and I don’t just mean competition. Any SaaS tool a company in your space might replace you with, a complementary tool or a tool similar to yours in a different vertical can offer guidance, but make sure you don’t just compare features; compare how it’s sold. As mentioned above, the sales process has tremendous influence over how a product should be priced. There are so many SaaS tools out now that a survey of competitive and adjacent tools can give you a mental map of the range of prices you can charge. No matter where your business sits, one thing is true: “If no one’s complaining about your price, you’re probably priced too low.