What I learned from our evangelist tonight

Tonight I had a great dinner with new friends. When I introduced them the service we’re offering, there’s a girl who was especially enthusiastic about it, she keep saying that the pricing is “cheap” and she started some sales pitch to one of her friends in front of me.

I learned few things tonight.

Talk to your customers, especially on pricing!

We were buzzed these days about pricing. One thing that troubles my partner most is that he couldn’t convince himself about the price. It’s just too high to be competitive. However, I learned tonight that it’s product market match.

There’re a sweet spot on price where customers are happy with the product. That may not support long term scalability but it’s not the problem now. What we need now is to know what’s our customers like.

You don’t have to teach them with use case

I only told her the functions of our product and when she gets it, she immediately turned to her friend and did a pitch with all the use case. It really works like magic!

I was preparing marketing materials and powerpoint the other days. We discussed a lot about how to show “use cases” to customers. It reli strikes me tonight that once they get the functions, they immediately know how and when to use it.

When we design the marketing materials, we can’t help “profiling” our customers: corporate customers are boring and they only use it for a, b, c. Other consumers are lay-back and they use it for x, y, z.

But in the real world, there’s no corporate or consumers, they’re all human being who need a solution to their problem.

“Pin it forward”, the project that helps Pinerest to obtain significant growth in early days, was started by a local blogger organizing a meet-up, literally Pinerest’s first meet-up. The use case wasn’t expected by the team but it became an inflection point. [1]

[1] In May 2010, a woman named Victoria helped organize a program called “Pin It Forward” – a “chain letter” where bloggers would exchange pinboards about what home meant to them. It was an inflection point.