Plain Vanilla with a Twist
How to simplify your product go-to-market
Convincing someone to adopt your technology, or buy your product is one of the hardest things. There are many “go-to-market” (GTM) strategies, and it always starts with solving a customer pain point, ideally that’s a “heart attack, not a headache.”
Paul Graham was famous for telling his founders at Y-Combinator to get out of the building. Go talk to customers. Until you’ve nailed your initial customer profile (ICP), and really honed in on the problem you’re solving, and the customer pain point, there’s not much a GTM strategy on its own can achieve. But you can sharpen your ICP according to a few vectors, or dimensions. What sector are you going after? What company size and segment are you going after (startup, small business, or enterprise)? What target buyer are you selling into (CEO, CTO, head of sales, etc). Does this target buyer control the budget? If so, how can you align incentives with them, primarily by helping them either expand revenue, or increase their cost savings. Once you’ve nailed down your ICP you’re one step closer to isolating your GTM motion.
The sharper your ICP, the more refined your GTM can become.
I often tell founders I work with about the early days of Google Docs. When Gmail launched in 2004, internally it was called Caribou. Soon acquisitions of companies like 2Web Technologies and Writely in 2005-2006 led to a consolidation, and Google’s initial offering of Google Docs. Back then at Google we had Docs and internal spreadsheets called “Trix,” after the acquisition of 2Web. 2Web had created a product called XL2Web that converted offline Excel files to web-based spreadsheets. I still recall the internal sheets having the name and icon “Trix” at the upper left, long before these tools were external and packaged into today’s Google Workspace, that now includes everything from Drive to Forms to Gmail to Docs to Sheets.
In those early days I recall Google’s go to market motion that was trying to supplant Microsoft 365. While the collaborative web-based alternatives like Docs and Sheets offered manifold benefits, I recall early Product Manager and Product Marketing Managers explain to me how their own GTM had suffered by over-selling the many ways in which Google was in fact superior to offline Microsoft Office. The problem was, there were so many differentiated features that it was hard for buyers to grok. People would hear 10 or 20 points of differentiation, and inevitably latch onto one thing they didn’t like and say, “well that’s why it’s really not for us.” It could be for one reason or another, but too many features becomes a distraction, and a reason for a no. Don’t oversell complexity to create a reason for someone to say no.
What came about is what I call “Plain Vanilla with a Twist.”
The key differentiator for Google Docs was collaboration. You could have multiple users working on a Doc or a Sheet at the same time. What early product and marketing leaders had to hone in on was that ONE salient differentiator, and then cut out all the noise. They had to be Plain Vanilla… but with one twist. Only one.
We sold Google Docs as “exactly like Microsoft Word, except you can have multiple people in the document at the same time.” This simplification cut out 20 other reasons it might have been better, but it simplified the story into something dead simple that slot into both a user buyer behavior with one key differentiation that was plausible, not scary, and moreover enabled that ICP or buyer to retell the story.
In other words you’re often not just selling, but you’re creating a game of telephone. You have to enable your buyer to be able to retell and resell what you’ve already sold them. They need to understand the narrative so that they can amplify the buy in. Adoption only comes when your narrative is dead simple, clear, and easy to explain. Ideas have to travel, and it’s up to you to package your product and narrative in a bite-size way where someone else can explain it in an elevator, or at a cocktail party. Product led growth (PLG), and true viral growth, happens when not only is the narrative dead simple, but moreover the embedded mechanics and incentive structures enable your users to share the story, and the product itself on their own.
What’s plain vanilla to your ICP? What’s their existing buying behavior? And how can you isolate one key point of differentiation that makes them say “aha.” For early Google Docs and Sheets it was a dead-simple narrative that isolated and explained one key point of differentiation versus Microsoft 365. Plain vanilla, with a twist.