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The engineer's grail is a product great enough that it sells by itself. But anyone who says this either is delusional or is selling something (and thereby contradicting himself).
Think about distribution as something essential to the design of the product.
Good product + Bad distribution of the product = Bad business
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MORE IDEAS ON THIS
Most people (especially engineers) underestimate the importance of sales because it's hard to accept that customers will not come just because they build cool stuff.
Engineers are biased to think that way. But it's only a delusion to think that distribution will flow magically withou...
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386 reads
It can vary based on the product's target customers.
To have a viable business, the total net profit that the company earns from a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, CLV) should be bigger than the amount spent to acquire the customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, CAC).
It starts from co...
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Work for low-priced products that have mass appeal but lack any method of viral marketing.
A laundry detergent company can't afford to pay salespeople to go door-to-door, but instead pays salespeople to talk to grocery chains since one deal might mean 100.000 bottles sold.
To reach it...
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Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly. No matter how strong the product (even if it is the next best product in the world), it must be supported with a strong distribution plan.
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At Paypal, they wanted to get the most valuable users first, which were the emigrants who wire money back home, but the transactions were infrequent - didn't work.
They needed a segment with a higher velocity of money - they found eBay 'PowerSellers' (the professional vendo...
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All salesman are actors: their priority is persuasion, not sincerity.
Sales work best when hidden. People in sales, marketing, or advertising have a job title that has nothing to do with those things.
And there is a reason for all of this: none of us wants to be reminded when we're be...
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A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too. If every new user leads to more than one additional user, it will grow exponentially.
This ideal viral loop should be as quick and frictionless as possible.
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If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business--no matter how good the product
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In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or fails. They add value by becoming experts at a technical skill that can be evaluated relatively easily.
Sales are the opposite: a campaign could be to change surface appearances without changing the und...
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CURATED FROM
As an engineer, it was hard to not underestimate the importance of distribution. Most of the time when I was thinking about sales, my brain(thoughts) just decides to skip it.
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Whether it's telling inspiring stories to customers or delivering a presentation to executives and the board of directors, being a good storyteller helps us make the leap from Good to Great.
Product managers and designers can benefit tremendously by great storytelling, and so can anyone wh...
Good product discovery has a simple underlying structure: Start with an outcome, discover opportunities, discover solutions.
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