Madhavan Ramanujam: commitment

Transcript context

…When should early stage founders think about segmentation? Do you suggest it's right from the beginning, the first product should have multiple segments, or does it come later? This is also an often asked question in the sense that as a startup, as an early stage founder, often the excuse is, "Hey, we don't have time. We're actually pulling stuff out of the wall. We need to get something out there." It's like, "Time is of the essence, so we need to build a product." And usually they would say, "Let's build just a product, which is every awesome thing that we are working on, and then we come back and revisit whether we want to build other versions, et cetera, and we don't have resources to even build multiple products." Well, that logic makes sense when you don't understand the concept of segmentation. If you truly understand the concept of segmentation, you would say, you know what, as a first conversation, when you're having that willingness to pay conversation based on your idea, you would say, "Who's actually willing to pay for this innovation? What do they need? How many of them are there? Can we productize to this first compared to the others? "Then you'll start prioritizing not only your R&D roadmap, but you're resourcing to say, "Which segment should I start with? And then what segments would I actually add?" And then your value messaging would be tailored to that segment. People will understand the benefits. They will say, "Your product will be launched and people will get it and they would actually go for it." So having done this exercise early will tell you how many segments are there, what is the size of these segments, how to prioritize them, which one to pick first and which product to build first for that segment, and then productize to the other segments later. If you're lazy and sloppy, you'll build a product, you'll slap on a price, you'll throw it in the market and say, "I will attract everyone. " You'll attract no one. Amazing. So basically understand the segments right from the beginning. Don't necessarily launch products for every segment.…

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