This is a three part series on how to win your startup market. Part 1 is this post, Part 2 is finding your quadrant, and Part 3 is finding your tidal wave

Delivery, it’s where startups fail.

What’s delivery? It’s your methodology for winning your market.

What does winning your market mean? To be the largest, most successful, and therefore the most enduring company in your space.

Why do you care? It’s called the Law Of Increasing Returns. Chapter 1 of Eating the Big Fish explains this best, but number one has every advantage in the market. This means everything is easier from acquiring customers to raising capital to attracting employees to being profitable.

Back to delivery….In my first company I spent a decade of my life not realizing that winning a market was by far the hardest aspect of building a company. I was naive to assume that the best product wins, it doesn’t. Instead the company who figures out delivery has the best shot to both win their market and give themselves time to make the best products.

GoPro beat the shit out of us with content to retail. They copied the RedBull model but instead of selling a can of sugar water they sold you a camera. They built their company DNA around content marketing and retail distribution. The result was brand value that allowed them to sell an inferior product at the same price. Ultimately better product margins gave them more money to put back into Delivery, which further increased their market share.

A second example is Box. They started in the same market as Dropbox, both trying make data storage easy. Early on they realized they had very little chance of winning in the online, consumer storage game. Therefore they pivoted to enterprise where they quickly realized their Delivery was about enterprise sales and marketing. They had to shift their DNA from consumer internet to the enterprise and therefore had to spend a lot of capital to establish customer relationships quickly. They knew that if they could win customers they could then make their offering better over time. They too became a public company.

Every market is different. Below is the process I use to discover Delivery.

Keep in mind this is not a list of steps but instead a circle you keep spinning to find your answers. This process takes 2-3 years to figure out.

1- Who Is The Customer And Why Do They Buy?

The who is different from the why.

The who, is the person who will eventually purchase and use the offering you make. Ignore how you get to them, just understand who they are.

When you start you don’t have customers so you have to do this through interviews within an existing market. You have to find out how people solve their problem today. If they are buying/products or services you want to know what and why they bought it. If they didn’t buy anything you want to know that too. Why people don’t buy is as powerful as why they do buy because in their "no" you can uncover a lot of potential.

Please note these are not customer persona’s. Those are just made up people and a waste of time. Instead just talk a lot to potential customers, to the point that you can see the trends of what people are saying.

The why, is deeper than the features or the price. It’s about understanding their motivations and what triggered them to act on them. You want to find out…

• Why did you buy?
• Why did you buy now versus later?
• How long was it from thinking about buying to actually buying?

When you get surface level answers, like price, ask follow-up questions to understand their deeper why. Such as, what problems are you trying to solve, why is it a problem, what are you trying to get out of the solution?

What you’ll start to discover are consistent themes. At Moment we learned that people purchased because they were going to take a trip. It represented the reason they wanted better photos or videos..and therefore the products and services we offered.

2 – Who Has Reached This Customer Before?

Take your customer and look at who has reached them before.

Start outside of your direct market to avoid repeating tactics they have already seen. Instead look at random, different markets and what tactics have worked to reach this same type of customer.

For example, early on we thought people had to see and touch Moment gear before buying. If true, this tactic is similar to sampling. So we looked at sampling industries…

• Beverage
• Food
• Cars
• etc.

We would then look at the tactics the winning companies used to see which ideas were relevant to us that we could test. The ideas we liked we copied and applied to our market.

• Local street team with gear who would visit local events.
• Small trips where people try our gear.
• Photo walks.
• Etc.

All of these were small bets we could take and test to figure out our Delivery.

At scale a great example is RedBull. Somewhere along the way they realized they could take the the tactics of an alcohol company (sampling, parties, vip) and marry them with the tactics of an entertainment company (entertainers, content, and big events). They were able to take tactics used in ancillary industries, bring them to beverage, and create something no one had ever seen before.

3 – What Tactics Work?

Try everything…quickly.

You need to create a culture built around experimentation. Everything your team is working on is in support of figuring out your Delivery. You don’t care if it’s about products or sales or sampling, etc. Every dollar the team is spending is a bet and you need the team learning which bets work to acquire a new customer.

What you care most about is that the team has a decision framework to make bets, learn from them, and decide what’s next. They need a bet size, in dollars, they can use. They need to be able to measure the results, even if in a basic way. And they need to take notes so you can find the threads.

The basic process…

• Create a culture that experiments.
• Provide a bet size, in dollars.
• Have simple ways to measure ROI.
• Take notes to find the trends.
• Be part of as many bets as you can.

In order to roll this up into one Delivery methodology you need to be in the middle of the action. You can’t run all the experiments yourselves but you need to be looking at the data, reading the notes, and talking to people. In between the tactics are the bigger trends and it’s really important that you find them.

4 – What Is Your Delivery?

Now comes the hard part.

You have to roll-up the tactics into one strategy. You will build your entire cultural DNA around this strategy, therefore it’s important to figure this out as fast as you can. If not you risk hiring people that aren’t going to fit.

In creating a delivery strategy you want to keep it as simple as 1,2,3. It probably starts as just one strategy and over time you add the second and the third. Keep in mind you will get some of this wrong so don’t be afraid go backwards in reducing your list to then re-add.

The easiest way to summarize your Delivery is to answer the finish the statement…we win our market through_____. To start it will be, we win our market through ______. Then it’s we win our market through ______ and ______. Then it’s probably…we win our market through ____, ______, and ______.

If you list a bunch of tactics you’re doing it wrong. Your answer should be simple enough if fits in a single sentence.

At Moment we win through Content to E-commerce. Therefore we have built our whole team DNA around both content and e-commerce. From the people we hire to the way they area organized to the tactics we use, we are building around this Delivery.

We still have a ways to go in adding our third element but now five years in we’re starting to uncover what our third element is to winning our market.

If you have questions email me or send a dm to @marcbarros.