This is a guest post by Chris Winterhoff, who is an expert in Growth. Currently Chris is a fractional Growth leader and growth advisor at Perceptycs.
Previously he headed Growth at Onto, a UK platform for all-inclusive electric car subscriptions. And was also Head of Marketing at Mashroom, which covers the UK housing industry.
Guest Author: Chris Winterhoff
The best companies steal market share by
being super focused,
being unafraid to do difficult things,
and taking a deep understanding of a key need of their customers.
That’s how they build a differentiated offer in their customers’ minds.
You want an example?
Here’s how Loom did it. Loom is the async video recording tool that recently sold for close to $1bn.
The Loom founding team had an idea, then obsessively tried to understand whether the idea had legs, speaking to potential customers day in day out. Turned out it had no legs. Nor did the next idea.
Did they do marketing? Nope, they were super focused on hitting a need and not doing anything else. They could have ramped up marketing spend and driven some user adoption, but they did the hard thing and pivoted to new uses, because they didn’t get the signals they needed. Many other companies would have shied away from pivoting.
After the third idea they found something that stuck. As they developed the product they worked on only one channel: referrals. A mega hard channel for most companies, but one that worked really well for them given the nature of the product.
Did they invest major resources in other channels? Nope.
Did they achieve differentiation? Yes.
Zoom, Google Meet et al were all live meeting tools. Loom differentiated by relentlessly focusing on those customers who didn’t want more meetings. They became the de facto market leader for async meetings.
Where video meeting software companies enabled meetings, Loom disabled meetings. And customers love them for it.
If differentiation is on your mind but you’re not sure whether customers see you that way, DM me and we can hop on a strategy call to explore this.
