What do we want our customers to become?
Amsterdam Product Club #20
Hi friends! 👋
Happy Thursday and welcome back to Amsterdam Product Club.
Today I’m sharing an inside-story from my work at VEED. My product - our mobile app - has blasted past $1M ARR. A great milestone, but only the start. The past weeks I have plotted our actions for the next phase. This time, instead of thinking about how to improve our product and workflow, we asked ourselves: What do we want our customers to become?
What’s your Super Mario?
A good analogy to think about that question is Super Mario. Without flowers and mushrooms Mario is just a little plumber that can’t even jump high enough to save the princess. But with them, he can blast through the levels and reach his goal. Our product is that flower: something that unlocks a better version of themselves for your user. More productive, more creative, more better!
We’re not selling the flower itself (a video editing app), we sell the powerup Mario gets from it (great videos to fuel their business growth). So ask yourself: what is our customer's equivalent of super Mario? What superpower are we giving them?
Super Mario at VEED
This framework helped us put more emphasis on reducing the effort needed to create great-looking videos with our app. It also helped us sharpen our marketing efforts, where we now focus more on “make videos like [insert favorite influencer]”.
Implementing your Super Mario
The Mario analogy is a mental model to zoom out, and understand the full context of your product. You can use this to improve your customer interviews: instead of asking users what specific task they set out to complete, ask what got them there in the first place. Figure out their biggest pain points in their journey and see if you can support them. And try marketing your product in a more emotional (save the princess) and less functional (here’s a flower you can eat to grow a bit) way.
Note of caution
This model comes with a big caveat. In the early stages of your product your target audience is a small set of early-adopters that knows what they want. For them it will help to be very specific in your marketing. Only when you expand from that group and need to get more people educated and excited you can bring in Mario.
Go find your Mario!
People buy the benefit, not the product. At VEED we feel that business growth with professional looking videos in just a few clicks. What are you helping your custeromer to become? Would love to hear it in the comments!
Internet things I enjoyed 🧑💻
Noah’s substack on geopolitics
Super insightful. Helps me understand the world betterMy future dream home in the woods
Found my dream crib - check it out here
Gokul’s thoughts on delegation
My philosophy ever since has been to transfer monkeys to the right people ASAP (keeping in mind Andy Grove's task-relevant maturity framework), ensure these people know these monkeys are theirs (clarity of goals), and help / advise / coach them on how to care and feed for their monkeys (delegation does not equal abdication).
Happening in Dutch tech 🇳🇱
I’m a bit sad an will not share highlights this month. Only one lowlight: a new plan by the Dutch destroy our knowledge economy and startup ecosystem. This time by only allowing ⅓ of university courses in another language than Dutch . Every week there seems to be news like this with random populist measures. What country do we want to become? How will we protect and expand our position?