More than a Mousetrap
Steve Robins
Marketing Leader | Scaling B2B SaaS Marketing & Product Marketing | EnergyTech, PropTech, InsurTech & 15 other verticals
"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door."
My parents shared this adage countless times when I was younger. Although they are very wise in many ways, on this my parents were wrong. It turns out that the world - and especially the world that we live in today, will not beat a path to your door just because you have a better mousetrap.
There's just one you. But there are 319 million people in the U.S. and 7.4 billion people in the world today. 319 million people are not paying attention to you. Heck, "only" 80 million of them tuned into Monday's presidential debate. There is just no way that all of those people - or even meaningful small fraction of those people - are going to find your product on their own or with the help of their friends.
I know what you're thinking: If I create a great product, an amazing product, a wonderful product, an "I gotta have it" software/SaaS/mobile app product, a user-centered product, a solid product, a well-designed product, a useful product, a beautiful product, then won't everyone beat a path to my door? Won't my friends tell their friends who will tell their friends and so on, and so on? Isn't that how Dropbox and Evernote and Slack became giants?
Sure it is. And it's what over 160,088* other software companies in the U.S. are trying to achieve as well. But that's not really the point.
Here's the point: getting your great, amazing, wonderful, perfect product into the minds and hands of buyers is going to take a lot more than a great product. It is going to take marketing. Without marketing, barely anyone will know just how great, amazing and wonderful your product is.
There. I said it. It's going to take M A R K E T I N G.
Oh, and by the way, it is also going to require a few other things such as engineering (to design it) and human resources (to staff it) and finance (to pay for materials in advance and make sure it's profitable) and sales (to connect the product with buyers) and maybe distributors (to sell it into the market), and a whole lot more. Yes, getting your software/SaaS/mobile app product to market is going to take a whole lot more than your product. It is going to takes a whole ecosystem. A system. A value chain.
Sure, you might be able to skip a few of these steps. Maybe you can sell it online without sales people and maybe you don't need distributors. But you can be sure of one thing: you are going to need more than a product.
But no matter, it all works best when all of the parts come together. It's not software but the model still applies: Consider the Apple iPhone with its attractive design, solid construction, highly trained engineers, knowledgeable sales people, strong supply network and broad distribution through phone carriers. All of which is complemented by something else... prolific advertising, sleek website, carefully crafted brand, even its Twitter feed, which are all.... you guessed it: marketing. Yes, marketing.
So go ahead. Build a great mousetrap. But be sure to think about what it's going to take to design, staff, finance, sell, supply, distribute, and yes, market your mousetrap, so you that a whole lot of mice find it and beat a path to your trap, er mousetrap. Good luck!
Steve Robins helps others create, market and sell better products and solutions. Steve is the president of ProductCamp Boston, the world's largest, and a board member of the Boston Product Management Association. A marketing executive at EMC, Documentum, FirstBest and KANA. Steve Robins is the principal of strategic marketing consultancy Solution Marketing Strategies, founder of the top-rated Solution Marketing Blog, and guest contributor writing on martech from the CMO's perspective to SearchCRM.
* US Census 2012 ||| Mouse image: George Shuklin ||| More: what it takes to build a complete offering
Product leader, Advisor, Ex-Threads | Tech Product Led 50% YoY growth
8 å¹´Marketing is critical. Tie that to sales will be the effective way to get the job done.
Consulting Engineer for Interdisciplinary Problems
8 å¹´Great points! But there is also a ‘dark side’, with sufficient marketing a “bad mousetrap†can often beat the “better mousetrapâ€. I have seen many engineers and managers, who should know better, ask why aren’t we using the “new†thing, based on the assumption that “newer†is always “betterâ€. Also transition “costs†are often neglected. An improvement must be sufficient to justify training, documentation, validation, etc., which can be very costly. Sometimes just “different†is a problem. I have been amazed to see how much trouble a new container, now one inch too big to fit on the existing shelves, can cause.
Substack at Aargh! by David Pinder
8 å¹´Absolutely spot on, Steve. Thank you. Plus, as Sam Klaidman says, given the huge choice-power that Customers now have, any new mousetrap maker has to be able to nail the value elements of their solution.
An outcome-focused pragmatist working with aftermarket leaders to grow revenue and profits while reducing customer churn
8 å¹´Steve, well said but missing one point. If your new whatever doesn't help the potential buyer improve business outcomes by either increasing revenue, reducing costs, or minimizing risks then the product will fail no matter what. Unless they create customer value the product will be a learning experience but also one of the 90% of new products which fail to even recover development costs.
Principal Technical Writer at Guidewire Software
8 å¹´Great post, Steve!