3 Ways to Sell A Platform
Do you think your startup is on its way to becoming the next Microsoft?
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Every startup wants to be a platform, but how do you actually SELL a platform? There are three main approaches that the big names tend to use to successfully market themselves to consumers.
Option one is to use one main product as a “wedge” into their company.
Basically, it gets the consumer’s foot in the door. Think of Stripe – primarily a payments product, right? Yet, once you start using Stripe, you realize they do much more. You get an alert, "We saw some suspicious activity — you should also get Radar, our fraud prevention product."
And thus, the wedge has done its job. Now, you’re fully invested into the multiple different products across the platform. This is the safest bet for startups. It’s a forcing function to help you stay narrow and prevent product bloat, it keeps the focus on finding product market fit with one product first, and one intial product is by far the easiest to market and sell.
Option two is to sell multiple wedge products to different segments.
For example, depending on how you first heard about monday.com, you might think of them primarily as a project management tool. BUT, if you ask your friend who works in insurance, he might tell you monday.com is a CRM. T
his is because Monday is positioning themselves three different ways for three different customer segments and essentially hides the other products until you're already inside and activated (and THEN they try to cross-sell you).
This becomes a little riskier for startups as you basically need to run multiple go-to-market plans at once. Then there also comes the issue of two people meeting who have completely different understandings of what Monday is and does. The safest way to use this approach is by analyzing what works and what doesn’t and eventually trimming the fat to whichever products are working best.
The final option, and arguably the hardest to do perfectly, is to create a bundle.
Microsoft is the king of the bundle. They make it extremely hard for you to buy just Word or Excel, and instead coerce you into an Office 365 subscription. This is the strategy that most startups use when trying to sell a platform.
If you’re early in the game and haven't found the right product market fit, bundling will make it extremely hard to look critically at what is working and what isn't. Without being able cut down to only the best performing products, you run the risk of creating unnecessary product bloat.
Bundling together five point solutions (that nobody really wants) does not suddenly make them all more attractive to the consumer. And unfortunately, unless you're selling into larger mid-market or enterprise companies to begin with, your target segment likely isn't shopping for an end-to-end platform.