Anthony Pierri 🎸

If you're an early-stage startup, you have four weapons at your disposal to fight the incumbent. 1) Offer a cheaper price Canva launched with a free tier while Adobe was charging $50 a month for their Creative Cloud subscription. 2) Ship a 10x better product Salesforce changed the game by offering software that lived in the cloud rather than in on-premise servers (like Siebel, the 800 pound gorilla) and could be accessed from anywhere with a web browser. 3) Distribute in highly-leveraged manner Notion grew from the ground up with a hybrid B2C/end-user B2B PLG motion that encouraged deep community evangelism and unheard of word-of-mouth — while Microsoft and other incumbents used traditional marketing and top down sales to grow. 4) Serve a underserved segment Reverb took on eBay (a huge player at the time) by focusing their entire marketplace on musicians and audio engineers — rather than staying horizontal for anyone selling anything. The REAL competitive advantage comes from using multiple of these weapons at the same time (as most—if not all—the startups below did). #productmarketing #saas #gotomarket #startups