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How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

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Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#31

>Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing and the next paragraph >The main thing that got Pipedrive to first 100, 1000 and 10000 customers was having a great product. Building a great product IS marketing. It's the most important part of marketing. It's at the beginning of any marketing plan. Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the mark…

Hate is love;

War is peace;

and everything is marketing.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thank you for chiming in. I'm not sure how you got the impression that I insisted we "don't do any marketing." - sorry if I wasn't clear. What I aimed to say was that product was the main reason for getting to 10k, and marketing tactics and strategies I described each contributed further.

I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success. It also leads to inventing terms like "content m…

this is actually great advice. what would you recommend reading?

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#33
Successful people always attribute luck because they usually underestimate their own special qualities or don't acknowledge it. This is the reverse Dunning-Kruger. While non-so-successful people will attribute other's success as luck because they think they also possess such qualities but didn't have the "luck". Creating a great product has less to do with luck than product/market fit. That is extremely difficult.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#34
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the markets the company operates in. No. See Wikipedia: Marketing is the methodology of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling that product or service. Marketing is about communicating the value of the product. Regardless of the actual quality of the product. Building a great product i…

Well, I spoke too quickly about the wikipedia article then. It must have changed, or I've read another page. The page which says that is wrong. Communicating product value is only part of the marketing mix. Building a great product is most definitely part of marketing. For example there are methods and techniques which faciiliate it and are subject of marketing journals and marketing academia. One of these methods is…

'Segmentation-targeting-positioning' doesn't support your assertion and you're conflating marketing and product development.

This thinking can occur because often entrants to a competitive marketplace will assess their competition, identify a weakness and deploy a product to meet the need. The development of the product in this scenario is not 'marketing' as you assert.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#35
I thought it was well written and inspirational. Sorry you're getting so much negativity on here. I wanted to tell you congratulations and good luck going forward. Good work with this blog post and growing your business.

Obviously, this isn't the secret sauce that can get anyone's idea up to 10k paying customers, and there may be other factors that contributed to your success, but this is your perspective on successful marketing strategies from the point of view of a marketing guy and it looks pretty good to me.

Thanks.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#36
post #33

Successful people always attribute luck because they usually underestimate their own special qualities or don't acknowledge it. This is the reverse Dunning-Kruger. While non-so-successful people will attribute other's success as luck because they think they also possess such qualities but didn't have the "luck". Creating a great product has less to do with luck than product/market fit. That is extremely difficult.

AFAIK the reverse Dunning-Kruger effect is the same as the regular one, since it also include skilled people who underestimate themself.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#37
post #35

I thought it was well written and inspirational. Sorry you're getting so much negativity on here. I wanted to tell you congratulations and good luck going forward. Good work with this blog post and growing your business. Obviously, this isn't the secret sauce that can get anyone's idea up to 10k paying customers, and there may be other factors that contributed to your success, but this is your perspective on successf…

Lovely comment. Thank you :)

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success. It also leads to inventing terms like "content m…

this is actually great advice. what would you recommend reading?

ISSN: 1573-059X; 0022-2437; 0022-2429; 0732-2399; 2164-3970; 1520-6793.

https://www.informs.org/ (a couple of the journals are published by them); their Analytics magazine is also good, as well as their site.

ama.org

Any book published by Springer, Emeral Insight and Taylor & Francis Group.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#39
post #23

>Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing and the next paragraph >The main thing that got Pipedrive to first 100, 1000 and 10000 customers was having a great product. Building a great product IS marketing. It's the most important part of marketing. It's at the beginning of any marketing plan. Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the mark…

>Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the markets the company operates in. No. See Wikipedia: Marketing is the methodology of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling that product or service. Marketing is about communicating the value of the product. Regardless of the actual quality of the product. Building a great product i…

Not according to the American Marketing Association. Their definition - which is used as the textbook definition of marketing - goes like this:

"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

Marketing is _not_ simply about communicating the value of products. Advertising something that doesn't help a customer create or experience value is not marketing.

I think you'd find this article and the comments interesting:

http://avc.com/2011/02/marketing/

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I spoke too quickly about the wikipedia article then. It must have changed, or I've read another page. The page which says that is wrong. Communicating product value is only part of the marketing mix. Building a great product is most definitely part of marketing. For example there are methods and techniques which faciiliate it and are subject of marketing journals and marketing academia. One of these methods is…

'Segmentation-targeting-positioning' doesn't support your assertion and you're conflating marketing and product development. This thinking can occur because often entrants to a competitive marketplace will assess their competition, identify a weakness and deploy a product to meet the need. The development of the product in this scenario is not 'marketing' as you assert.

Product development is dictated by marketing strategy.

How would you build your product if you don't know what the market conditions are? How do you find out what the market conditions are? By segmenting the market by behaviour/need/price sensitivity, then targeting a segment which is underserved (or you can serve better), and finally positioning your product to cater to that particular segment with specific product design, messages and distribution channels.

Marketing doesn't develop the product. It just designs it (writes the specs).

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