​My Playbook for Taking $300M in Products to Market​

Published on January 19, 2025

Hint, hint - Don't forget to scroll to the bottom for a private, subscriber-only event...

Selling a product? If so, you are competing with over 30,000 new products that enter the market every year. Think about what that adds up to over multiple years. I'll do the math for you - it's a lot of products you are competing with for attention.

According to Clayton Christensen, a well-respected Harvard professor, about 95% of those new products will fail.

Ventures fail for a lot of reasons. A lack of funding, cash-flow problems, etc. But, all of those reasons come back to a lack of finding and winning the right customers.

Think about it. You don’t have cash-flow problems if your product is selling well. 

You can self-fund, or bootstrap, the growth of your business if your product is selling well, or at least most business models can. 

But, that isn’t the reality for nearly every new product. 

Where they go wrong is the founder(s) have a good idea and they charge forward without a go-to-market strategy, so they:

• Don’t understand their target market(s) at an intimate level.
• Don’t know what pricing strategies work best for their target market(s).
• Skip over performing market research that allows them to carve out their own niche.
• Spend too much energy, money, and time on the early versions of their product.

I've done that myself.

In 2010, when I was launching GoGrabLunch, I opened up membership to the entire world, instead of taking a slower, more deliberate city by city approach where I could focus on serving the right customers. That one decision cost us dearly.

Fortunately, I learned from that mistake. Over the years, as I've taken over $300,000,000 in products to market for myself and other companies, I've paid more attention to dialing in the go-to-market strategy and understanding things like:

• Problem Market Fit vs. Product Market Fit vs. Platform Market Fit
• Ways to analyze competitors - including my favorite method
• How to validate demand for products, before building them
• How to build a consistent brand voice
• Ways to use pricing strategies as a marketing tactic
• Methods for building pre-launch hype

All of that, and more, is what makes up my Bookends of Product Management process.

If you want your next product launch to be successful, you can copy my exact playbook.

In my new book - Go-to-Market Made Easy - I share every step of my go-to-market strategy and the secret steps that most people miss.

It's available for pre-order on Amazon.

Join my live Q&A session (only for subscribers!)

👀👋Also, don't miss out on my special launch day event. On 2/3/25 at 7pm EST, I'm hosting a live Q&A session where I'll answer questions about your own product go-to-market strategies. This event is only available to the first 100 people. So, make sure you get registered today.