The productivity space is growing rapidly across the world and there’s a big demand for the same in digital spaces. The client was a new player in the web productivity space & wanted to figure out a Go-To-Market strategy for their offering.

There are a few challenges that the space offers today, these are as follows -

Business model challenges

(A) Operating in an industry that’s characterized by the factors of productivity and advertising for revenue which are opposing value propositions.

(B) Revenue model that maximizes the revenue yet focuses on long term platform growth

(C) Optimizing ads for revenue and user experience

(D) KPIs to track, target and improve

(E) Validating & testing the business model

Market Challenges

(A) Differentiating the offerings in a market that has a few established players globally

(B) Targeting a specific market and shaping up the value proposition that’s attractive for the business and the user

(C) Target countries in the short, medium and long run.

We had to enter the market with few resources and scale up the business sustainably. There were unique challenges that needed to be solved for including, but not limited to –

(A) Develop a business model that maximizes revenue and optimizes the user experience

(B) Identify & capture existing best practices & trends in the industry

(C) Determine ad format and features, ad platform to be used

(D) Identify the KPIs to be tracked and targeted

(E) How to differentiate and add value to users via donations to different causes?

(F) Target countries and the causes to support in each of them

(G) Platform’s financial forecasting for the next 5 years

(H) Capturing key consumer insights to validate hypotheses

(I) Building stickiness into the platform for user retention

The main challenge was to figure out a go-to-market strategy for a business in a rapidly growing and evolving industry. The challenge was to build a differentiated product proposition for all the stakeholders including users, causes supported and the business.

The key challenges were –

Maximizing revenue while optimizing the user experience – Figuring out the right revenue streams for revenue maximization while balancing the ads so that user experience does not get spoiled

Prioritize the causes to support – Which causes should we donate to and how much share of revenue should we donate to each of them? Should the donation model be static or dynamic?

Go-to-Market & marketing strategy – Which customer segments to target and how to reach them? How to target early adopters? How to prioritize market entry into different countries?

Financial forecasting – Understand how the model can grow (users, revenue and other KPIs) under worst, likely and best-case scenario.

The key challenges were solved keeping in mind their financial viability, industry best practices and client’s preferences. Different cases were evaluated basis which a portfolio of alternatives was proposed. Key takeaways –

Strategy for maximizing revenue & make key decisions regarding refresh rate, ad engine to be used & also optimize for the user experience

Charity preference list and model recommendations basis a ranking of charities and causes supported in various markets, to diversify causes and match user preferences

Based on usage of productivity products, we recommended customer segments like freelancers

and students with targeted messages for them. Country prioritization basis evaluation of 5 key factors like usage, growth rate, existing users & so on for the productivity apps.

Financial forecasting using top-down model accounting for industry growth rate and using industry benchmarks to analyze the best, likely and worst-case scenarios. Triangulated the number with bottom-up analysis to validate.

Market survey to reveal consumer preferences (willingness to pay, triggers for usage etc.), validate hypotheses (usage rate, most supported charitable causes, most important productivity features) and provide additional insights to make pinpointed interventions in the tool design for enhanced user experience.

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