Would You Rather Fight 100 Duck-Sized Horses or 1 Horse-Sized Duck?
The “duck-sized horses vs horse-size duck” question entered the Internet Hall of Fame when a Reddit user posed it to President Barack Obama during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session.
Sadly President Obama ignored the question, but founders and business leaders have no choice but to answer it. Replace the duck and horse with “customer,” and you’ll encounter an important dilemma that every company experiences.
What do I mean?
Well, our goal is to get to $1 million in 52 weeks. There are many ways to get there depending on the price of our product. For example, if we priced our product at $1 a year, we would need 1 million customers to hit our goal.
In essence, every business has to pick its battle on the spectrum of 1 giant customer or 1 million tiny customers. Both strategies have their merits:
There is no right or wrong answer here; pricing strategy depends on the product, the competitive landscape, your ability to capture the value you offer your customers plus a whole host of other factors unique to your business.
So what about us? Currently, at Framework we have been playing toward the lower end of the spectrum. Here’s our pricing page:
But I’ve noticed something interesting. Every now and then a customer will email me complaining that $39/month is too expensive. They want a refund, and they blame our product. I ❤️ getting customer feedback — many of the flaws pointed out are valid and we fix them immediately. However, another set of customers is doing extraordinarily well on our platform.
Here’s an example:
Kate Bourgoin, marketing savant and Founder at CustomerCamp, launched a challenge that teaches folks how to market themselves called ‘Un-ignorable’ on Framework last month. Here’s how it went:
Another customer (to be revealed soon) is making 7 figures every month 👀
To be clear, these super successful customers would likely be crushing it no matter what platform they used — as Kate called out in her tweet, her success is 100% due to her many years of hard work, skill, and reputation.
What is really interesting to me however is that I’ve observed three things:
- The amount of effort required to launch on Framework is the same for small customers and big customers (i.e. folks with a large audience)
- The odds of success however are dramatically skewed for bigger customers who are virtually guaranteed to see a LOT of success on our platform
- Large sophisticated customers that have options are choosing Framework 👀
All of which adds up to me realizing that I’ve gotten our pricing, go-to-market, and positioning COMPLETELY WRONG up until now.
Well, the good thing about realizing mistakes is that you can fix them 😅
This is all great Rush, but I still have no clue what the Framework platform does or who your target customers are… Don’t worry we’ll get to that soon 😉
Have a great weekend!
Rush
P.S. I’m curious — who would you rather fight? 100 Duck-Sized Horses or 1 Horse-Sized Duck? Drop a comment below with your answer!
