134. Consume 🌎
Notes on becoming everything for everyone
I share a weekly update on ways to be a better marketer, brand-maker, team-builder, and person. If you enjoy this, you can share some love by hitting the Substack heart button above or below.
Hi there 👋
This week’s email topic was inspired by a pair of newsletters I love that both so happened to mention the same tech challenge within the same week. I’d love to hear your thoughts on if you’ve experienced their challenge also (see below).
Oh, and speaking of newsletters, I wanted to highlight Check Your Pulse by Sari Azout. Sari is a seed investor and product specialist, and the CYP emails are some of the best I get in my inbox.
Wishing you a great week,
Kevan
These are 3 cool things I read this week
How Huel Uses Social Media to Reach an Audience of 400,000+
AMA with Camille Ricketts, Head of Marketing at Notion
Becoming everything for everyone
An email marketing tool.
A way to send postcards.
A landing page builder.
A social media scheduler.
A social ads creator.
You can read that list as either five distinct product categories or just some of the many solutions that are offered by a single product, Mailchimp.
Of course, this didn’t use to be the case. Mailchimp got its start as an email marketing platform, and it has only recently become the small business marketing, all-in-one solution that it is today.
Mailchimp homepage, August 2016
Mailchimp homepage, August 2020
Mailchimp’s path is not unique. Many, many tech products expand as they grow — sometimes expanding to the point that they’re hardly recognizable. There are totally justifiable reasons for this: category expansion, new markets, growth, ambition, and as you’ll see below, I think a large portion comes from a customer focus.
That being said, it’s hard when you’re the customer they’re not focusing on anymore.
Is it good when our favorite products get bigger?
Sometimes it’s great! If the product expansion allows us to do more jobs easier, if we get to do those jobs with a brand we love, then it’s a win-win.
But there’s also a major risk in becoming everything for everyone.
Just the other week, I noticed the same exact sentiment in two of my favorite newsletters, each sharing about the struggles of what their favorite products were becoming.
When I recently logged into my Mailchimp account, I quickly got frustrated trying to navigate my way around all the things I didn’t want to do. Even more off-putting than dealing with the usability challenges of feature bloat are the constant little hints that I’m not doing enough …
It’s a shame to witness so many of my favorite digital tools become unrecognizable casualties of the growth cult.
Products I used to love before are now so complicated that I can't even figure out how to use them anymore.
No longer being the target customer for a product you love is a bummer.
So why does this have to happen?
Is it necessary for products to keep growing and growing?
In some cases, yes.
Let’s take Mailchimp as the example again. They had achieved great success — market share, revenue growth, owning the email category — and may have seen a crossroads: Do we go even deeper on email or do we go much broader on marketing? It’s an interesting strategic inflection point. To go deeper on email might mean doubling down on transactional emails, going enterprise to capture huge email budgets, going into new categories to support newsletters and creators (a la Substack). To go broader on marketing meant expanding the feature set to include more jobs: landing pages, social scheduling, paid ads, audience development. Both paths have growth potential; it’s likely that expanding to serve small businesses would have had the larger total addressable market and the larger revenue potential.
But I don’t think it was all about growth.
I think some of it is about who you’re excited to serve.
Both approaches are customer-first approaches. Mailchimp could have chosen to serve its customers who cherished Mailchimp as an email service provider. Or, Mailchimp could have chosen to serve its small businesses who relied on Mailchimp to help their business grow and sell more products.
We’ve faced similar choices at Buffer. Why do you exist as a company? Who do you desire to serve? When we think about expanding beyond a social media management platform, we think about the people we’d like to help: small businesses. What problems do they have that we can solve? It may be asset management or social commerce or user-generated content. And ultimately, by solving those problems (and rest assured, especially on social, there are new problems to solve all the time) the product ends up evolving.
Still, it’s hard when your favorite products change.
One of the books I love is Crossing the Chasm, which talks about the technology adoption life cycle. Here’s a chart:
Being an early adopter means that sometimes you’re adopting a product before the product even knows what it is. Ultimately, the product will change — and it may change in the opposite direction from you.
The way these things go, though, if you do belong to a segment of the market that is all-of-a-sudden underserved (no solutions for you) or over-served (too many solutions that you don’t really want), the market will find you. Products will be born. When Mailchimp stops building email marketing tools, there are many other products — Substack, Campaign Monitor, Convertkit — waiting to serve you.
There’s a chart for that, too. (This one’s from the book Product-Led Growth.)
Entire growth strategies are built on serving customers within segments where people are underserved or over-served by the existing options.
So even if our favorite products do end up growing, changing, expanding — there will always be new ones rushing in to take their place.
Thanks so much for reading. Have a great week!
— Kevan
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