Seeding Sprout Seedling Vegetating Budding Flowering Ripening
Imagine seeding was like developing the product, it’s the essence of the marketing that we are about to do. Seed is the core of it.
For a seed to turn into sprout, it require it basic necessity such as light and water. However, the amount and the stability of these resources is important for it’s growth, the plant at this stage are very sensitive. There’s also requirement for nutrients but usually it require minimal fertilization, this is due to the fact that sprout rely on stored energy from the seed.
There are two lesson here, one if we are about to apply to the nature’s occurrence as a model for our thoughts, as you can see the basic necessity such as light and water is almost the same as what every product need. They need user. User gives both light and water. We do not need a lot of them, we do need important part of them.
Having early user to your app is really important as that is where your initial idea, was challenge by the reality. This is where you got your first feedback, your first iteration.
I think a great analogy here is that, this is where you know whether that core seed (essence of the product), could and should sprout. After all those test, and it is still resisting, I think that’s a great
So now we have established what is a distribution.
So how can we approach it?
Just like building anything, all development following the same stage/phases.
For an example, to develop a product.
It begins from sprouts (idea/hypothesis), seedlings (evaluation/living the idea), vegetating (PRD, prototype, MVP), budding (launching), (growth), (Scale Up).
It’s the same with distribution
Sprouts (asking around), seedlings (friends, direct selling, community),
The first stage has always been trying to get your first 100 user, or 1000 users.
The second stage then Growth Analytics, where it’s main goal is to understand users expectations towards our product, so when there’s misalignment we can course correct.
The 3rd stage is Growth Strategy and Machine, where fundamentally we design what happened to be the alignment (Growth Engine) to put more fuel so we can have more user.