Product Placement Strategy - How to Position Your Product or Service for Success

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hey, how you doing? We are back or this is welcome home or welcome here if this is the first time you've been here. We are Developer Nord. We are the Building Better Developers podcast. This season is actually about building better businesses. In this episode, we're going to talk about product placement. Now, before we do that, I'm going to introduce myself, myself being Rob Brodhead, one of the founders of Developer Nord, also a founder of RV Consulting, where we basically we help you figure out the best way to wrangle all of that technology sprawl, whether you're a little business and you're trying to figure out whether it's what accounting software you're using or whether you're a larger organization that's trying to figure out who your IT staff needs to be, what kind of skills do you need to have, what kind of ERM or CRM or ERP or ABC, all of those things that you may not even know what they are, but you hear that you've got to get them. We help you figure out what is the best solution for you, not only today, but six months and six years down the road. And our, if you call it our secret sauce, it's not very secret. Basically, what we do is we sit down and talk to you, understand your business, look at what you have, where you're at, and through whether it's integration, implementation, innovation, simplification, automation, any shun you can think of, basically, we will work with that and go out there, help you find the best solution to your problem or problems so that your business can be focused on business and not technology. Good thing, bad thing. So good thing, I mentioned in a previous episode that we had a house that was, we got an office on our house right away, had a nice little, but it was like, you got to be out in two weeks. Well, the good thing is, have made it past that, out of the house, got it closed. The bad thing is, it was bad. Let's just say, this is like a portion of my life I just want to like black out and forget because it was a rough time. It started coming back late on a Monday night, very like, I think we got home at like 1130 or midnight. And then at 8 a.m. the next day, we had movers. We had lost that whole three or four days on a cruise, which was not a bad cruise, but boy, it hit us right in the chops when we came back. So if you have a choice, I recommend not doing that. But you have no choice, even though I do recommend you listen to Michael as he introduces himself. Thanks Rob. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Mollage. Welcome to Building Better Developers, Developer. I'm one of the co-founders, like Rob. I'm also the founder of Envision QA, where we are a software company that helps businesses look at their software stack and help them determine if they are working with the correct technology for their business or if they're working for their technology, meaning that they are having to implement processes to make this cookie cutter software work for them. Our ideal solution is to come in, help you do a software assessment of your processes, and help you kind of build a roadmap or build software, put the pieces in place that you really need to be very successful in your business, help it grow. And if you are building software, we also can bring a software team in and help you go from a small team or a struggling development house to a full-fledged development team and get your products out quicker and happier. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing, it is finally warming up. I'm finally not freezing anymore. Downside, I can't go outside without wearing a mask right now. There is so much pollen in the air. It is just driving my sinuses crazy. So let's talk about product placement. And this is really important, I think, for us when we're doing the side hustle, because in a general business, I think it's hopefully, it's more likely that we have spent some time, we've done some market research, we've thought about our product, we've figured out what do we want to do, we've got a culture or something like that within our company that is sort of a, this is what we're going to do, this is what we're going to produce. But some notable kinds of things would be like an Apple. Apple has always been the gold standard, they don't care about price. I mean, it's going to be pricey, but the whole point is, it's going to be pricey, but it's going to be a higher-end product versus if you go like think about like McDonald's, they are very much like, we want to get you affordable food quickly, things like that. So there's a wide range. And obviously, those are two companies that are very successful. And there are examples throughout, you know, from the very, like the people that are the low-cost kings, and the people that are the, you have to be a king to afford our product kind of products, like wherever you go with these. Now within these are also, there's things particularly with software and digital stuff, there is a level of, in the physical world, things wear out, things just, you know, will degrade over time. Naturally, it doesn't matter what your product is. However, in the digital world, it's a little different. It doesn't necessarily, you could run your same application on the same operating system, same machine for quite a while and never see any degradation. Now the machine itself may change, but especially if you have a virtual machine, which is very easy to have these days, you don't really have to worry about it. So instead, it's really more some of things like, is this going to be maintainable as for yourself, maybe depending on how you position the product? Is this something that you want to be able to do multiple versions and enhancements and upgrades? Is it really more of a one and done? Is it something that you want to position as an integral part of something else? For example, like I said, I mentioned earlier a CRM, maybe what you have is a, let's say you have a website that's really, or you have a product that is about mail campaigns, email campaigns, and that's it. You don't really care about the customer management side anymore than you absolutely have to. And so what you end up doing is you have something that's sort of like a plugin, maybe that would run beside pick your favorite CRM. And so maybe you do something like that. So do you want to be standalone? Do you want to be part of something else? Do you want to be that high end product? Do you want to be a lower end product? And there is a long list of pros and cons wherever you pick these things. If you want to be higher end that you need to be higher end, you need to make sure that you have high quality, you need to have the right processes, all those things in place to make sure that when somebody gets it, they've paid that extra, you know, that high dollar amount for it, but they are going to expect certain things and you better deliver on it. If you do great, if you don't, you're going to have problems because we're going to say, I could buy the cheap stuff and it would save me money and I'm not going to get anything worse than you do. So you can, you have challenges up there depending on what you're building and what your goal is. Now in software, sometimes I will say that just getting a product, just solving a problem is in itself almost the gold standard because nobody else can do it maybe, or nobody else does it in a way that you do it. Okay. You can cut yourself some slack, but then you have on the other end is the, I want to be able to provide this at a low cost to whoever wants it. And then in those cases, you know, it ends up being like, yes, you're going to be able to maybe have more people afford your product, more customers, but there with that comes the expectation in the types of customers that you're going to deal with. We've mentioned many times before our work week, and this is something that Tim Ferriss has mentioned before, along with many others that are all these, it's about, for lack of a better term, I'm trying to find out like the politically correct way to do it, but just like some people are annoying more than others. And some people are really, you know, are lower class or lower brow, however you want to do it. And if usually if you're buying the cheapest product, you're probably not, you know, you're more likely to be like pinching pennies and things like that. You're going to be more cost-conscious. So you're going to be arguing that, Hey, instead of $10, can you get it to me for $9? And the support of it, there's a wide range, just a broad range of issues that come with that. Now, I don't want to say that that's not necessarily the right way to go. It depends on what your bent is. It depends on what your product is. A lot of it does depend on things like automation and mass production and things like that. Because if you can automate your customer service so that it's maybe just you, but there's an automated piece that could handle hundreds of thousands of complaints and customer calls in a given hour, then go for it. Like roll that dice, throw that stuff out there. If it's affordable, go for it. If that's not what you want to do, if you want to have like that very personal touch for everybody, then maybe think about, maybe I don't want to have as many customers as much as I want to have like more of my ideal customer, less customers overall, but the ones that I have are going to be more near and dear to my heart, as we would say, and therefore much more better fit for what you're providing. Now, I know I've, I've gotten pretty broad on this, but I want to just sort of think like, what are your thoughts in product placement and maybe even some of your experiences with it, Michael? Yeah. So it's interesting. You really focused kind of on the product itself, but sometimes as a business owner or as a, you know, we are service providers, we're not necessarily product providers. So we don't have a physical product or software. We're actually selling our services. So that still falls within the conversation of product placement though, because your product in it of itself is your services. You know, how are you selling yourself or what it is that you offer to your customers? Now, before I dive into that though, I do want to touch on one thing with the product placement though. So if you are building a product, as Rob mentioned, you know, price point is critical, but the other problem you run into potentially is competition. Is your product something that is too generic or too general that you are one of hundreds? So the problem you're going to have is how are you going to stand out? How is your product going to differentiate from those other competitors? And price point is one of the big things Rob mentioned using automation, things to improve, you know, time to market, lower your cost. There's still some issues with that because if you are trying to sell a product in a vast industry or with vast competition, you have to be very careful to position yourself in a way that people don't forget about you. Or you're going to run into Rob was mentioning where you're going to have those penny pinches or not even really that, but one customer saying, well, why is your product 50 bucks? But this person over here is $10. So you've got to be very careful. Where do you place your product? Now, if you are more of a niche, more of a Etsy kind of person, Etsy is a great place, but Etsy still has its competition. The other thing you could look at is maybe smaller markets like your local towns, flea markets, other areas like that. But in the digital world, most of your customers are going to be online. So you're going to have to figure out how to place yourself in a position where you stand out. So either it is better quality product, use higher quality materials, which does justify the cost, but you need to make sure that the cost is still something that you can pass on to your customer, that your customer can afford your product. So just some caveats there to be careful of if you're doing a product based company and you're trying to position it. All right. I want to flip over to the service side now because services is a little more of what me and Rob kind of do from a consulting, from a developer's perspective. We're out there providing software services to companies. We build software, we provide services, we help them analyze, do assessments, things of that nature. The problem is if your customer is non-technical or your customer is very technical, you're going to run into a couple of situations. One, how are you going to justify your cost to sell your product to someone that knows nothing about what you do? What is the value of what you're providing? So the first thing I want to talk about is value. How are you going to show your service will provide value to their business? So if you're a software company, I build software that can improve your production time. So if you have this clunky old 30 year old system that is working, but it takes you two hours to do something that you can do in five minutes, right there, you can show a justify cost here. If I come in, I can help you do this, which will eliminate 45 minutes, two and a half hours, whatever from your day, multiply that by a week. And suddenly your cost savings are going to be justified that, Hey, if I provide you four weeks of work at X, I'm going to save you six months worth of value over time. So those are just some calculations you can do to kind of help justify the cost of reducing service times. Your cost coming in will reduce their overall return on their investment or increase their return on investment. The other thing is trying to talk to customers. Well, not necessarily as a service, but when you're talking about building them software, like websites are a very good example. I don't like really building websites for customers because a lot of times there's too much competition out there. You can go to like Fiverr, you can go to a freelancer. There's so many places where people can just quickly throw up a website and AI is making that even more difficult with all these like Wix, Aerie, or all these like Hostgators. They all have AI now. So basically you just go fill in a couple of questionnaires, boom, you've got a website. How are you going to compete with that? So be careful when you're offering services that you're also like the product, you're not offering something that is too generic or has too much competition in the industry. One of the interesting ways I heard someone explain how they essentially build and sell websites is they offer like Rob actually mentions in some of his pitches, they offer a boutique experience. They come in, they walk through the life of a customer and then they build the website from a customer's experience. Totally different approach. It's still building a website, but the pitch is different enough that it makes them stand out. So the second thing here is your pitch. How are you presenting to your customers and are you presenting to the right customer base? So you, again, this is like the price. You want to make sure that the price you're charging for your service, for the product that you're going to build is in the right price range for that target market. Because if you're too low, you're going to get the people, well, hey, I want this. And you're going to run into situations where it costs you too much in time, not enough in returns. You actually lose money on the deal. So those are a couple of things that I think of when I think about product placement. Any additional thoughts? Sorry. Yeah. And I think really there is a difference in the service side versus the product side. Definitely. And on the service side, it is, I think it's a little more dangerous a little bit because as Michael alluded to is that there is a time cost that can often be hidden that maybe you want to spend, as I mentioned, like you want to have a better connection, a better relationship with your customers. Well, that is going to require time. That requires investing in those relationships and your customers and all of the things that involve that. And it can be something that if it's not part of your billable hours or your contracts or things like that, then it's essentially free time. It's time that you are not charging for. And over time that can actually become unsustainable basically, because you can only be split so many ways. You can hire people and things like that, but then there's a cost and all of those things continue. So I think that's with the service. It is definitely something that you want to, and again, this goes back to the developer side of this whole thing. What, from a service point of view, there are, you can position yourself in technology stacks and things like that. You can be somebody that is a big provider on like your Upworks or your Gurus or those kinds of sites, or you can be somebody that is very active in maybe LinkedIn or one of the job sites that is like a monster or something like that, where you're working with a lot of stuff. Or as Michael alluded, maybe you're part of your local rotary club or something like that. You're part of one of these local organizations or meetups and things like that, where that's really where your niche is, is you're just going to go with that geographically small area. You may also want to go with something technology or line of business small. So instead of, I'm in healthcare, maybe you are in devices for heart transplants, healthcare, something that's much more niche, but then you can also maybe charge a little better, charge a little more, but also you don't have to have a pitch to large numbers of people. You can actually have a much more personal pitch to maybe potentially every single customer. And I think that is a value we provide as when we're sending out, we're going out there to provide a service. Part of that is how we build that relationship, how we maintain that relationship and where that fits in. And so, some of it you want to think about, and this gets into the challenge is your challenge is what is your primary product and where, if you had to give, let's say five bullet points that are placement points on your product, what would they be? Would it be something around pricing? For example, like we give you the best deal or we are the Porsche of this product or this service. Does it have to do with the customer experience? In some places, that's the whole thing is like, is it all about the customer walking away and your product may or may not be great, but their experience with you in your product or your service is great. Does it have to do with like a niche or something like that? Or something like that? Are you, as part of it is that you place your product in an area where others don't, maybe you're a combination of things that others aren't. Maybe you're the first, you create shoes that have, for example, shoes could have bells on them, but maybe you have shoes that have fidget spinners on them. If somebody wants to sit there and fidget spin their shoes, I don't know. You look for some different combinations, some unique problem that you're solving that can be part of your placement. But I think there's a couple of factors into it. So that becomes the challenge this time around is list those out, be self-aware in your business. It's like, what is your product? What is your service? And this is going to help you with things like identifying your ideal customer and even pricing and things like that. For those of you that are watching this, I think that will be part of my bonus material that we do offer on the YouTube side is I want to talk a little bit about pricing as we get into the bonus material. That being said, our overtime is coming soon because this one's wrapping up. As always, shoot us an email at info at developinord.com, reach out at us in all the different ways that we provide it's whether it's a review here where you're listening to the, wherever you listen to podcasts or out on YouTube and the development or channel. If you want to go out to developinord.com, we have contact forms, we have feedback available on every one of our articles and all of the kinds of stuff that we've got there. You can catch us on X at developinord. You can get us on Facebook. We have a developer developer page there as well. That all being said, harder than it seems sometimes go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nord Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.