1. Intro
Tangerine tease is a brand-new app, created in collaboration with sephora, that makes it easier to get the exact product you want from a brand new concept.
The app works on your phone or tablet and is designed to allow customers to explore the products of one of their favorite brands. If you’re currently shopping for a new beauty product, Tangerine tease will help you find the perfect color and scent.
2. Product Descriptions
The other big thing to consider is product descriptions. The best ones are long (of course, this is also a good reason to avoid those already gone over in this post). You can read more about them here:
The best part of product descriptions is that they are the most honest description of your product that you can manage to create, and even if your product isn’t perfect, it captures most of its core characteristics. In fact, I’m not sure there is any way around it:
Pitch decks are supposed to be less than three pages long (at least as far as I know). Every pitch deck I’ve ever seen requires a pretty detailed description of the product in its entirety that goes beyond just a “show me a screenshot” type presentation.
I’m guessing the same is true for your pitch deck too.
The main reason for this is twofold:
You want people to take the time and effort to read through it so they can get a feel for what you have to offer It makes business sense too because by making the pitch short and sweet, you add an element of transparency which will make it easier for people — especially early adopters — to evaluate whether or not your company has authority in their field. This will increase their confidence in you (and thus show them that you are worth following) and also increase their confidence with the idea of trusting your company with their money in exchange for a better experience. That’s not the only benefit though – there are also benefits from being able to look back on past products you have made and see how well they do in comparison with competitors – essentially giving information on how different products performed over time – which should help you choose between competitors instead of just taking up space on every pitch deck like every other startup out there does. Just make sure not to oversimplify things into “we have X feature and Y approach instead of Y feature + Z approach…” – because that makes at least some sense but doesn’t really give any additional information on what kind of product would make sense given certain circumstances. Remember: Anytime we say something like “I totally don’t need these features! I can do everything I need on my own!” we are probably wrong … We don’t want people looking at our pitch deck as some sort of magic formula that tells us exactly what we need … rather than trusting us completely…
3. Customer Reviews
Most companies spend a ton of time and resources trying to gather user feedback and feedback from their customers. They do this because it is a key indicator of what their customers like and don’t like, which can inform them about the features they should be focusing on and what features or pricing they should be considering.
These days, customer reviews are a common part of the process for apps on the App Store, Google Play Store, Amazon or in other distribution channels. If a new app has been successful enough to get distribution and have some decent reviews, there’s almost always the opportunity to buy them off of app stores with in-app purchases. In some cases, that means paying developers to write some sort of review (which is true for all reviews). This is often done through paid promotion; many developers have no qualms about charging for reviews, since they know they will get more money from sales than just word-of-mouth.
But it turns out that paying for reviews isn’t necessary. Many tech blogs have reported on results where people can actually change their mind after reading one or two reviews (for example). It seems that people are able to form opinions freely without having paid for anything or been influenced by other people’s opinions. In other words:
• Without spending money
• Without needing to keep track of who likes what
Which begs the question: how do you collect feedback from your customers? How do you make sure you are giving your users exactly what they want?
The best way I know how to accomplish this is by using third party tools (such as our tangerine tease sephora tool), as well as by looking at our own data. We look at every single purchase made from within our app and look at which products users bought previously before they bought this product – we also look at things like whether previous users have reviewed products in the past or not – and then use these data points to determine which products we should include in our “Revenue Plan”. We also use these data points to determine the best time frame for adding new items into our inventory – if we include more than one product in our inventory at any given time, we need to take into account when each item was purchased. This way we can give users exactly what they want: new items as often as possible while still ensuring that there aren’t too many non-essential items in order not to negatively impact user experience
4. Product Usage
In the post-Lean Startup world, you are seeing a lot of talk about product usage. Ideally, this usage is highly productive and measurable. In practice, however, all too often it is difficult to quantify what people do with your product.
Example: a company that allows users to buy parking spots directly from their phones and then pay for them with their credit cards in real-time will likely have a very high number of users who use it regularly. But if you get the same number of users by simply showing them how to buy parking spots, there’s no way to know if they will actually do it (since they have not yet tried).
Here is an example from my own personal experience: I had an app that let me buy and sell tickets to shows I wanted to attend online. There were hundreds of thousands of tickets listed but only a handful were actually available — most people were just looking at listings without buying anything (which is fine). I also had a small amount of inventory available on the website but some people would inquire about buying tickets but then never buy anything. So we had little or no usage data for either product type:
# Ticket Buy/Sell # Tickets 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 100%
Now, when you run a product like this where there is little demand, your usage data can be extremely valuable (and in fact can be more valuable than any other category) but here again you don’t want to take too much credit for what people do with your app because they may not be using it at all!
5. Product Quality
“Product quality is not just about the quality of the product — it’s also about how people learn to make use of it,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We are always looking for ways to optimize our products so that they can be used and enjoyed by more people. And we must do this while maintaining a high level of quality and trustworthiness. We believe that if we can do this right the first time, then everyone will be able to use our products and enjoy them.”
And yet, as Marc Andreessen points out in his post on The Product Hunt blog, building a good product is a huge part of building a great company:
If you think about what happens when you go from free to free — from ‘I can have everything I want’ to ‘I have everything I want’ — you don’t run a business because you are selling things; you run a business because you are selling people. So your goal is not just to sell more products at cheaper prices; your goal is to sell more people at higher prices. This is where I think Apple was so successful for so long: They focused on the best human beings possible in terms of their expertise and their potential and the value they could bring to the world through their products. Ultimately, that made them value-add businesses and created 5 times more revenue than they spent on sales (which was still considered sustainable by all accounts).
It also helped that companies like Apple knew how to make certain decisions around manufacturing and distribution (and also much better than most other companies).
6. Product Pricing
Tangerine tease is a company that takes a very different tack than most other startups. Their core product is an email marketing service that sells in the tens of thousands per month. It’s also a new product. They’ve been around for less than 5 years and are still in the early days of their launch.
As a result, they have found that many people who use their service do so only once or twice per week. This is fair enough: their goal is to capture and retain customers for as long as possible rather than to aggressively expand their audience and so on. The problem comes when they try to figure out what products would actually make them more profitable if they sold these products:
Given the fact that the core business model involves marketing emails to a small, highly specific group of people, it stands to reason that there are only two options: either they will have to price themselves relatively high or they will have to price themselves extremely low (to attract as many customers at once).
Their solution: pricing themselves moderately high, but not too high. We can see this strategy clearly in action by looking at what happened with tangerine tease’s revenue growth over time (in green):
The first thing we can see here is that tangerine tease has got some pretty good traction with its core user base — more than 1,000 users per day last quarter — but it hasn’t really captured any new customers from those users using the service regularly:
This looks like an alternate revenue stream for tangerine tease . If these users were willing to pay $4/month for some additional features, then maybe these features could make them more money — but we don’t see articles or other ads being paid on top of the emails (perhaps because there aren’t enough people interested in those features). So perhaps this is just one way that tangerine tease could generate additional revenue streams off its core user base? But if all they’re doing here is providing value, why wouldn’t they sell more features? To be fair, tangerine tease does seem like it has done quite well with its core user base with minimal marketing . But it certainly seems like there are lots of other ways for them to bring new customers into the fold without having to push so hard on pricing — perhaps it’s worth exploring, however!
7. What Others Are Saying
If you are involved in a startup, you could find yourself reading countless articles about it. Most of them are valuable, but some of them are quite shallow and don’t add much. So here is a list of the most interesting ones:
1. Facebook’s product strategy: (quite good)
2. The difference between a smart startup and a dumb enterprise: (quite good)
3. How to choose a product-market fit strategy: (worth reading)
4. What is Product-Market Fit? (good answer)
5. The value proposition of security tokens and why they are revolutionary: ххх (very good answer)
8. Related Products You May Like
A recent study conducted by the Comscore Group and the Nielsen company showed that a large proportion of consumers are already aware of social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest.
The survey found that while most people use these sites to share personal information — and with it potentially nefarious purposes — they also use them to share news and links to products they like.
What’s more, many of those who do so are only following or engaging with brands they already know. And this is not just limited to the US; a similar trend is present in other markets such as Australia.
Adding this knowledge up across many different social media platforms can give you a big picture view of your brand’s current status. This is especially useful for two reasons: 1) you can quickly determine how popular your product is in terms of volume of interaction (and engagement); 2) you can gain insights into how your audience is interacting with your brand on other channels too.