With over 20 years of marketing experience, Yoram Greener is at the forefront of new forms of media and commerce growth based on rich data and analytical environment to build effective and efficient growth plans based on consumer behavior rather than generic selection and profiling methodologies..
As an expert in audience identification and activation, Yoram uses a wide variety of digital and offline signals to create consumer-focused marketing plans.
In a recent meet-and-greet, Yoram answered questions and offered advice as he shared his wisdom gleaned from years of experience to help entrepreneurs overcome their challenges in finding market-fit.
What are the best indicators of a good market-fit?
The best indicators of a good market-fit usually start with structural or regulatory changes in the marketplace, attracting early indicators of potential disruption to the current market conditions.
Those changes can originate from change in consumer preferences or when consumer value sets change into those products and services attributes or features.
A structural change can also come from a regulatory perspective that either limits or even prohibits existing players in the marketplace from conducting their commerce and their business conduct.
Typically, these reasons trigger a series of new ideas, products and features by either industry insiders and practitioners or industry outsides who are early visionaries to see the “day after tomorrow” and are willing to take a risk of early creators to build a new market and communicate well with early adaptors
What are the challenges that could prevent finding market-fit?
Finding the Right Experts
When entrepreneurs identify those niche needs or structural change needs, they will need good people and experts to be able to “translate” and execute their change strategy into new products, features and services.
In today's environment where employees have an abundance of choices and are being approached by many employers, it's getting harder and harder to lure new talent and experts into new entrepreneurial outfits. That's the first major obstacle I see.
Getting Use Cases
The second major obstacle is to be able to find friendly use cases to test whether or not the new product or service is actually a good fit and address these new needs.
Financial support
The last obstacle is usually a financial one; sufficient level of funding to be able to develop the alpha and beta product, but then go to market, continuously experiment and make product or feature modifications.
How long should an entrepreneur work at finding Market-fit before realizing there is none?
It's always a search or a race for the next step, right?
A race until the market catches up with either similar or better products and usually better sales marketing resources. During this critical time, usually twelve to 18 months, maybe 24 months, if the entrepreneur has sufficient funding.
During that time, the entrepreneurs need to keep iterating in the marketplace, test the product, make the modifications and continue to iterate with more and more use cases until they realize that there is no incremental growth either to the market or the product.
If the entrepreneurs are able to continuously iterate before the rest of the market catches up, they are creating a gap, an advantageous gap and increasing the cost of entry and operations between their outfit and their competitors. A gap that would allow the new company to keep gaining market share from a wide set of constituents to then be able to sustain the product financially independent of any external funding. That's the moment of truth for every entrepreneur and it usually takes twelve to 18 months.
As a Reap Advisor, what are the key steps that you recommend to entrepreneurs when building their tech stack?
This is a loaded question that often comes up as more and more entrepreneurs attempt to translate their thoughts and strategies, their imagination into an actual product that can address real market needs. That's the point where experts in technology, data engineering and science need to come and work closely with the entrepreneurs on a weekly or monthly basis to make sure that the requirements are being defined correctly and being executed accurately.
Core technology versus Auxiliary Tech
We often talk about Tech Stack as the various marketing software, hardware, tools and workflows that a company or the entrepreneur need in order to tell their story. But a tech stack is bigger than that. We need to look at what is considered core technology versus auxiliary technology.
Core technology is something that the entrepreneur and the company needs to own, meaning needs to write the code, needs to write the software or the hardware mold. Every entrepreneur and startup needs to have core technology that can be developed, tested and patented.
Without core technology entrepreneurs don't stand a chance of making it.
The rest of the tech stack is considered auxiliary technology and these are modules or tools that are widely available in open sources or can be purchased with a license. These tools or modules can then be integrated to augment core technology.
Finally, what is the one thing to avoid, or biggest mistake or trap that entrepreneurs fall into regarding analytics and data?
Don't attempt to mix feelings or fall in love with your products or with your own data and convince yourself that this data is prescribed by your imagination, by your mind, by your wishes.
Very often people have already made a choice and they're looking for data to support their decision instead of just looking at data from a more objective point of view, either by just consulting with someone who can read and interpret date more objectively.
Therefore, It’s important to let data translate itself autonomously. You need to let analytical experts translate the data for you to be open or neutralized of any political or opinionated mindsets that could wrongly influence analytical findings.
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Reap was founded on the belief that entrepreneurs deserve the attention of experts and need ongoing support to overcome the difficulties of building something new, often from the ground up. So at Reap, we help entrepreneurs succeed. What is our unique formula? We have on-demand experts in marketing, sales, and technology combined with the power of peer support in a Web3 mindset.