I wish I realized this earlier.
I took over TrustSpot as President towards the end of 2020. TrustSpot is a product review tool for ecommerce businesses. It competes with YotPo, Stamped, etc.
And when I took over, I immediately applied a growth playbook that worked well for me at TheraNest and Therapy Brands.
It had minor success then failed. And failed. But I kept pushing. Launching new experiments. But the experiments used the same premise.
Our marketing was how and why we were the best in the ultra-crowded space of “product review tools.”
There are 2,265 product review tools on Shopify’s marketplace.
I was trying to signal why and how we were the best. How we were the #1 of the 2,265 product review apps.
Seems obvious, right? Painfully obvious (still is painful).
I talked about feature parity. I talked about pricing. I talked about customer’s switching.
My biggest failure was focusing on our uniqueness.
TrustSpot had an Experience Survey which allowed brands to collect nearly unlimited user generated content. And it was not tied to a product purchase.
It was not obvious. Most of our existing customers did not use this tool. Most customers did not ask about this tool.
But, the ones who used it LOVED IT. And when we talked about the tool on sales and support calls, customer’s eyes lit up.
Customers were gluing other tools to solve this need. They used form tools like Typeform and Jotform.
Sadly, it took me over a year to see this behavior and understand the opportunity. We had several blockers in the product that made seeing the future much harder. The Experience Survey tool was bolted on to our product. It felt like an integration and not a core product.
But after seeing the future, we made changes to the product and started testing different messages.
It was hard and wins didn’t come immediately. And still did not come in waves when I left the company to focus on other initiatives.
But, they’ve continued to test messaging and pull on the thread of Experience Surveys. They’re logging wins and stair stepping their way to building a successful company.
Love to see it!
Wish I could see the future sooner. Wish I had read Lochhead earlier.
But, I will not make that mistake again.
I’ve told this story a couple of times to clients to help them break the cycle of competing with competitors. Two clients have seen significant success by talking about their businesses and solutions differently. I would not classify it as category creation, yet. I hope to receive permission to write a case study for how we did it.
Read Lochhead. Listen to his podcasts. Listen to this story: https://overcast.fm/+TkLIekYEw
I learned a lot during my time at TrustSpot. Maybe I’ll write about my other failures there in the future.