Just about complicated: how to present a complex product

I am often asked to tell what the essence of our service is. Both friends and potential clients ask, and just people whom I get acquainted at business events.

For a long time I could not learn how to answer this question correctly. It turned out either too seriously (a platform for automating accounting and business processes), or too narrowly (in our service you can configure CRM taking into account the specifics of the company), or it took a very long time to explain, until the interlocutor had a more or less complete idea of ​​the possibilities of SkyBase .

And recently, the answer was born by itself - in the form of such a simple and understandable picture.

If you are developing a complex product for which a short and understandable definition has not yet been invented, then you probably have faced the same problem. You have to look for a way to somehow convey the essence of the product to your target audience. I will tell you what difficulties were in our case and what kind of solution we finally found.

What does a complex product mean?

Let's see what is meant by a complex product . It’s not about how complicated your product is “from the inside” or how many human hours you spent on developing it - it’s about the complexity of perceiving the essence of your product for the user.

Suppose you offer a task scheduler to a client . Most likely, he will easily imagine what is behind these words - a system in which the leader sets tasks for his subordinates and controls the timing of their implementation. Further, he may present some other details that may or may not be specifically in your task scheduler. This representation of him can be corrected later, in a more substantive conversation. The main thing is that the person understood the main meaning of your proposal correctly.

And what will happen if you say that you are developing a designer of business applications ? That is how we originally presented our service . A person immediately has a bunch of thoughts and questions:

• What is a business application?
• And by the way, what kind of application is mobile in mind?
• Constructor ... Lego somehow introduced. What does the children's toys have to do with it?

Sometimes these questions are asked out loud - then you can continue the dialogue and, perhaps, still get to the point - and sometimes they simply transfer the conversation to another topic. The interlocutor does not want to seem stupid, so he can leave the questions to himself. And it will seem to you that he understood everything, just your proposal did not interest him.

We tried another description option: SkyBase is a platform for automating accounting and business processes . In general, this wording is understandable to our target audience. But here lies another problem. It happens that people say, “Oh, no, we haven't grown to that yet!” Apparently, such a phrase gives rise to something so global and powerful in their view that it becomes scary to get involved in it. And fear is clearly not the emotion we want to receive from them.

In fact, the service is focused, first of all, just on those who have not yet reached the big sophisticated systems. Our users are usually small businesses. There are quite small companies among them (2-3 employees). So any company that uses Excel in its work has grown to SkyBase.

How to describe the essence of your product in a nutshell?

First, find out who is in front of you. Who are you contacting - to a potential client, investor or to a person far from your field of activity. This will help reduce the amount of information that needs to fit into the desired “couple of words." It is important for the client how your product is useful in its work (well, or in something else if you have a B2C product). The investor must believe that you should invest. And a person from the outside is simply interested to learn about something new.

When you understand what your interlocutor is interested in, try to speak the same language with him . No need to dump on him all the information that you own - show him only the part of the product that is really important to him.

Let's get back to our picture. It presents views on SkyBase from three different angles.



Firstly, it is a platform for solving automation problems. The same constructor that we talked about at the beginning. The difference is that now we speak words such as platform and constructor only to those who understand them. These may be developers who are looking for a tool to solve their problems. Or large customers who understand that the system they need does not exist ready-made, and it will have to be developed on something.

The platform allows you to focus on the main thing and not delve into all the technical details. You simply assemble the application from ready-made blocks, like a constructor.



Secondly, we have been engaged in custom development for several years, and we have accumulated solutions to typical problems in various fields of business:

• Selection of real estate by parameters - for realtors;
• Schedule classes - for a dance school;
• Equipment rental accounting - for rental points.

We sell some of them as ready-made solutions - you can immediately start working with the application, and then modify it if necessary.

We tell about ready-made solutions to those clients for whom we have such solutions :) It happens that there is not exactly what we need, but rather close in functionality - then we show this example and talk about the possibility of any improvements. A person can immediately (without spending time and money on development) understand whether our solution is suitable for him and what changes will be required in it. Often, such an approach is easier than from scratch to figure out what a “dream program” should look like.



We are talking about the third use case for our product to those companies that have complex business processes and a lot of specifics in accounting. Typical solutions are hardly suitable for such clients. In this case, we offer individual development on the SkyBase platform. And we realize any dreams of our clients :) And if during the process of working on a project it turns out that some opportunities are not enough, we don’t back down - we are finalizing the platform and still realize our dream!

By the way, if you too are self-developing, welcome to cooperate . We will help you learn a new tool and save significant development time in the future. In addition, you will receive a reward from the payments of your customers.

Summarize

If you are going to offer the market something new and unusual, be prepared to face difficulties in describing your product. However, the solution is:

• Try different options and look at the reaction. Do they understand you? Do they understand correctly?
• Study your target audience and speak the same language with it.
• If there are several audiences, separate them and offer each one what it is interested in.

If you have similar experience, share in the comments how you solved this problem.