What type of app does your product provide the most value to?

Since I work primarily with products that are for engineers and engineering teams, I encourage clients to think first about what types of applications or technical situations their solution will provide the most value for.

For example, if a tool greatly improves I/O speed, it makes sense that it would provide most value for I/O bound applications. If an application is compute bound, the fact that I/O speeds are greater would provide no benefit.

If you have a tool that provides 100% uptime through zero recovery time objectives, it only makes sense for mission-critical applications. This level of backup is expensive and it would be insane to use indiscriminately.

App type isn’t enough

The type of applications your product is best for should absolutely feature in your sales and marketing material. For example, “zero RTO for mission-critical applications” or “increase speed of I/O bound apps by 10x” would make sense as your website header.

But thinking about application types is a stepping stone to thinking about business types. Segmenting your market by application type is not enough — you have to use that information to identify types of organizations that are most likely to have a lot of that type of application.

That’s because market segmentation is useful both for increasing inbound leads through your website but also for focusing your outbound marketing/sales. All though it turns out there is a disaster recovery journal that one might consider advertising in if zero RTO is your thing. In general, it’s easier to figure out how to do outreach if you have other identifying characteristics of your ideal customers, in addition to the type of application.

Figuring out what type of application your product will provide the most value for is essential for technical products whose buyers and users are software engineers. The application type should absolutely be called out in marketing and sales material and should be considered as the product roadmap is considered. But it should be the starting point of your market segmentation, not the end point.