What type of application makes your product shine?

If you’re a start-up (or even established company) selling into engineering departments who use Kubernetes, you should absolutely segment your market based on company characteristics. But you should also think about application characteristics. 

In even mid-sized companies, there will be many applications, each of which has different characteristics and different needs. Even if your product should ultimately be deployed across the entire organization, the way that the buying cycle usually works is to start with a proof of concept, followed by a trial in which the product is used by a specific team.

Wouldn’t it be best if the proof of concept and trial is done on the applications where your product’s value will be knock-them-over-the-head obvious? 

Here are some examples of specific application types that a product could be particularly well suited for:

  • I/O bound apps

  • Mission-critical apps

  • Internal-facing only

  • Customer-facing

  • Revenue generating

  • Extreme low latency requirements

  • Apps that are very expensive to run

  • Etc…

The list could go on and on, because just as there are many ways to segment the B2B market, there are many ways you could “segment’ types of applications. I didn’t even get in to things like coding language, which is often how applications are segmented. 

If your product is most valuable in with a certain type of app, you need to tell people about that. If they will get a 40% increase in development speed with on all types of applications but a 400% increase in speed for a certain type of application, make sure everyone knows about the use cases with the massive speed increase! 

Understanding which types of applications your product delivers the most value for is a good starting point for thinking about what the characteristics are of a business that will get the most value out of your product. But even once you’ve focused on a specific market segment, don’t lose sight of the type of application where your product really shines. It is a core part of your positioning.

This is part of what I do during positioning workshops if you need help articulating which types of applications your product delivers the most value for.

Emily Omier