Take an Indian product to the world

Sell to the US or the Gulf from Bengaluru or Chennai, and be trusted doing it.

5 steps, 80 questions underneath

1. 1
   Who you sell to

   Picking a customer worth chasing, and knowing early when a deal is not one.

   What is an ICP and how is it different from a persona? People use both words for the same thing.

   The gist An ICP describes the company you want as a customer: size, industry, what they already use, what has to be true for your product to matter. A persona describes the human inside that company: their title, what they get judged on, what makes them look good or bad. You need both and they do different jobs. The ICP tells you which doors to knock on, the persona tells you what to say when someone opens. A useful ICP is uncomfortably narrow and written as filters you could actually apply to a list, not as adjectives like 'modern' or 'fast growing'.

   📰 Defining our ICP is the most important thing we ever did A real company showing its ICP before and after, including the messy middle where they were guessing. The point that narrow ICPs beat broad ones, a... 16 questions on who you sell to →
2. 2
   Positioning and messaging

   Making a buyer understand in one sentence why you exist and why you are the one to pick.

   What is positioning in plain English, and why does everyone insist we have got it wrong?

   The gist Positioning is the context you give a buyer so that your strengths look obvious. It is the answer to 'what kind of thing is this and who is it for', and everything else, your tagline, your website, your pitch, is downstream of it. Most teams get it wrong because they start from what they built rather than from what a customer would use instead of them. The practical version has five parts: the alternatives buyers actually consider, what only you can do, why that matters to them, which customers care most, and what market you want to be judged in. Get those five right and the words write themselves.

   📄 An Introduction to Positioning Explains why positioning is not messaging, branding or a vision statement, which is the exact confusion behind the question. The email versus chat ... 16 questions on positioning and messaging →
3. 3
   Brand and narrative

   The founder story as a GTM asset, a point of view that sells, and earning trust selling from India to the world.

   I am a founder with no marketing team. Is my own story actually a GTM asset or just vanity?

   The gist It is an asset, but only the parts of it that are useful to a buyer. Nobody outside your family cares about your journey, they care about what you learned building the thing they are about to buy, so tell the story as evidence rather than autobiography. In B2B people buy from people, and at your stage you are the only person in the company who can speak with real authority about why the problem exists. Start by writing down the three things you believe about your market that most people in it get wrong, then say those things in public every week.

   🎧 How to Build a LinkedIn Founder Brand that Drives Revenue A founder and her marketer describe the actual posting system that took a B2B founder brand to inbound pipeline, including who wrote what. Practica... 16 questions on brand and narrative →
4. 4
   Pricing and packaging

   What to charge, what to charge for, how to package it, and how to change it later without losing people.

   I have no idea what to charge. How do I pick a first price?

   The gist Find the right order of magnitude first and stop arguing about the exact number. Are you a ten dollar product, a hundred dollar product, a thousand dollar product or a hundred thousand dollar product? That decision follows from who buys, what budget it comes out of, and what they do today instead. Bound it from below by what it costs you to serve a customer and from above by what a heavy user is worth. Most early founders underprice badly, so if nobody has flinched at your price you are almost certainly too cheap. Announce pricing as late as you sensibly can, and build the product so pricing can change without an engineering project.

   ✍️ The Price Is Right: And for Early-Stage SaaS Companies, It Needs to Be The bounding method for a first price (cost to serve as the floor, cost of a heavy power user as the ceiling) plus the advice to keep pricing chang... 16 questions on pricing and packaging →
5. 5
   Partnerships and alliances

   Tech and integration partners, co-selling, co-marketing, when a partnership is real, and your first partnerships hire.

   What does a partnerships person actually do all day?

   The gist Mostly three things: finding companies whose customers overlap with yours, getting people at those companies to trust you enough to make introductions, and making sure those introductions turn into deals instead of dying in a shared Slack channel. It is not deal making in the movie sense. A normal day is account mapping, writing enablement a partner rep will actually read, chasing your own engineers for an integration fix, and reporting a number you only partly control. If you like getting outcomes through other people's teams, it is a great job. If you need a clean line from your effort to your commission, sales will suit you better.

   📄 Dissecting the Role of Partner Manager Written by the industry body for partnership professionals, so it describes the job as practitioners actually experience it, including the reassura... 16 questions on partnerships and alliances →