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How Can You Get Big Customers To Buy Your Small Startup’s Products?
There are some meetings you never forget, and this meeting with a very well known Silicon Valley VC fund was one of them.
We were just starting to raise our Series B funding, and, the fund we were meeting with had the CEO of a former portfolio company sit in on the meeting. The meeting was going well until we got to our go to market strategy.
I confidently said that we were focusing on the Tier 2 and Tier 3 customers that made up over 80% of the market. That’s when the former CEO erupted.
He said, “If I was on your board, I’d force you to get your ass in front of Apple and Samsung.”
I was surprised, but not shocked, at his response. The strategy his company followed was the classic moonshot strategy of hoping to win one big design. The CEO’s company, after 15 years of barely surviving, hit the mother-load winning a big deal with Samsung. They leveraged that one deal into a pretty decent exit.
I hated that moonshot strategy. It just seemed like such a crapshoot. Besides, we didn’t have 15 years to hope for a moonshot because there was no way investors would fund us for that long.
Instead, we would build our business piece by piece, one customer at a time. Our strategy was working really well. We were…
