Episode 75: Gokul Kailasam - How To Gain Traction by Niching Down

Gokul Kailasam: Founders, they have this fomo, right? Fear of missing out, where they don't want to alienate one particular segment, they want to attract everyone. But if you try to attract everyone, you're probably attracting no one. Look, niching is not permanent, right? It's not like once you have chosen to niche into something, you cannot go back. And honestly the biggest risk is actually staying broad and growing slowly rather than uh, niching down and going fast.

Louise Liu: You are listening to this is Product Marketing brought to you by Product Marketing Hive, a product marketing community that gives back. I'm your host Louise Liu. Product Marketing Hive and this podcast are supported by Product Marketing Edge, a technology product marketing consulting firm. In this episode, Goku Kalasan, um, shares his thoughts on how startups can gain early traction by niching down the let's dive into it right now. Hi Goku, welcome to the show.

Gokul Kailasam: Hey Lewis, how's it going?

Louise Liu: Great. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your product marketing background.

Gokul Kailasam: Sure. I started my career in sales. Fun story. I was actually a computer science engineer. Uh, but I realized that I don't like coding and I hate debugging. Uh, but that's when I realized that I really love talking to people and explaining things. So uh, I was an AE and an sdr. Uh, and at that time I realized that a lot of the things that I was doing was actually product marketing. Like uh, talking to users, uh, looking at competition and differentiating from them was a lot of product marketing work. And that's when I decided uh, I moved into product marketing. At the same time I also moved from India to Netherlands and I worked with a few European B, uh two B SaaS startups as a founding PMM. And over the last one year uh, I quit my own uh job and I've been working with a few early stage B uh 2B SaaS startups on uh, things like product marketing and go to market strategy. And the fun part is today is actually my one uh, year anniversary of me quitting my job and starting this thing.

Louise Liu: Happy anniversary for starting your solo product marketing journey.

Gokul Kailasam: Thank you.

Louise Liu: You've worked in the tech companies in India and Amsterdam. How would you describe the product marketing and startup landscapes in both places? And to you, what feels unique about each?

Gokul Kailasam: That's a good question. I think Indian startup culture is very fast paced and uh, marketing uh, teams are probably smaller so you end up doing a lot of execution work. Uh, and uh, you are not just a pmm, you also do a bit of content, you do a bit of uh, ads. Uh, so I Would say in India, at least in early to growth stage companies, PMM is not that well defined. Uh, and Europe is uh, very different because here, uh, founders want you to be a bit more strategic. So you have all the time to really think about your icp, your Personas, your positioning and then work on execution. Uh, another thing would be in Europe, uh, companies care a lot about compliance, data privacy and security. So all of the positioning revolves around that. Yeah, that'll be the main difference.

Louise Liu: Our topic today is niching down versus staying broad. what stage of company's growth do you think this dilemma becomes most acute?

Gokul Kailasam: I think initially when you start, you probably have uh, a specific use case, uh, a few features for a use case and you're probably targeting a specific Persona, uh, or an industry or a geography. Right. Uh, after you have like 10, 20, 30 customers, you start seeing new uh, conversations, new inbound leads from a different Persona or a different industry. And that's when you have this dilemma whether to go all in into the first use case or whether to serve like multiple use cases or multiple uh, Personas.

Louise Liu: I think the decision niche versus broad is a fundamental product marketing decision. It is positioning. So that being said, from your perspective, what role should product marketers play in shaping the niche versus broad decision?

Gokul Kailasam: Good question. I think payments should uh, drive this, uh, the execution of this decision. But they are not the decision makers that will most probably your C suite, most probably your CEO or CSO or CRO. Right. Uh, but VPMMS have a lot of data about our customers. We really understand the market and the product well. And the good thing is we go well along with product marketing and sales teams and customer success teams. Right. So I think one of the key things we need to do is get them into confidence. So I would uh, book separate meetings with your uh, product marketing, sales and sales teams to understand their concerns with this new uh, approach with niche, uh, and try to uh, uh, try to convince them that the data that we already have. Right. And then later, uh, I would say, uh, you need to have a separate meeting with your C suite saying that all of the teams are actually convinced and then going to them, uh, with all the information you have and then from there, uh, niching is not something that is permanent. Right. It's not like you cannot go back. So uh, you can just sell this as an experiment and uh, if it doesn't work out, that's fine, you can go back to your original niche in a few weeks.

Louise Liu: Thank you for sharing. So tell us a little bit more about the examples you have where niching down was necessary. And how did that go?

Gokul Kailasam: Yeah, sure, I think I have a good example for this. So I uh, work with a client called Imper Notes. Uh so they are an AI meeting recorder and when I joined them they uh, have broad positioning. So something like AI meeting note taker for teams or something like that. Right. Uh, but the problem was this extremely crowded category with like 50 plus competitors like fireflies, otter, granola, etc. Um, so what I did was I listened to a few of these uh, initial sales calls. A pattern kept emerging. The pattern was all of these uh, inbound leads are uh, from regulated industries in Europe. When I say regulated that means think of fintech, healthcare, legal, things like that. Like companies that really, really care about data privacy and don't want to use non uh, EU tool. Right. So uh, I completely changed the positioning of this product to focus more on data privacy and security for European teams. Uh, and that had a uh, big impact on the pipeline and you know, deals that we close. So we started seeing a lot of inbound leads from you know, people like CISOs and CIOs who really care about uh, data privacy from European firms in these regulated industries and our uh, pipeline increase, but also our close rate, uh, increase.

Louise Liu: That's a great example. Thank you for sharing. I remember when we first met you also mentioned one other company um, that they expanded beyond their initial use case. Tell us a little bit more about that one.

Gokul Kailasam: Sure. Uh, I was working ah, at a company called User Pilot and I was a founding PMM there. So when User Pilot started, uh, they started as a user onboarding tool. Think of your uh, in app messages, uh, that you use to onboard new users. Right. So it is a very specific use case for like a couple of Personas like product teams or product marketing teams. But then they started adding uh, new features. So uh, they had product analytics, they had session replacement and suddenly they started uh, competing with a whole new range of uh, competitors that they were not competing with against there. What we did was uh, we had three or four or five different modules uh in the product. We went with the all in one route where uh, uh, we said that uh, instead of buying five different tools and you need to integrate them, why not buy a single tool uh, that sits across your whole uh, product team. Team. Right. And that also kind of uh, gave us a lot of inbound leads from new uh competitors that we didn't compete with earlier and that actually eventually increased uh our ACV and win rate over a period of Time.

Louise Liu: If a product marketer wants to push leadership towards niching, how can they make the case internally?

Gokul Kailasam: I think you need to, you need to have your data in your hand, right? So you cannot go to leadership without, uh, uh, you know, without that. So what I like doing is uh, uh, first thing is go to your CRM and look for patterns. So you already have like, probably hundreds of uh, customers you lost and won. You have uh, hundreds of leads. So look for patterns. For example, which industries are they from? Uh, are you closing customers from a particular geography or for a particular Persona or use case? Right. Uh, you might see that uh, for example, 80% of your revenue, uh, is coming from a particular Persona. In that case it really makes sense to uh, niche, uh, down to that Persona so that uh, you can be very targeted in your messaging, you can increase your inbound leads and uh, close leads with the data in hand. I would also look at your competition. I would look at uh, uh, what kind of competitors you have, how crowded the industry is, and uh, are customers able to understand how you're different from the competition? That is a very important aspect because in a very crowded industry, customers don't know why they should choose you over competition. Right? So it's a combination of your existing pipeline and existing sales numbers, but also looking at the market and saying, okay, this particular niche makes sense for us to uh, for our growth goals next year. And that's how I go to the leadership team.

Louise Liu: When you see early stage companies trying to sell to everyone, what's usually driving that choice?

Gokul Kailasam: Oh, probably they don't have a product marketer in the team, right? No, I'm just kidding. Um, I think founders, they have this fomo, right? Fear of missing out, where, uh, they don't want to alienate one particular segment, they want to attract everyone. Right? Uh, but that actually backfires because if you try to attract everyone, you're probably attracting no one. Uh, so that's one thing. But also many, uh, many companies and many founders start from execution in mind. So they are like, okay, I have this great product. How do we get 100 new customers? And they just think of channels, they think of whatever, right? LinkedIn, paid, uh, outbound, whatever. But they don't think of your icp, your positioning, your uh, competition, and they directly jump into execution. So I think it's a mix of uh, trying to attract everyone because you have fomo, but also because you don't have the product marketing strategy in place.

Louise Liu: On the flip side, what are the real risks of niching too early that's a good question.

Gokul Kailasam: I can think of two uh, uh, uh, problems with niching too early. One is you are niching down uh, to a category where there are not enough leads. Uh, for example, it's really a small niche, like not many people in that niche. Right. The second, uh, might be you are uh, alienating a huge chunk of the market. Uh, for example, let's say your TAM is really big, but the niche that you have chosen is really small and the 95% of your time cannot relate to that niche. So I can see these two uh, problems when uh, your niche too early.

Louise Liu: What are the common mistakes you've seen people make regarding finding out the ICP clarity?

Gokul Kailasam: Yeah, I think the biggest mistake is actually not uh, thinking about your ICP at all and directly jumping into execution. Uh, fun story. Last week I was uh, speaking with the founder and uh, they were like, okay, I need like leads and I'm just going to write some blogs. I'm just going to uh, create some campaigns on uh, meta and Google, uh, maybe write some LinkedIn posts. So I think that's the common uh, uh, mindset that 80% of the founders have and they don't even think about their customers. So you start with the strategy and then you go into execution. So you look at your uh, icp, you understand your positioning, you understand your competition, you figure out where your ICP hangs and from there you go into channels. Say okay, these are the three places where my ICP is, uh, browsing on the Internet, for example. And I'm going to do for example SEO outbound. That's it, for example. Right. And from there you go into execution. So the biggest problem I see is actually not spending enough time on ICP and niching strategy.

Louise Liu: How should product marketers evaluate whether a niche is big enough?

Gokul Kailasam: That's a good question. Um, I would say it starts from your existing customers. So are you already seeing some traction in this niche that you want to niche in? Uh, for example, you're already having some conversations with people or you already have some uh, close deals in this niche. And then I would look at, I'll just do a generic market analysis with these ChatGPT, uh, or Claude. And look at this whole market segment. Is this growing year on year. Do we see our ECB increasing if we go into this particular niche? Uh, I would also look at the number of companies in these niches. Do we have enough companies to actually build a pipeline and achieve our goals for next uh, year? And finally I would also look at our competition like uh, Are they growing? You know, uh, what is their messaging? Are they able to close deals? What's their churn like? So I'll kind of look at the market, the competition and my m own data to uh, make this decision.

Louise Liu: Some founders often worry that niching will trap them. How would you suggest product marketers to address this?

Gokul Kailasam: Yeah, yeah, good question. Look, niching is not permanent, right? It's not like once you have chosen to niche into something, you cannot go back. Uh, you can, you can, you can choose a niche for like a few months, see how it works. And if it doesn't work, you can always expand that later. I think that's how most of the companies grow. They choose a niche, they see if it works and then they expand. Uh, uh, I think for product marketers, uh, like I mentioned, uh, showing data to and your uh, to your founding team is really important. You uh, know, uh, understand where your current customers are coming from, where your ACV and win rates are higher, and go back to your founder with this data. And honestly the biggest risk is actually staying broad and growing slowly rather than niching down and going fast.

Louise Liu: Any final thoughts you'd like to share?

Gokul Kailasam: Yeah, sure. I think uh, one of the things I love as uh, a uh, product marketer is being able to listen to uh, a lot of our sales calls, right? So I love uh, tools like Kong or Clary where I'm able to listen. So I would say uh, if you record these calls, go and listen to some of these calls, understand why you win and lose deals, or if you don't record these calls, go join your sales team in their meetings. I'm sure they would love to have you there and just try to identify patterns. You don't need to create like a whole PDF or anything, just try to identify patterns on what kind of industries you're winning and losing. Uh, where is your uh, win rate high, what kind of churn rate you have across different segments and from there you will start uh, deciding uh, what should be your niche in the coming days and weeks.

Louise Liu: Great. Thank you for joining us today.

Gokul Kailasam: Yeah, thank you so much Luis. This was a pleasure.

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