Is Your Product 10X Better?

I just read David Cumming’s post from this evening talking about doing things to improve internal process by 10X. It caused me to reflect upon an influential statement we heard frequently when we were first starting our business.

If your product is not 10X better than the alternative for your customers, your startup will really struggle.

In our case, this was easily measurable. We sell acceleration products. We can measure how fast they run compared to the alternatives.

At the time, it was unclear if we would be able to maintain a 10X advantage over alternative approaches. For our customers, it meant beating the status quo of running code on a CPU. We used the 10X speedup number as a target for our product development. We put in the elbow grease to win at that level in our product development.

Achieving 10X over the alternatives is tough for any product. But it is even tougher to market and sell a product with a puny low-budget startup marketing voice without a clear 10X advantage over alternative approaches.

This does not mean you need to be 10X better than other new market entrants. Many markets are not winner-take-all. Being 10X better than how customers are currently doing their business can really tip the sales funnel in your favor.

Do you think your product is 10X better than the alternative?

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