What I learned from my clients in 2025?

Here is what I learned from my clients in 2025. I will keep sharing additional snippets as I collate them. 

• Please note that I changed the product, names, locations, b2b/ b2c and other aspects just to maintain the privacy of those who reached me. 

• Treat this post as a learning experience. See if these learnings are applicable to your software/ non-software businesses and apply those. 

• Hope my questions and answer format connects with you. I will only share key questions which are learning oriented. 

Question - 

My business sells commercial locks, door knobs, etc. What do you think - should we prioritise b2c or b2b as the target audience? 

Answer - Hypothesis - b2c will give us more volume and revenue. 

Now, for b2c; select a channel. E-commerce, quick-commerce, Social media or similar. Let's say you select Amazon. Post all products there with pricing, reviews, videos, etc. Building materials space is very mature with decade old established players. So you will need a strong positioning and message. Examples that come to my mind right now - thinnest door knob, technically advanced smart lock and so on. In 45 days you should be able to complete the end to end journey from selling to delivery, installation and happy customers. Gauge the CAC and other parameters for each channel. 

Now for b2b select a metro city. Reach a construction builder (example) with 500+ flats/ units and sell door knobs to them. Complete the end to end journey from closing sale, onboarding, fixing, payment and customer satisfaction. Gauge the CAC and other cost parameters for this channel … 💰 

So in six months you will know which channel to double down on. That channel will become your core channel. However if the lower channel is more than 15% of revenue, try it for some more time. If less than 10% or so, you may ignore it for 1 year. 

Consider volume of products, GMV, profit and cost per product sold in revenue and not just revenue … 🏆  

Target audience, positioning, message, CAC, profits, channel optimisation should be re-assessed after every 2 quarters based on the business and seasonality you are in. 

Question - 

My market seems to be crowded. In this case, what stand-out feature or innovations would you recommend for us to differentiate? 

Answer - Here are some of the frameworks for product differentiation. Most of these apply to both b2b and b2c products.  

• Kano Model (delighter for a customer)

• Blue strategy framework (strategy canvas)

• SWOT analysis

• Product, price, quality, service framework 

• Porter’s Five Forces framework

Apply these frameworks to your product lines and the space you are in. These will give you a starting point and a better understanding of the ecosystem in which you are planning to play … 🫠    

We need to run a competitive study which compares all existing players on above criteria. It also helps to do supplier and other ecosystem player interviews to understand additional insights. Based on these we can decide which segment we should enter and dominate.  

I recommend having some technical, supply chain strengths which we can capitalize on. We are the safest or cheapest product and so on. Consider piggy backing on market trends/ established players as well such as -bluetooth, camera and so on. 

I will follow this approach to select features, benefits, capabilities and more. It has worked for me while I worked for multiple global IT products. 

Question - 

How to approach monetization for a travel app (as an example) in today's market. What revenue models would we test?

Answer - First, for a new business in the travel industry, we should start with a niche segment. This can be a good penetration strategy and we can dominate that niche. Examples I can think of right now - food travel, teenage travel, girl’s hangout weekend and similar … 🙋   

Then freemium to premium, we should test. However we need to have a critical mass of 300k MAUs and above. A consumer business below 300k may not sustain as a business unless it is a niche such as healthcare where traffic may be low and still ok. 

Post critical mass, there are strategies such as growth hacking by Sean Ellis, Survey Monkey and others which then help to get 10% or similar conversion on that 300k. You can charge $9.99 (per user/ family) or similar for a paid account. Paid users should get multiple discounts, proprietary extra content, support (examples) and for this we need to get partnerships with airlines, hotels and so on and so forth. 

Another thing which worked well for us was to focus on one state or one big city which is accessible and nail that geography from brand perspective. Because CAC, conversion, adoption and monetisation has to happen as a very delicate balance. 

Everything I mentioned has to be experimented on a shorter cohort and should be iterated to see what works for this specific business. Every business and every niche is very unique. 

Additionally, we can try partner monetisation as well. Example - send leads to a hotel, airline, resort and get incentives from that hotel. One more, try b2b as well. 

The actual outcome will be a compounding impact of all your channels. Hope these help. 

Question - 

How to drive user acquisition. What channels and strategies do you recommend and how to measure results?

Answer - What worked for me in the past? For user acquisition, we tried and iterated all channels over a period of 3 years. Website, Blogs, Youtube, SEO, schools, influencers, call center (minimal), communities, paid ads, social, feature development and so on. SEO, communities and paid ads worked well … 👍 

From SEO we got most of the traffic, communities we got paid users (high conversion) and so on. The website gets 300k plus MAUs. 

After the first year, we built mobile apps in addition to desktop sites as users were asking for it. The apps focused on a niche. Maintaining that niche across the channels is key. Hope this helps you. 

……. 

Swagat Irsale is Growth Advocate. He works with startups and scale ups to grow revenue and build products which enterprises love to use. 

Reach him for work and partnership opportunities.