The Grizzly Bear Strategy, how AirBnb, Dropbox and Uber did it and 10 market problems looking for solutions

What if you could sell water to millionaires in the desert? Way to go to Product Market Fit capturing an existing demand.

Hey everybody welcome back to the Product Market Fit Newsletter 🚀

My name is Guillermo Flor and I write this weekly newsletter to help founders, growth professionals and product people to grow & fund their companies.

In this article I’m going to talk about The Grizzly Bear Strategy: position your company where customers just happen to flow to.

Imagine being a grizzly bear standing at the edge of a river, waiting for salmon to leap right into your mouth. You have a great advantage, salmon have to go against river and jump, the only thing you need to do is to wait and be focused.

In business, you can position your company similarly, becoming the first solution your customers encounter when they need it the most.

But before, enjoy some Fred again 👇

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• I’m opening up 2 hour of free weekly consulting for startups fundraising or going to market. Find a slot here. (Soon to release Podcast)

• I have some news about Inbound that I’ll be sharing soon 🚀 🚀

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Now, the Grizzly Bear Strategy is all about strategic positioning. By understanding your customers' behaviors and needs, you can place your business in their direct path, making it easy for them to choose you.

This isn't about aggressively chasing down every lead; it's about being in the right place at the right time, so your customers naturally find you.

Now, there are two main things you need to take care of to execute this strategy:

1. Position your company where your target customers flow to

2. Learn what is the event that triggers the flow of customers

3. Capture your target customers

Position yourself where your customers flow

You need to understand your customer better than himself.

Customers are like patients. When you go to the doctor with some pain in the knee, you don’t know if you have broken it or there’s nothing wrong. It’s the doctor that tells the patient what is wrong with them and how to fix it.

However, as a doctor, you need to be where your patients are. If you are a trauma doctor it would make sense for you to work in a place where injuries are common, like ski slopes, not at an elderly house.

Your job as a company is to work as a doctor and study your patients to understand exactly how they behave, where they hang around and at which point they typically have the problem you solve.

How?

Many of the greatest startups were born from founders solving problems they personally faced:

• Airbnb started because Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia saw an opportunity to rent their apartment during a big event in San Francisco that had all hotels booked

• Uber started because Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp had trouble hailing a cab on a snowy night in Paris and wanted a more reliable transportation solution.

• Spanx started because Sara Blakely was frustrated with the lack of comfortable and effective shapewear and decided to create her own solution by cutting the feet off her pantyhose.

• Dropbox started because Drew Houston was tired of carrying USB drives and emailing files to himself and wanted a better way to access and share files across devices.

• Bumble started because Whitney Wolfe Herd wanted to create a safer and more empowering online dating platform for women after experiencing harassment at a previous dating app company.

If you haven’t personally dealt with the problem your company solves you can rely to

Learn what is the event that triggers the flow of customers

All these examples have similarities in the sense that the companies positioned themselves to solve problems people had and just had to wait for the people to get to their solution.

They profited from the fish flowing their way in some sense

For example, people going to San Francisco every year for the IDSA, a huge tech event happening every year and with attendees from all over the world, that would naturally look form affordable accommodation.

Airbnb created a solution for that and benefited from all those people.

The most important thing to find out what is the event that triggers the flow of potential customers:

• Understanding What Events Trigger Their Need for Your Solution:

  No.1 Customer acquisition strategy for new startups in crowded markets

Make sure you capture the flow of target customers

It doesn’t matter that you position your company at the point of flow of target customers if you aren’t able to solve their problems and capture value from them.

In order to capture value, there are several things we still have to do to market our companies and close the clients:

1. Build Trust by Giving Value First

2. Make It Easy for Customers to Buy/Pay

Remember, when people buy something there is a bit of an emotional decision. They buy something with the hope their lifes will change somehow thanks to the product.

The easier it is for them to buy it the more customers you’ll capture. If you make it hard for them they’ll have another reason why not to buy the product.

This was a pain back in the day

Premium: 10 opportunities in 2024 where customers are flowing to without enough supply of solutions👇