# FY1 S0 Distribution Plan

# Focus on Sales

From D97C to D10K, we will focus on distribution by sales. 

![Colored area represents total satisfaction. Assuming that the total satisfaction we can deliver stays constant, we can choose between delivering high satisfaction to few customers by sales and delivering low satisfaction to many customers by marketing. ](FY1%20S0%20Distribution%20Plan/Sales_and_Marketing.png)

Colored area represents total satisfaction. Assuming that the total satisfaction we can deliver stays constant, we can choose between delivering high satisfaction to few customers by sales and delivering low satisfaction to many customers by marketing. 

Choosing sales over marketing means we will sacrifice the opportunity to reach many customers in order to focus on the opportunity to greatly satisfy each customer we do get to reach. Increasing satisfaction of a customer is more difficult than replicating the satisfaction of that customer to more customers. We will first focus on the more difficult problem. 

Sales will enable us to engage deeply with each customer. We will get to spend a lot of time in conversations with each customer, not only get to hear, but also keep in our mind, the complex details of who they are, what they are dreaming, and what is blocking them. 

Since we are small today, we are able to keep up, and even grow, our operation with even a low number of customers. Let us take full advantage of this privilege. While our product is still maturing, the high customer acquisition cost that comes from choosing sales also remains a positive force. Disappointing a hard-won customer and seeing that customer leave us will inflict great pain on us. This pain, or the fear of experiencing this pain, as well as the prospect of seeing the customer greatly satisfied, will drive us to make correct decisions and take correct actions, the way we need to during our critical first year. 

# Target Customers

We sell to technical founders who are expecting to grow to over 10K daily active users within a year. The target customers have the following traits:

- Transitioning from a university or a company to entrepreneurship.
- Developing a mobile app to deliver utility to consumers.
- Has a clear idea for the product.

We expect this set of target customers will benefit greatly from our product and give us sincere feedback on any gaps between what we are providing and what they need from us. 

Following traits are not considered when determining whether a potential customer is a good fit for our product: 

- Whether they have business skills
- Whether they have capital

We are not targeting following developers and entrepreneurs: 

- **Enterprise** developers (businesses with a team size over 100) are not inherently a bad fit for our product. However, we expect enterprise customers to move slowly (which is why we define enterprise based on team size). At our scale, we cannot afford to move slowly with them.
- **Student** developers and **hobbyist** developers do not plan to grow their apps to over 10K DAU. We will focus our capital to best support the developers who are strongly committed to helping many consumers.
- **Non-Technical** founders who do not have any technical talent on the team are not a good fit for our product. We will direct them to try no code tools.

Our understanding of the target market is still growing, and we will remain flexible to discover customers who are good fits for our product. 

# Sales Targets

| D98C | D99C | D10K |
| --- | --- | --- |
| $10K deposit | $10K monthly revenue | $1M yearly revenue |
| 10 developers | 60 developers | 360 developers |
| 0 users | 100K users | 1M users |

We target to have 360 greatly satisfied developers as our customers by D10K. 

We will have between 1 and 10 team members by D10K. Assuming we have 5 great talents, we will be able to greatly satisfy 360 customers, but have difficulty supporting any more. 

![Product Change per Customer.png](FY1%20S0%20Distribution%20Plan/Product_Change_per_Customer.png)

Also, the amount of change that we need to introduce to the product to meet the demands of each marginal customer will slow down as we get close to 360 customers. When we only have 10 customers, our product may be overfit to only support the special needs of those customers. But once our product can satisfy 360 different developers, there is a good chance that many other developers can be also satisfied by our product. 

In summary, the milestone of “360 customers” is both when we *can* move to marketing (due to maturity of our product) and when we *must* move to marketing (due to capacity limit of our team). When we have reached 100 customers, we will start preparing to transition from sales to marketing. 

# Sales Plan

We will fan out from Junwon’s network in Silicon Valley and at Stanford University. This sales channel is expected to lead us to at least 300 customer candidates. We may provide temporary custom deals to customers while we calibrate a general pricing plan. 

This plan saves us the cost of finding new sales channels. Whereas we need to get so much done with so little capital from D97C to D10K, this cost savings in distribution will let us spend more on product and technology. 

This sales channel is expected to remain important in the future. Even after we start making variable cost investments into distribution by marketing, we expect to still continue making yearly fixed cost investments into distribution by sales in this network. We may partner with university offices and student organizations at Stanford University, and venture capitals and startup accelerators in Silicon Valley, to promote our product, offer deals, and provide complementary utility to early-stage technical founders in order to increase awareness of our product. 

# Marketing Plan

We will start marketing only when we are ready to deliver satisfaction to a high number of customers. We will be ready when “revenue per customer” exceeds “expense per customer”. While we are not ready, we will not invest in broadcasting advertisements and contents on social media and discussion forums. 

To increase revenue per customer, we will 

- grow the utility of our product,
- find a scalable business model.

To decrease expense per customer, we will prepare materials for marketing and support: 

- cases of customers who reached success thanks to our product,
- tutorials for recreating the most popular patterns of online apps,
- a clear landing page, to bring down the cost of marketing,
- a clear documentation, to bring down the cost of support,
- a simple developer interface in the product, to bring down the cost of support.

# Marketing Ideas

When we start marketing, we can also try following experiments:

- **On apps on our platform:** When a user who is a developer uses an app on our platform, invite the user to develop an app on our platform.
- **In search:** Search questions that target customers are likely to search. For posts that appear at the top, from websites like Stack Overflow, Quora, Reddit, and Hacker News, answer the question and introduce our product.
- **In git repositories:** Enforce git repositories for apps hosted on our platform to contain introduction to our product or website, in the repository name or in the README.md file.
- **1P apps for developers:** Broadcast apps that are interesting to developers (e.g. a messenger app where users can send each other executable code blocks).