Introducing
Successful companies have a product-market fit. This means they found the right distribution channel (e.g. a social platform) to get crucial information from their potential users, and therefore get knowledge about the target market.
To showcase exactly what successful companies did in the early stages to get first users, I am using “Where is my user” which will help find the right distribution model for consumer startups. I’m going to use booking.com as an example.
Company: booking.com
Goal: Find where early users of booking.com are active.
Who would actually buy the product and service? Who is willing to pay for the service? Who has the problem that we are trying to solve?
Booking.com had to answer all these questions to adopt and build their solution for exactly this audience in mind.
Some important questions to answer would be demographics like age, gender, location, language, …
I am using “Where is my user” as a tool to answer the most important questions about the audience of booking.com
First, the tool gets demographic information- like age, gender, location, etc. – about who the audience of the product (booking.com) is.
In case of booking.com the age group is quite wide. Usually children and teenagers might not be a natural fit for the early adopters for a travel booking platform.
Both genders equally travel and book hotels, so there is also no difference.
Other demographics like occupation might be interesting. For example people in higher sales positions for big corporates are a specific sub-audience and therefore could have been a potential first early adopters group.
To understand the potential customers we need to know where they naturally spend time. There are some limited places where specific audiences are spending time.
Booking.com had to figure out the behavior of their potential customers. What are they doing that indicates that they might be good customers for them.
In the case of booking it is quite obvious: people search for specific keywords about their travel destination.
After defining the audience, we need to figure out some more information about what is our audience behavior online. So in this example of booking.com, their potential user probably follows travel hashtags and travel content creators. They also probably search for keywords like “cheap hotels in Lisbon” if they are planning a trip there.
This is important because for example a 14 year old teenager would probably be found on TikTok, and a 60 year old woman might be on Facebook, so their behavior online differs a lot, and therefore they are naturally in different channels that we need to explore.
How are we planing to make money?
The core question when choosing the right distribution is to plan based on how money is flowing through the company. A recurring revenue business has different opportunities / problems than an advertisement based business.
Booking.com opted for a revenue share model in the beginning. Now they might be in the advertisement based model (as well), but in the beginning things where simpler.
Then we answer questions about the business model of the company and ways to acquire users. For example:
When building a company like booking.com getting distribution right is one of the core milestones. Figuring out what distribution channels exists and prototyping on these channels will very likely increase the potential to build a meaningful product / company.
So what is the result of booking.com? What distribution channel works for them?
Maybe you already guessed right – booking opted for paid ads as an initial customer acquisition model.
In case you want to figure out what distribution model works best for you and get early access to your potential customers, feel free to try “Where is my user”. Our free tool for early stage startups to find their distribution model.