Vimeo's Strategies for Differentiation and Product-Led Growth in Competitive Markets
A conversation about Vimeo's growth in the red ocean of streaming services
When doing expansion strategies, we need to come up with insights about what markets we can penetrate and win. Combining that with product-led growth thinking, you can review the pull from existing users to come up with underserved needs and sizing opportunities.
That can be easier said that done, but in this episode of 100 Product Strategies, Markiyan Matsekh, ex-Director of Product at Vimeo, shared the steps he took to conquer the enterprise segment.
Besides the very insightful strategy story, he shared the fundamentals and the importance of Vimeo’s positioning and differentiation to win in a crowded market.
And of top of that, we closed with an interest story of an unsuccessful strategy, that failed for the same reasons the other one succeeded, reinforcing the importance of these concepts.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.
My takeaways from this episode
Markiyan shared a typical story of expansion strategy: moving upmarket from SMBs to Enterprise. He explained the PLG approach to it, having already users from the companies using and loving the non-enterprise (or even free) plans, so they used that pull and data to convert them to a higher plan with more value to this type of user.
Thanks to the demand pull they were receiving, the first insights for the strategy came from the existing pipeline: getting into client calls and understanding the underlying needs (aka “Corporate Netflix”).
One of the struggles they found implementing the new “enterprise” strategy was the conflict with the existing structure. They try to get away putting a new team “on the side” working on it, but it couldn’t make fast progress and was hitting the wall with unprioritized dependencies. One of the key wins Markiyan had as product lead, was influencing the organization to change the approach and put the enterprise segment in the roadmap of many teams.
The storytelling combined quali and quanti: starting by the size of the market, combined with more detail scenarios and use cases from real users and companies.
As the one leading the strategy that influenced many teams, Markiyan was in an interesting position because he had to give enough strategic context to the teams to start making implementation decisions. He highlighted connecting teams to the clients he interviewed was one of the key ways to empower teams.
Intrestingly, this expansion strategies have many complexities, but goals tend to be very straightforward: revenue growth in the new segment/market.
They had a long strategy review every 6 months, very interdisciplinary including finance, sales, etc.
At the very end he shared the results of other strategy, related to recording video messages (similar to Loom). The takeaway was that their positioning, which made the enterprise strategy successful, was the same thing that “lowered” their chances in the new space, where another competitor had a strong and unique position and brand awareness.
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