Thread by @juliehpark, 2020 was a tough year for small businesses. But the spirit of [...]

Julie H. Park

juliehpark

2020 was a tough year for small businesses. But the spirit of resilience remains strong. Q3'20 saw a surge in new business applications, the fastest growth since '07.

Interested in building for small bizs? Here are 7 lessons from my time looking after them at FB.

Thread

1/ Reskinned enterprise tools =/= SMB tools. Small bizs ultimately want similar things as enterprise clients (eg find new customer leads), but the nuances of how she’ll get there will be completely different. This leads to fundamentally different products, not UI/UX changes

2/ Customer ROI needs to account for both investment of time & money. The SMB client has a full-time job, whether that’s selling houses, providing tax advice, or baking cakes. Now she’s expected to be a marketer, accounting guru, and compliance expert. Make her time count

3/ Deliver immediate results. Before FB, I worked with Fortune 500 clients with six figure test budgets. Test budgets for SMBs?

4/ Speak plain ‘English’. Terms like “impressions, click through rates, and ROI” are considered industry standard terms. But they mean nothing to SMBs. How can you translate your value prop into terms your SMBs understand?

5/ Provide encouragement and celebrate the small wins. At FB, we learned to identify ‘small wins’ and celebrate them. This is a concept that many workout apps deploy, and it works elsewhere

6/ Mobile first increasingly wins. The SMB customer is on the floor or behind the register. In emerging markets, she doesn’t own a computer; she’s conducting all her biz on WhatsApp. Want to be part of her workflow? Design it for

7/ Aim for consumer-grade tools. TikTok makes it super easy to create content. Spotify makes it dead simple to find songs. Then why do SMB tools require webinars? The best products auto-optimize, vs putting the burden on users

I can't think of a more meaningful mission than to build for SMBs and the time is ripe to support this audience

For more in-depth details, check out my post: https://juliepark.substack.com/p/building-for-smbs-7-mistakes-and

The end.

Building for SMBs: 7 Mistakes & Lessons Learned at Facebook

Before I joined Venrock, I was lucky enough to lead the long tail ads business at Facebook. My customers were realtors, restaurants, accountants, and everyone in between. Having worked with small...

https://juliepark.substack.com/p/building-for-smbs-7-mistakes-and

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