Everyone Needs a Coach
VSVs that figure out how to help small businesses succeed will be rewarded. Coaching, in whatever delivery method, can expand the TAM and help customers overcome critical challenges, making them more likely to stick.
Small business owners need to be a swiss army knife of skills: marketer, salesperson, IT specialist, HR manager, legal advisor, and financial guru. It’s no surprise that, every once in a while, they need a helping hand. The assist can come from other owners or actual coaches—but usually a small business owner has to figure things out on their own.
The good news is that help may be on its way. Vertical SaaS vendors (VSVs) that serve as operating systems for small businesses are starting to launch coaching services that can help the overwhelmed business owner work through key challenges. Video infrastructure and benchmarking data have allowed VSVs to deliver industry expertise, and sometimes live experts, in contexts and in workflows that don’t break the bank.
This digital coaching is not only great for small business owners, but it’s also great for the VSV. While helping merchants, a VSV can greatly improve conversion and onboarding, drive retention, expand TAM, create more surface area for cross-sell and upsell, and enable more product bundling and pricing innovations.
At Tidemark, we try to open-source our thinking as much as possible to help founders win; however, as investors, we can’t give everything away in public. If you’re an operator or founder, you can request access to the rest of this piece below.
Keep up with Tidemark
Sign up to receive new content as soon as it's released