This week I reached a personal milestone.

It’s been exactly one year since I left my VP of Product Marketing role to work full time on PMM Camp 🎉

My favorite part of solopreneurship is the diversity. On any given week, I’m working on the following:

• Writing this newsletter

• Connecting with Campers in my private community

• Teaching PMMs how to level up product launches with Andy & Jason

• Consulting startups and scale-ups

The consulting piece has been what’s surprised me the most. I didn’t set out to be a consultant, but it’s been incredibly enjoyable to peek inside a variety of businesses. And it’s meant I’ve had to seek out new frameworks and approaches to adapt to each company.

That’s how I came across today’s framework — a modern spin on the classic 4Ps.

In today’s edition we’re going to take the traditional marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) and give it a glow up.

Introducing the new 4Ps: Persona > Problem > Promise > Product ✨

Let’s get into it.

The 4Ps

If you’ve ever attended a business class (or read a marketing book) you’ve probably heard of the 4Ps.

They were introduced in the 1950s by a professor at Harvard and have been generally accepted as the foundational framework for how to market a product or service ever since.

But, to me, they’ve always felt incredibly outdated. And, the worst part is, there’s no mention of the customer at all.

First Round’s modernization of the 4Ps fixes this. Here’s how it works:

• Persona: Identify who benefits most from your solution. You need to have one clear target segment in mind so you’re not just building for everyone. Adjust your target if it's too broad or narrow.

• Problem: Understand the most important and urgent problems that persona is experiencing and narrow down which ones you want to solve. I love to use a combination of customer interviews and surveys to extract these insights.

• Promise: Clearly communicate the unique value proposition and benefits your product will deliver in order to solve these problems. These should be mapped back to the specific problems of your target persona (ie. if you solve problem X you’ll get promise Y).

• Product: Note how product comes last. Only once you understand what your target persona needs can you build a product that will deliver on that promise.

I like to pull the 4Ps together in a chart that looks like this 👇🏻

I highly recommend this exercise be completed in partnership with product management — this is a collaborative way to build a strategy together.

Once you’ve agreed on the foundational pillars of your strategy you can use this artifact to align stakeholders across the business. You can also think of the four pillars as levers you can pull as you try to find product market fit. Each one requires optimization and experimentation to get it right.

As we completed this exercise for one of my clients, we quickly realized the four pillars weren’t in harmony with each other. We needed to go back to the beginning to refine their persona and then build the rest of the pillars from there.

Once we did that, everything clicked.

Want to try applying this framework today? Take your current strategy and map it back to each of the four pillars. You’ll quickly see where things make sense, and where they fall apart. That will give you a starting point for optimization.

CAMPER ESSENTIALS

📚 Reading List: Dig into more content from First Round on product market fit (this is where I first came across the framework we discussed today).

📚 Reading List: Need a break from business books? I just binge read The Will of the Many in 3 days — it’s the best book I’ve read since Fourth Wing.

🗓️ Events: The only thing standing between me and my 3-week vacation to Greece is summer camp! Join me on August 7th to get your step-by-step guide to identifying your ICP and building a holistic marketing plan. Register for free.

Until next week,