SnapEdit Go-to-Market Strategy
Armita H & Benjamin K – Team 12
Distribution Channels
Mobile app
We are investing in our mobile application as the primary product, with a distribution channel of organic and paid marketing leading to downloads in the app store.
A quote from our interviews captured a major reason why: our interviewee touched design tools “probably once in the past year and that’s bad.” From our research, small business owners are not habitual designers. They typically design only when they absolutely must. We want to enable them to become habitual designers, by lowering the threshold to making quality graphics, but to do so, we must meet them where they are at. Making them download yet another desktop app and onboard a complex flow is friction that many business owners likely won’t tolerate based on our user interviews.
The 33 million small business owners we’re targeting are already used to managing inventory on Square’s mobile app and updating Shopify from their phones. They post to their business instagram account from their phone. When they need a graphic at 10 PM for tomorrow’s flash sale, they need it accessible from the place all but guaranteed to be on their person, their phone.
Rejected alternatives:
Desktop-first (Canva’s approach): Our competitive analysis showed Canva built workflow integration as their moat. This is because they assume users will invest time learning their ecosystem, and they are right, for the habitual designers that use their platform. But small business owners are different. They don’t have time to develop design workflows and don’t want to do so. They need quick and easy graphics that are high enough quality to post. Desktop-first assumes planned design sessions that our ideal customer profile simply doesn’t have.
Web only: Investing in a mobile app allows us to make a smoother experience in-app, such that it is easier to generate graphics without worrying about accidentally closing the tab. We can also send notifications more easily with a mobile app. Finally, the app store itself acts as a marketing channel. Thus, we are not doing a web only approach.
Sales Strategy
Freemium self-service with strategic price positioning
We’re implementing a four-tier self-service model that directly addresses the cost sensitivities we discovered in our research.
Free Tier:
We will offer a free tier with basic editing tools and watermarked exports such that the user can gain confidence in our tool compared to others, like Adobe and Canva, that already have reputational credibility. Free tier will offer limited templates and cloud saves, but will have unlimited background removal and use of our AI copilot called SnapPilot. This allows the user to fully try out the product without unlocking the full value due to the watermarks.
Advanced ($9.99/month or $79.99/year):
Our advanced tier allows full template library access, watermark-free exports, unlimited cloud saves, and cross-device sync. This is everything a small business owner needs to work and benefit from the platform. This pricing plan is also affordable and allows the business owner to scale their usage to premium after unlocking advanced.
Premium ($24.99/month or $249.99/year):
Our premium tier will increase the advanced AI features by reducing rate limits on usage, allow for batch content generation at scale, provide scheduling integration with social media platforms like Instagram and Linkedin, and provide priority processing speed for image generation features.
Enterprise (Custom pricing):
We are keeping a door open for custom pricing with an enterprise plan that allows API access for workflow integration. Large teams or groups of small businesses could negotiate different pricing and custom features.
Further reasoning:
Our research found users frustrated that Canva’s background removal is behind a paywall. By keeping this feature free while charging for convenience features (watermark removal, cloud saves), we create a sustainable model that doesn’t gate the most important features for functionality. It allows our small business owners to test the full product without benefiting due to the watermarks. They can test the product and gain confidence before locking in to billing.
The $9.99 price point deliberately undercuts Canva Pro’s $12.99 while staying above the psychological “$5 throwaway subscription” tier. The premium tier allows a much higher price point for small business owners who find significant value in our product, priced at about 2.5x higher than the advanced plan, at $24.99 per month.
Rejected alternatives:
Direct sales model: Small business owners receive many sales calls and emails daily. They are overwhelmed with outreach and want a simple pricing model that delivers. In addition, the unit economics would not fund the customer acquisition cost required to hire sales representatives for plans only totaling up to $24.99 per month.
Reseller partnerships: Adobe’s and Canva’s models benefit from their trust, brand credibility, and reputation based on our competitive analysis. We lack this currently due to our scale. Thus, we cannot rely on resellers for now. In addition, adding their markups and margins would significantly dig into our profit, which does not have a high absolute volume since we are pricing very competitively to the market.
One-time purchase: Our identified risk of “AI inference costs rising faster than revenue” makes this untenable. One time purchase only works if the ongoing costs are negligible, which is not the case, due to hosting costs and AI costs.
Marketing & Promotion
The background removal and SnapPilot campaign
We’re launching with targeted grassroots marketing that exploits the specific pain points validated through our research. Our strategy focuses on meeting small business owners exactly where they already seek help, rather than trying to pull them to new platforms with specific promises.
Our first phase involves Reddit seeding over months 1-2. We will create authentic posts in subreddits where small business owners actively seek solutions: r/Canva, r/smallbusiness, r/Entrepreneur, r/restaurateur, and r/Shopify. These posts will highlight free background removal capabilities and ease of use of the AI copilot.
Phase two runs from months 2-4 with social media problem-solution content. One of our interviewees defined success as getting a good project done in a timely manner, and our content will demonstrate exactly that through videos of SnapEdit generating graphics quickly. We can create TikTok videos, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts showing small business owners creating real graphics for their business quickly. Each video will focus on actual business scenarios rather than polished tutorials, so we can match the sentiment and values of small business owners, our ideal customer profile.
Rejected alternatives:
Influencer marketing: Small business owners trust peer recommendations over influencer endorsements. Paying influencers will be expensive and won’t generate authentic trust from our audience.
Paid social media advertising: Facebook and Instagram ads have high customer acquisition costs that make it difficult for us to retain profit margin. At our scale with most of our funding being invested into R&D, we need to maintain a good margin. We already have significant organic growth, so we do not need to rely on advertising.
Traditional content marketing: Blog posts and how-to guides assume users want to learn design principles, but small business owners want immediate solutions, not education. They want to learn how to quickly get to a graphic, not read a tutorial about color theory or composition rules.
Customer Service Strategy
Asynchronous support built for 24/7
Small business owners often create graphics outside normal business hours. They do this in their free time when not talking to customers. This means they are typically communicating after closing their stores or during slow periods. We can thus offer support through an integrated customer support platform like intercom as well as staffing an email line.
We will prioritize quick response for our premium and advanced tier members. Free tier members will serve as a signal for product issues we should fix, but we are less focused on trying to convert them since they are already not paying.
We will staff the customer support channels with two full time employees. We will also have product managers work directly with or in these channels to understand our main customer pain points so we can quickly improve the product.
Rejected alternatives:
Quick live chat support: Staffing a real-time chat for users would require more than two full time employees in order to be available 24/7. This is too expensive based on the revenue we will be getting from these customers at the beginning.
Phone support: Similarly, live phone support is difficult and also means support cannot be outsourced or augmented easily with AI. We also need the ability to see what the user is struggling with, which is not possible over the phone.
Credits:
We utilized Claude.ai to improve the language and help draft based upon our previous notes, content. Modifications were made to outputted content based on human-written drafts, user interviews, and in class work.
