Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

Squaring the Four Ps

The Four Ps, known by many in the world of marketing, are product, place, price, promotion.¹ While there are many similar frameworks, the Four Ps have been in use for over 50 years and provide a simple, relatively complete checklist for evaluating the business model you apply to your product. The Four Ps come into play in somewhat different ways across enterprise and consumer products. Let's take a minute to explore that distinction.

Most high-tech products break down into one of the following three categories:

1. Infrastructure

2. Enterprise

3. Consumer

Infrastructure means the product is sold to support another product that the end user touches. Examples of infrastructure products are routers, servers, data storage, and software that optimizes any of those to make them more efficient. We won't spend much time here discussing the infrastructure category.

Enterprise means that the product is sold to businesses. Examples of products in this category are customer relationship management (CRM) systems, accounting systems, and software that allows employees to collaborate in the workplace. Enable Quiz is an enterprise product since it's sold to businesses.

Consumer means that the product is sold to individuals, and generally used in a personal capacity. Examples of consumer products include games, the iPod, and media services like Hulu. Though some products span both categories, most fall into one of these buckets and when they don't, their companies usually ...