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Light User vs Heavy User Funnel Strategy

Reusability

Strategic positioning framework where businesses deliberately avoid heavy users who demand low margins and instead focus on light users who provide higher gross margins

How It Works

Heavy users have more negotiating power and pull businesses toward commodity pricing. Light users are more fragmented, less price-sensitive, and allow for higher margins and better positioning

Components

1

Map your customer funnel from light to heavy users

2

Understand that you'll always be pulled toward heavy users

3

Resist the pull to the right (heavy users)

4

Build systems to serve fragmented light user base efficiently

5

Maintain pricing discipline with heavy user requests

When to Use

When you have a choice between serving large enterprise customers versus smaller, more distributed customers

When Not to Use

When you're in a capital-intensive business that requires scale to be viable, or when light users don't provide sufficient volume

Anti-Patterns to Avoid

Taking the Walmart order that transforms you into a logistics businessLetting heavy users dictate your business modelBelieving scale always equals profitability

Example

A-Swag gets calls from John Deere and ADM wanting them to store and ship all their merchandise annually, which would make them a low-margin logistics business instead of a high-margin creative services business