Why Ultra Flexible but Scalable Product Offerings Work for Challenger Brands
My company Path Unbound, a boutique UI/UX design school, is a challenger brand in a saturated market with many big named schools. We experienced a long slump in revenue in the first couple of years in business because we couldn’t find our product positioning. We offered products similar to our big competitors and tried to beat them with lower price only to have the opposite effect. People start doubting if we are bad because we were so much cheaper.
Last year, we discovered the magic formula to growth for us as a small challenger brand without big budget for advertising. We started to repackage our big product offerings into smaller ones that are ultra flexible serving mini segments of user personas. We started to see results within weeks of launching our new offerings, attracting more customers than we’ve ever have. In this talk, I’ll how we structured our product offerings according to customer personas and how other small businesses that are challenger brands to big competitors can thrive doing the same.

Stella Guan is a world-traveling technology entrepreneur with a background as an award-winning multidisciplinary designer, educator, speaker, and content creator. After a decade working as a designer for Fortune 500 companies, she founded Path Unbound, a UI/UX design school providing comprehensive, instructor-led, 1:1 learning programs and portfolio coaching for aspiring and working designers. As a founder, she is specialized in no-code development in a bootstrapped model.
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