How many marketing co-founders do you know?
How many early-stage startups do you know with a dedicated marketing person?
My guess: not many.
Steve Blank taught startups to pursue product-market fit before writing a single line of code. Marc Andreessen says there are only two stages for a startup: before product-market fit and after.
The problem is that many startups consider marketing something to be done after they’ve found product-market fit — instead of something that’s fundamental to getting there in the first place.
Before starting Bindle I launched Offside Inc., a marketing agency that helped over 30 startups integrate marketing into their often product-focused processes. Once marketing began, real product usage and customer data became available and virtually all our clients made significant changes. Often it only took a few weeks to disprove assumptions the company had been working under for months.
Every product seeks to solve a problem. For most startups, it’s easy to know whether there’s a market for a solution to that problem. The difficult part is what happens next: determining whether your solution is the right one, and building an actionable strategy for making the market aware your solution exists.
Having the flexibility to adjust both the solution you’ve built, and the way you reach your customers, is the key to finding product-market fit.
Two real (anonymized) examples from my years running Offside:
Startup A before marketing spends months (and thousands of dollars) to ensure its product, branding and messaging was completely different to the status quo of the industry in order to be as ‘disruptive’ as possible.
Startup A after marketing finds out that over 90% of sales in the industry are driven by SEO for the legacy search terms (i.e. the status quo) which they have been actively avoiding. Faced with a choice of going against the market for the sake of being different, or simply being the best version of what customers were actually looking for, Startup A chose revenue over branding. They made adjustments to product focus, messaging and targeting, and saw an instant lift in revenue as well thanks to significantly more obvious marketing opportunities and strategies.
Startup B before marketing wants to sell its products to hipsters because it’s assumed it will make the company seem on-trend and ultimately secure press coverage. Photography and branding is all geared toward hipsters. Sales are OK, and the team believes better marketing is the solution to find more hipsters to sell to.
Startup B after marketing finds out, through testing, that apparently non-hipster customers buy their products at a rate 3x greater than hipsters. Non-hipster marketing channels and press also respond better. Startup B decides to follow traction and re-shoots product photography and lookbooks to reflect the accurate customer profile for their product. Not only is revenue significantly higher, but new partnership opportunities have poured in.
The core lesson here is that without any market data, a startup’s product is a guess as to what customers need.
Those who succeed either continue to revise the product as they learn the true temperature of the market or try to change the market itself. When you build marketing into your roadmap from day one it is possible to implement, measure, and iterate many times after gathering data on that first attempt and all after. Luckily for both startups A and B, product-market fit happened with plenty of time and budget left to act on findings; not all startups integrate the marketing attitude early enough. The faster (and more accurately) you can run through the iterative process, the more likely you are to find product-market fit before your cash runs out.
At Bindle we’re trying to change the way groups chat and so we run product and marketing hand-in-hand. It doesn’t guarantee us success more than any other startup, but it does give us full perspective for our challenge, and the ability to iterate with confidence.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post feel free to recommend/share and you can also follow me for more startup thoughts to come.
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