Great post Ben. You’re right, it’s amazing what you learn when you begin testing different marketing channels and site copy. You get to learn where your customers are and what motivates them to use your service.

Ben, this post just convinced me to start sending out those proposals instead of putting it off until I had built a more ‘established’ presence in my field.

Thank you for that. I’ll be here soon with the results 🙂

Great post, but I should point out that Ash’s post is four years old.

Heh, that’s true. He tweeted it recently and I assumed it was new, didn’t notice. Some content is timeless, I guess. 🙂

Been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in regards to the order of operations for hiring in a startup.

It’s a tough thing to figure out, I’m not sure there’s an exact equation but it seems like the longer you wait to either get a founder or early hire (#3, 4, etc…) that understands marketing as customer development, the more painful it is to deal with later. Some of that can be band-aided by getting a capable growth hacker, but in a lot of startups there’s this noticeable, and broad, gap between hustling and doing proper marketing. It’s painfully obvious when the jump happens.

So far the only way I’ve seen to deal with that is to get marketing activities going from the start, even though you might not call it that. Also, I suspect that lean analytics practice / growth hacking, etc. or not, the point at which you go from causation to correlation when understanding user or customer growth is a hell of a lot sooner than most people either admit or perhaps are aware of.

I think marketing is being equated to advertising, which is something you don’t want to invest in heavily too early. And there’s some kind of twisted logic that says, “We’ve got all this traction with no marketing, people must REALLY want what we’re offering!” Meh. Maybe? 🙂

Super true! I consistently hear about tech startups raising money to build a product, but rarely do they talk about actually selling the product they build…other than the thinking that their brilliant idea will be obvious and magically found by the Internet.

Awesome tech ideas are great, but like in traditional businesses the true beauty and success is in the execution of the whole endeavour!

Building new tech without a real plan to sell it is just a science experiment with other people’s money…

Peter Drucker says that there are two questions in business: question one is what business are you in, and question two is how is business? That’s it. I would say there probably is a third question — with all due respect to Mr. Drucker — and that is how do you improve business, which is really the question you need to answer. He also said that all businesses are designed to bring in a customer and that can only be accomplished through marketing and innovation.

These are the only two functions of business and everything else is an expense. According to statistics two out of three businesses that start today won’t be around in five years. This is because they don’t understand the dynamics of marketing. It doesn’t really matter what it is you are selling. First it comes from analyzing, measuring, identifying — and then replacing — certain underperforming aspects of your selling, marketing, advertising, or operations with alternatives that perform better.

First of all. I want to give you a reference frame. You’ve got to think about what could be underperforming. The sales people could be underperforming, their presentation could not be closing, the markets they could be going after could be incorrect — there’s all kinds of potential problems. You could be having your sales people working their hearts out but calling on the wrong quality prospect.

You could have them working their hearts out calling on the right prospects but making the wrong proposition. You could have them working their hearts out calling on the right prospects, making the right proposition, but not having the right risk reversal policy to induce people to buy their product and to make it easier to reduce the barrier of entry. You could have an ad running or a letter going out, and because it has the wrong beginning, it could underperform it’s capacity by as much as 20 or 30 times. Smart bootstrapping is about turning your lack of resources into a competitive advantage.

Understanding your customer is critical to developing the right strategies and product that will resonate with them. Empathy is a powerful tool for business and one that is often overlooked. Call it marketing or not, either way, get to know your customer. Once you do, then market to them. Empathy brings leaders closer to their customers: http://blog.emotivebrand.com/empathy-brings-leaders-closer-to-their-customers-and-employees

This may be an old post as someone pointed out, but it is as applicable as it was four years ago. That’s the great thing about true wisdom; it’s timeless. I hear the same sentiment as I’m pitching my value to companies led by comfortable management that feel as if they have a brand that doesn’t need marketing. Aren’t they just asking for someone to fall into the hands of the competition and make them irrelevant?

Marketing is being equated to marketing communications, not just advertising.

That’s fair. I usually focus my attention on founders/startups more than investors. I’d say most people don’t understand the fundamentals of marketing.

Nice Post Ben. As a mentor with the Telluride Venture Accelerator for the past 3 years I have discovered that most founders are developers, product specialists and people who’ve discovered a customer pain that they feel they can solve… not marketing experts. In fact, most startup teams don’t even include much in the way of marketing experience and expertise.

Hard to believe given that Customer Discovery, Customer Validation and achieving Product/Market fit (all key components to the Lean Startup approach) are critical marketing strategy elements.

Understanding who your customers should be, who the early adopters are, marketing channels, pricing and revenue models, completing customer personas and customer buying journey processes, etc. etc. are all critical exercises that provide the foundation needed for being successful with marketing long-term.

I am of the belief that if the startup team does not include a startup marketing expert, that someone with these skills should be added ASAP as an Advisor so that their skills can be brought to bear while the startup team is developing and validating their business model canvas.

Thanks Mark — appreciate you stopping by and commenting.

The article you have shared here very good. This is really interesting information for me. Thanks for sharing!