Estimated Time
- Reading: ~9 minutes
- Video: ~97 minutes
- Many may have already watched the 2-Day Founder.University videos that are recommended in this section
- Activities: to be completed prior to next week
Insights
- Do the things that you can not scale when finding your first users
- Talk to your users early and often; collect and bucket feedback
- Talk to users — this week!
Marketing
- Just like building the MVP of your product, you do not need to have marketing and customer acquisition perfect from the start
- In fact, the way you acquire your first 10-20+ customers does not necessarily even need to scale
- Do things that don't scale is a great blog post that goes deeper into this concept
- But there is an advantage as a founder to talk to as many customers as possible in the early days
- You can quickly (and directly from customers) find out what works
- Which feature was an ah-ha moment?
- What phrasing in your pitch resonated?
- When did they give a buying signal?
- You can also identify the shortcomings and learn to fail fast
- It is important to have some kind of marketing even early on
- You have already been working on several of the points made in the blog Successful MVPs Have a Key Component: Marketing Strategy
- Market Analysis
- Competitor Analysis
- Positioning
- Targeting
- Strategy
- Understanding where your ideal customers hang out online and offering value is a great way to start
- The value could be in the form of
- Blog posts
- Twitter threads
- Answering questions in your field of expertise
- The value doesn't have to be an advertisement for your product or service
- If you are a thought leader in your space people will be interested in why you build a product
- If you create a strong brand and community based on your content people will be more interested in what you are building
- Don't target the "hard" customers first
- Hard meaning the customers who are going to need a lot of convincing to try or switch to your product
- Is there a segment of users that are more open to new solutions?
- Is there a network you can tap into of these potential customers?
- Be open to what the users are telling you when you talk to them
- Your initial vision of an ideal customer might not be who you think it is — be open to that possibility of shifting
- You can start marketing in some capacity before even launching your MVP
- So if you have already launched an MVP you can definitely be marketing it
- It doesn't have to be anything fancy or expensive
- Presh gave a phenomenal talk on Early Stage Marketing & Growth
- At the intensive 2-day Founder.University
- [~30 minutes]
- If you have not watched it I highly suggest clicking that link
- He emphasized:
- Building in Public
- Audience Building
- Content Creation
- Copy of his deck:
- Whether you are officially building in public or not you want to connect your personal social accounts with your company website or accounts
- Jason's account for example, links directly to his top investments, his main websites, podcasts (product), and has a newsletter you can subscribe to all in his bio
- You should also do this for your social accounts: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
- At a minimum include a link to your website (and company social account if you have one) so users can quickly learn more about you
- You don't ever want to miss the chance to make a sale (or talk to an investor) because they gave up looking for what you do
- So often we find a founder on social media from a retweet or a comment they made on a post and want to learn more about what they are building
- With our investor hats on, we are saying to ourselves... "this founder seems so great..."
- "I wonder what their website looks like?"
- "What problem do they solve? How do they do it?"
- "What does this product look like?"
- Only to click on their profile and find out they have no information about their company
- We can't find a link in their bio
- We can't find the name of their company to even do a Google search
- We sadly look at a cute picture of their dog the recently posted and move on without a meeting
- Do not miss this opportunity with customers or investors!
- Make it as easy as possible for them to learn what you are building and why they should care
- When someone goes to your profile, give them the option to quickly go to your website and become a customer with little friction!
- As the founder, you are the face of the company
- Have a checklist of easy to implement requirements for the company
- Make this part of the onboarding process so that each new member of your team expands the reach of your company
- Provide a templated email signature with a link to your website
- Social media accounts should have links in bios
- Open communication channels on social media
- Don't limit inbound traffic by having your profile locked down
- Check it regularly
- There are some of you in this cohort that I can't find out what your company name is or if you have a website — and I desperately want to know!
- If you don't have these things yet — don't worry everyone is at different places in development
- Just keep in mind if I am actively searching and can't find out info...
- How hard is it for a customer to find you if they don't know you are even building an MVP that they should buy?
- Make it so easy for people to know where to buy your product that they could do it every time they see you tweet, email, etc
- Simon Hoiberg makes the argument that putting your idea out there for feedback early outweighs the risk of having your idea stolen
- Continued execution is greater than any idea
- If you keep your ideas a secret until the day you launch you actually may be giving your competition more of an advantage
- They will collect all the user feedback from the launch and be on a level playing field
- If you wait you may be too far along to simply iterate but could be essentially starting over
- You did all the heavy lifting just to give the most valuable feedback to the competition
- If you collect feedback and validate your idea from actual users along the way you can iterate and stay ahead of the competition
- Craig Zingerline gave a talk on Finding and Owning Your Initial Acquisition Channelsl
- at the intensive 2-day Founder.University course
- [~45 minutes]
- I would highly recommend watching that recording as you dive deeper into marketing and acquiring customers
- Copy of his deck:82404131048_RegistrationReport (3).csv7.9 KB
Day2_Session4_Marketing Strategies for Scaling at Early Stage_ Presh Dineshkumar, LAUNCH.pdf
29.9 MB
User Acquisition
- You have a product (at least in the works)
- You have identified who your ideal customer is
- You have curated questions to ask as part of an outbound strategy
- You also now have a plan to start generating some inbound traffic
- The key, and we'll say it again and again, is to talk to customers
- You can not delight your customers efficiently if you don't listen to them
- Some of you have started to have conversations — keep it up!
- Do not stop drilling if you are finding oil!
- If you have not started to talk to potential users that is okay
- But you need to start!
- Make that a goal this week!
- Talk to your first users
- It would be best if they are your ideal customers
- The most valuable feedback will come from the people who will ultimately buy your product
- These are the people you ideally want to talk to
- But just talk to someone — even if they aren't within your ideal profile
- Collect their feedback
- Just because they aren't your targeted audience does not mean they won't offer insights
- They can provide insights on the flow, feel, and usability of your product
- This feedback is very important
- But weigh it accordingly when bucketing the feedback
- This "talking" can be in the form of an email, a Loom, on the phone, or a meeting in person...
- No excuses — interact with users this week!
- Don't have an MVP — show them a wireframe
- Don't have a wireframe — show them your initial drawings
- Don't have those — call them up and ask if they have {insert problem you are solving}
- The key is to get whatever you have in front of users as soon as possible
- You are never going to be 100% ready to get your first bit of feedback
- We know it is scary and rejection is a real possibility — if it happens be grateful you didn't wait longer to get it!
- The sooner you can get feedback the sooner you can either double down or pivot
- Take great notes and listen!
- Keep in mind that not everyone is going to want to talk to you
- In fact, it is possible that most won't
- You should target 3 to 5 times the amount you intend to talk to
- For example, if you hope to talk to 25 VP of Sales at an Enterprise Company
- You should target (cold email, LinkedIn message, call, etc) between 75 and 125
- You are also testing, collecting feedback, and iterating on your messaging (not just your product)
- Every interaction is valuable
- If you aren't getting responses to your requests ask yourself what you can tweak
- Is this the right persona that I'm reaching out to?
- Is the messaging clear?
- Remember to
- Keep it brief
- Use bullet points when possible
- Offer a specific ask
- Provide a date and time
- Ask for an intro to the right person if it isn't them
- This process will be very manual at first
- At this stage, it is more important to get meaningful feedback than to try and be efficient
- You will waste weeks, months, years trying to get the perfect product, pitch, or profile
- Reach out to people you believe
- Have the problem
- Are willing to pay to solve that problem
- Are okay working with a startup
- The manual process will help you truly understand if you have product-market fit
- You already created a list of questions to ask — test them out and see what gets a response
- For example,
- Is XYZ currently a problem for you?
- How painful is it?
- How do you solve it today?
- In these early conversations, you don't even need to focus on your product until it makes sense to do so — obviously close the deal if they are the buyer — but there is value in listening and learning!
- A user thinking "your product is cool" and paying for it are two very different things
- If your MVP is not completely ready, but they are ready to buy — collect more info and get them on the waitlist
- Or get creative and ask if they will pay now at a discount and you'll onboard them in X months when the product launches
- If they say your product is great but they wouldn't pay — you want to understand why
- Is it because they have no budget?
- Great - can they introduce you to someone who has it?
- Do they not have the authority and need someone to sign off
- Awesome - who would that be?
- Put a date on their calendar before getting off the call
- Is it not a big enough problem for them to purchase a solution?
- Gold mine — dig deep!
- Why?
- What would deem it "big enough"?
- A few "hacks" you can do as prep work for the meeting to know their budget
- Have they recently raised money?
- Congratulate them on the raise
- But also lets them know you are aware they have money to potentially spend
- Look for signs of "growth"
- Are they posting about a new job openings?
- Awesome - they are expanding
- Find out more about these openings
- Are they looking for 6 new developers and you offer a solution for managing teams?
- Lean into that
- Are they expanding to new cities?
- When you meet be clear with your intro
- Articulate your value proposition and one simple sentence
- They need to understand the problem you solve immediately
- And then why you are 10x better than the way they are currently solving it
- A few more examples of Awesome Minimum Viable Products
- In the coming weeks, we'll go into more detail on how to properly demo your product and incorporate iterations
- Right now is about collecting as much feedback as you can get and categorizing it
- In future modules we will talk about
- Which feedback is more valuable?
- Which user's feedback carries more weight?
- In July of 2020 Jason and David Sacks had a conversation on This Week in Startups about:
- How smaller startups should operate with product and marketing
- Why marketing should feed off the product
- Creating a “product launch event” to fuel marketing
- Although this is for companies that are a little further along it still has a lot of value
- The thought experiments and knowing what is coming down the line is helpful
Episode Date: Jul 14, 2020 --
- It is vital to understand that the process of testing, talking to users, and marketing never stops; your product is never "complete"
- You will always be iterating and striving to make it better
- You have to continue to obsess about finding new customers and this starts with having a product that you can market
- You can start small, it doesn't have to be perfect, and really doesn't need to scale at the start
- "If you build it, they will come" might be true in Field of Dreams but it is not typically the case with startups
- You need to let people know what you are building
- Show them why they are the ideal customer
- Make it very easy for them to become a customer
- If you continue to delight and listen to customers your chances of success go up
- This is a top priority as a founder early on
- As your team grows and others take on this responsibility full-time you should strive to still personally hear your customers
- Either regularly from your team or the customers themselves
- Collect user feedback and bucket it often
- It is hard to delight customers if you are not talking to them regularly and listening to what they are telling you!
- Talk to your customers this week!
Additional Resources
- How To Test An MVP: 5 Proven Strategies
- How to Launch (Again and Again)
- Is Your MVP Ready? How to Approach Validating Your Startup Idea
- How to Do Market Research for a Startup [7 Steps with Examples]
- How to Take Your MVP App from Idea to Tested Product Faster
- Validate your business idea: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- 30-step SEO strategy for startups based
- How do I market research for new products
Activities
Week 6
🔲 Conduct your first user interviews
- Use interview questions from last week
- Listen, collect feedback, and bucket accordingly
🔲 Update your social profiles
- Make sure your landing page, company account is easily accessible from your social media and email
Week 7
🔲 Continue customer interviews
- Adjust marketing as you iterate on your MVP
🔲 Collect feedback on your demo
- Adjust marketing as needed