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:

Day2_Session4_Marketing Strategies for Scaling at Early Stage_ Presh Dineshkumar, LAUNCH.pdf

29.9 MB

• 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

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

• 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

• Use interview questions from last week
• Listen, collect feedback, and bucket accordingly

• Make sure your landing page, company account is easily accessible from your social media and email

Week 7

• Adjust marketing as you iterate on your MVP

• Adjust marketing as needed