Startup Marketing

OK Now I'm at home and can write you a substantive answer. It starts here:

- Marketing is Highly Situational

- Different Markets Should Be Approached Differently

- Tactics are constantly changing and evolving, so mix, match, and measure until you find something that works.

It sounds like you're looking for the essence of web marketing strategies for early stage startups. The best person blogging about this topic right now is a guy named Sean Ellis (http://www.startup-marketing.com) who's the CEO of Catchfree and ran marketing at some really amazing companies (Dropbox, Eventbrite, Xobni, etc.).

His framework, as detailed in these interviews here - http://venturehacks.com/articles/sean-ellis-interview - the Sean Ellis framework seems to be the following:

- Value Proposition Clarification based on user interviews/analytics/qualitative customer data.

- Conversion Optimization - not only conventional LPO or form optimization, but actually optimizing for high quality users, attracted by the value proposition found in part 1.

- Channel experimentation/optimization - At some level, web companies are not highly scalable until they can "buy" customers profitably - until there's a known, strong relationship between CPA (cost per acquisition) and CLTV (customer lifetime value), and of course, you can get CPA below CLTV at scale. So this step is where experimenting with different channels and different tactics fits in.
Here's where you'd try different channels like paid and…

I am largely to blame for the recent tirade against “growth hacking.” I’ve let the term be bastardized and redefined a lot since my original blog post on it back in 2010 http://www.startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/ . I wrote that blog post primarily for startups that had achieved product/market fit. The idea was not to replace marketing, but to create a category of marketing activities that have a direct attributable impact on growth. Startups are always on the brink of death. They don’t have the luxury to focus on things like awareness building or to prepare 50 page slide decks on the demographics of the customer. I wrote that a startup’s first marketing hire should have “growth as their true north.” They shouldn’t be outsourcing and managing vendors, the person should be a hands-on “builder” and optimizer of growth programs. In order to help make the concept stick, I put a name to it. On that day the term “growth hacker” was born.

I won’t rehash why all this debate is actually a good thing. Read my comment here http://www.growthhackers.com/dhh-growth-hacking-a-cool-sounding-euphemism-for-making-the-doer-feel-good-about-using-the-same-old-sleazy-marketing-tricks/ for my thoughts on that…

Since my original post in 2010, I’ve been happy with certain evolutions of the term. One is that I think large companies should have a group that is exclusively focused on managing the activities that are directly attributable to growth. Companies like Facebook,…

I have worked with and known adennis4 for 4 years and want to vouch for him.

What he's leaving out is that he's incredibly motivated, hard working, and doesn't take no for an answer. He is one of the most outgoing and charismatic guys I know and I'd bet on him to succeed in his ventures through sheer force of will.

He isn't a programmer, but he's trying to learn the ropes. He's still no slouch. He is the "everything else" guy every startup should dream of having. If he doesn't know how to do it, he'll either find out how or find the person who does. This post is him trying to find the person who can propel him to the next level.

Not only is he a good startup bet, he's a guy you just want to be friends with. I cannot sing his praises enough. I would love to work with him, but I can't offer him what he needs. My best guess as a half-hacker is that he needs a guy somewhere between:
http://abstractnonsense.com/life-at-a-startup/ and http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/ (or patio11. that would do nicely.)

Best of luck Andrew.

Ideally, you build an audience ahead of time, but establishing some authority and credibility in your field. Publish relevant, valuable content via G+, Facebook, Twitter, a blog, etc., and start building your audience. Then, when you want to publicize your startup, you have people waiting to hear about it, who will - hopefully - become fans and help spread the word further.

Also, by putting legitimately valuable content "out there" you are, in effect, doing what people call "content marketing". You want to draw eyeballs to your site/blog/whatever when people search for keywords related to what you are doing.

See, among other resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_marketing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing

http://www.startup-marketing.com/

http://hackermonthly.com/startup-marketing.html

Nice analogy.

I think this is why Steve Blank talk so much about founders 'getting out of the building'. The first instinct of a highly intelligent tech nerd when faced with the challenges of a startup is to bury their head in code and not engage directly with the customer at all, i.e. focus solely on improving the product and not testing if there is a market for the product in the first place:

http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/

Fortunately, Steve Blank has designed his 'Customer Development' roadmap to mitigate against this. For a brief, free synopsis, see:

http://www.socrated.com/courses/4?home=1

This was posted on HN recently enough, and it's brilliant. It sums up the entire Customer Devlopment roadmap quite nicely. I'd still recommend buying the book too though, also excellent.

To me, the cautionary warning (echoing Andrew Chen's[1]) for consumer startups was key:

Beware too of the edge case where something spreads rapidly but the churn is high too, so that you have good net growth till you run through all the potential users, at which point it suddenly stops

Sean Ellis[2] has a similar test for product market fit (the 40% rule):

I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product.

[1] http://andrewchen.co/2012/06/20/quora-when-does-high-growth-not-imply-productmarket-fit/

[2] http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/