The Dark Art of Marketing. Just the phrase is enough to strike fear into the hearts of many startup founders!
That's because many startups are founded by a couple of friends or acquaintances who have an idea, the skills to build the initial product, and some time on their hands. It's the classic "two guys in a garage" dream--which is still relevant today, decades after Hewlett and Packard proved that it's possible to build a world-changing company from humble beginnings.
But building a solid business today is about a lot more than just building a great MVP or even a solid market-ready product. Marketing is infused in every step of a successful startup's journey, from pre-launch preparation, to establishing product market fit, and finally to scalable monetization and growth. The problem comes in when founders (who are nearly always software developers) realize that they're struggling with marketing. This is often due to lack of time, lack of experience in messaging and marketing, or sometimes, lack of enthusiasm for the necessary activities to market your business.
So what's a coder-founder to do?
Well, first and foremost, take a deep breath and realize that...
marketing is not truly a dark art
At its core, marketing is simply telling a story about what you've built, to the people whose problems it's meant to solve. Next is understanding that there's actually a clear, logical way to build a strong early marketing path for your startup. Finally, it's key to know when your time is better spent focusing on your core skill set, bringing in help so that you can focus on doing the things that only the founders can do (vision, fundraising, building a team).
Here are the basic steps for creating a marketing path, from the idea stage all the way to the growth/scale stage:
1) Creating Your Brand
2) Pre Launch Prep
3) Defining Your Customer
4) Writing Your Story
5) Your First Dollar
6) Reaching Product Market Fit
7) Scaling Monetization
8) Growth
Each one of these 8 steps is imperative to understand in detail, so we will be creating a 9-part series of posts exploring each of the steps. Subscribe here to get notified as soon as each post drops!
If you can't wait, drop us a line and we'll be happy to schedule a free consultation, no obligation, to give you some tips on the house.
