How to not hire a marketing lizardđŠ and still wing it!
I founded my first tech startup 130 years ago. Thatâs in entrepreneur-years, of course, which we all know are measured by amount of pivots and toilet sessions spent reading Quora discussions. Not to mention lost âfree timeâ doing whatever it is others are doing in their Modern Family-esq lives đšâđ©âđ§âđ§.
What Iâve learned however will save you at least a decade of time. Iâll walk you through two fundamentals of creating a business: 1) how to differentiate your product and 2) understanding your customers. Or as the big boys put it; marketing. Under the hood, however, itâs only about three things; knowing your products, knowing your customers and knowing how to connect the two in an inspiring way đ. The rest comes naturally.
Iâll lay out the land for you through my own mistakes, with concrete steps and (best of all) Google Docs templates so you can get started while still sitting on the toilet. Iâll give you the baređ»essentials! No magic, no jargon, no fluff â just stuff.
Through it all youâll learn to walk by taking the following steps:
- Define your key values
- Know your customers and #winđ
- Really know your customers
- Be bigger than yourself
- Pick your strategy and stick to it
- How to run your marketing programsđ
Iâll spare you from all the MBA bulls**t and jump right into concrete steps. In this post weâll concentrate on the two first steps â the fundamentals of doing anythingâââthe stuff you should have done before starting the company but didnât. In later posts weâll dive into the next ones.
Consider this the secret source code to your customers, market domination and everything.
Step 1: Define your key values
I started my first company at the age of 23, making websites for small companies. My business, however, was exactly the same as that of a thousand guys at the same time; we made websites for SMEs. There were probably more website companies in my city than there were any other kinds of companies during the .com. It was a bad idea. Period đ©. I hadnât selected a niche or defined myself â I had no key values to offer.
A company without a key value proposition is like a broken pencil⊠pointless!
Youâd be surprised how many companies get started with no clearly defined key values. As founders you always have a vision, but has your product been clearly defined?
This is where Key Value Propositions come in. Key Value Propositions are a template Iâve put together based on business canvases and value definition papers. Iâve found the Russian-doll structure, where each consecutive step builds on the previous, works perfectly for a Dilbert-brain such as mine!
The Key Value Proposition starts from one step earlier than what the product centric engineers inside of us would like to start; the customers point of view. And finally it demands for customer testimonials or proof on how your product solves the customerâs problems. But most importantly, it teaches you about your product or service. It nails down your Key Value Proposition.
đ Key Value Proposition template in Google Docs.
After Step 1, youâll have a much clearer picture of your product. Next, letâs tackle the second part of the formula for success: your customers.
Step 2: Know your customer and #winđ
In my second startup, we started by making online booking systems for tennis courts. During the time, this was a new idea â there were tons of sports halls around the world and nobody dominated the booking market. But we hit a wall already before going global; we couldnât get in front of the decision maker â or to be honest, we didnât know who they were. Many of them were run by committees and it confused the hell out of us. They were bad hombres. Complete failure. Sadđź! We used various strategies to try to meet with different people on the mini-corporate ladder, but ended up wasting a year of R&D and sales time.
So we pivotedđ. We turned into yoga and pilates bookings. Yoga studios usually had one decision maker and the decision maker was a yoga instructor themselves. Instant success! We were able to define the typical buyer; Harriet. Harriets were usually women in their thirties, their passion was primarily yoga and secondarily money. Their calendars were always booked and they didnât have time to take care of billing or marketing or anything else. So they were struggling in a chicken-egg world of needing more business but having no time to do anything for it.
This became our secret sauce. We knew their pain points and were able to target that in website SEO. We knew their minds and were able to build the system so that they could get started in seconds and wouldnât need to invest hours into seeing our benefits. And we hired a part-time yoga instructor to take them through the system introduction. And our new customers loved it. We grew from a $20k turnover company into a $200k turnover business in less than 12 months and continued climbing from there. Hockey sticks for everyone!đ° Only because we went from a fuzzy customer to one we understood.
The Harriets affected our R&D, marketing, sales and support â much more than general customer feedback ever could. It made us prioritize the right things. Later on we had more and more stereotypical personas as we grew as a business. And we knew the personas by first name which was very powerfulđȘ.
Ultimately, no matter what marketing budget or sales channels you have, the one that knows the customer the best, wins.
A Buyer Persona description will let you define your stereotypical customer, already before you get started. It starts from the personâs demographics and goes on to their fears, values and everything that makes them tick. Youâll refine these along the way as you get under your customers skin.
đ Buyer Persona template in Google Docs.
Youâll now have a clear view of your customers and your product â the next steps are to connect these with each other. Value Cards and Personas are like the foundations of your house â if they arenât in shape, you wonât be able to build on top of them.
Step N: n+1
Next, youâll need to connect your products to your customers in an inspiring way đ.
To do this youâll need to understand your customerâs evaluation process, ie. the customer journey. After that weâll look at how you can ride on the wave of something larger than your product, i.e. mega trends. And finally weâll pick your marketing strategy and see how to do it operationally as marketing programs.
The general 6-step framework is the same for both small garage startups and large airfield-as-a-campus corporations.
But remember; this is the foundation â you canât build a Marketing funnel, an Account Based Marketing strategy, a Social Media plan, an ad-words strategy, a content calendar or anything else unless you know the fundamentals. So take your time, a couple of hours should do, and do it well.
Iâll touch the following teaching steps of the framework in more depth in the next blogposts. Heart this post to be notified when itâs out, or follow me on Twitter.