The Pre-Product Startup Guide
You have an idea for a startup. GREAT! Go make it! But while you’re making it, heres a few ways to get ahead in the game.
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Create & Grow Your Social Presence
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As soon as you think of the idea, jump onto social media, and start an account. Even if you don’t have a product yet, start announcing to the world you exist. Start gaining likes, follows, pins, mentions, subscriptions or whatever engagement from social media platforms, you find are best in tune with your product.
Even in the earliest of days of your product, you can gauge your potential audience.
Start today and those early successes build upon themselves. By the time your product launches, you’ll already have an audience.
How do you grow your audience? Most important thing is contributing interesting content regularly. Beyond just being interesting, you’ll need some help. Look into some of the growth hack tools below:
Twitter/Instagram
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Blog About Your Startup
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Believe it or not, the process of creation is interesting. People will want to watch your idea come together.
From Dan Pedersen’s, 3 Rules For Good Writing:
1. Is it true?
2. Is it helpful?
3. Is this the best way to say it?
If the answer is yes to all three, publish it.
Your work will be honest, will educate others by example, and all you have to do is figure what is the best way to say it. This may not be easy for you but take baby steps. Even a couple of paragraphs a week is progress.
The above example is from Brian York’s weekly posts to Medium. I like this example because I personally watched these articles grow in popularity and following.
Once a week write about your developing startup (& post it to Medium).
Not sure blogging is for you? Read some other opinions:
- 8 Ways That Blogging Will Kickstart Your Startup by Martin Zwilling
- Why Startups Need to Blog (and what to talk about …) by Mark Suster
- Blogging vs. Building by Ryan Hoover (a more balance writeup of the pros and cons)
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Create a Landing Page
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Why get a landing page up so early? Because it’s the home to your product and idea. Even in the earliest days of conception you can have a business gaining customers or users.
All a landing page needs to do is convey the problem you wish to solve, how you’re solving it, and how the user can be apart of it. Thankfully you can set that up in an hour.
Where to start?
The best site I’ve used to launch a landing page is Launch Rock. There are MANY sites out there for creating a landing page though.
RosterBoss (above) took me 1.5 hours to create through LaunchRock (mostly because I spent too much time on design).
When you setup your page, set it for email subscriptions. Getting emails is the easiest and most straightforward way to start making some type of signup conversions.
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CONCLUSION: Now What?
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Now that you have a landing page, social media accounts that are growing, and content people want to read and share; what do you do with it all before your product is ready?
[ 1 ] Test Your Marketing
Nows the time to be creative. Try new taglines! Try new content you’ve never tried before!
[ 2 ] Understand What’s Working
Your funnel for success can be measured like this:
content %-> landing page views %-> email subscribers
Test what content gets the most views on the Landing Page. Then test what Landing Page taglines get the most Email Subscriptions. Use this time to better understand your product.
[ 3] Talk to Users/Customers
Finally and most importantly, talk to all these people coming to your site and following you online. Schedule calls, send emails, have coffee meetings — it’s never too soon to know your audience.
Thanks for reading and if you’d like to chat-tweet at me! Please recommend early and often!
Five Lessons for a Small Team Product Manager ← P R E V I O U S
