How Some Tech Startups Are Going To Lose
Congratulations you have become the grand prize winner of a shiny new tech startup! As a bonus prize you have won no sleep, crazy work hours, and you can’t forget about the undying search for the best of the best programmers and designers to join your tight knit group, right?
Well, if you happen to fall into the category of being one of the lucky individuals throwing their hat in the tech startup arena, there is one crucial thing you need to remember; you have a product that needs to be sold to people who don’t know that you even exist. Scary thought right? For most people reading this, you might think that I am being incredibly arrogant and rude. Well, I guess if the shoe fits, but trust me I have good reason for it.
You see, the number 1 mistake I see tech startups making is that they have tunnel vision on finding the best engineers, programmers, designers, machine learners, AI experts, etc., but completely forget about the fact that at some point you actually need to be able to sell that product/service to people. This means MARKETING. Tech startups are constantly bringing on as many highly skilled computer programmers as they can fit on the payroll, meanwhile their marketing department is in some serious need of some TLC.
Trust me, the value of engineers and computer programmers, amongst the other specialists I listed above, cannot be overstated enough. Without them, there is no product, there is no company even. However, I am merely suggesting that this is an MMA fight, not a boxing match. You need to have an incredibly diverse and multi-facetted set of tools at your disposal if you expect to come out on top.
Which brings me to my number 1 reason for why heavily investing in marketing, building a brand and investing in social reach is crucial. Competition is skyrocketing and fast. More and more tech startups are entering the ring every single year and the more people who offer a service, or product, that is similar to yours, the more you need to differentiate yourself.
Next up on the menu, a beautiful, delicious, sweet piece of pie. The thing that you have probably read this post up until this point for; how do you properly differentiate yourself and market your company efficiently? Well, the answer is quite simple. SOCIAL REACH. What I mean by this is building a brand, brand awareness, and a following through online platforms like twitter, instagram, blogs, podcasts, facebook, snapchat, and even pintrest. You need to leverage all of it.
There is an incredibly interesting and amazing phenomena going on in our society at the moment. Social media advertising is incredibly cheap and has astronomically undervalued attention. If you take the next 5 years — while all the big players (fortune 500 companies) are still trying to maneuver their way into social advertising and invest every single penny of your marketing budget into building a social reach — you will win. It is as simple as that.
And before I continue, anyone who is sitting there thinking: “well my product/service can’t be sold through social media,” or “my company’s clientele won’t come from a place like that,” you are so incredibly wrong. Let me put it into perspective for you; you spend the next 5 years investing in social media, and you build a total social reach across all platforms of roughly 200,000 people. Pretty cool right?
Well, here comes the real cool part. The minute you decide to have an event for your business, raise awareness for a new product, service, or sell anything, at the click of a few buttons instantaneously you have access to 200,000 people who then share it, like it, and re-post it for their network of people to see. Word of mouth on steroids.
Even if your company’s ability to produce content isn’t great and what I mean by this is sometimes people don’t care about a company putting out random pieces of content. What they do care about is if the CEO, COO, other managers and executives at your company do. So, invest in your own people building their personal brand that is intertwined with your company’s brand. Take videos of your office activities, your environment, your people and post it everywhere.
People love a facade, but authenticity and the face behind it all will ultimately resonate with people much more. The unfortunate part about all of this is that the window of opportunity is slowly closing. In the next 5–10 years when all the massive fortune 500 companies realize what is really going on and start throwing around their multi-million dollar advertising budgets in the form of social media advertising, prices will skyrocket and the ROI will go down drastically. It’s simple economics; supply and demand. That’s it.
I think I have ranted on long enough for one day and I hope I didn’t come across too harsh, or as if I am attacking the way people do business. Because who am I at the end of the day? I am just some guy who has a company with a lot of opinions. I am passing on some observations and knowledge of mine that may be of use to those of you who are early on in their tech careers and want to build a business that is going to outlast the rest.
Till next time, read between the lines.
