Marketing Students Wake Up! You’re Not Ready To Work In Startups.

Let’s go straight to the point: your business school is not preparing you to become a marketing killer in a startup. Nope.

I’m in my final year in a top French business school, and I can tell that if I did a good job and gain trust and responsibilities during my internships, it’s because I woke up early enough. And unfortunately, my school is not really accountable for the marketer I am today.

Yet, business schools can bring you a thing or two that you can make use of in startups:

1. the network: I know… everyone says that, but it is true, and even more for startups. It is true to find an internship, a job, a partner, customers… Don’t underestimate your network.
2. The other valuable thing you get from your business school is your presentation skills. It is probably the most valuable skill you learn in a business school. You learn to be comfortable speaking in public (which is, by the way, the first thing people are afraid of, even before death). Of course you can still be nervous before speaking to a small to medium audience, but at least you know you can do it, for you did it plenty of times during your studies. So please, be aware of this. It is an important skill that you now master.

So that’s it? 30 grand for a network and presentation skills?

No of course not. You’ve learnt many other valuable things. But nothing else that can be very useful in a startup environment I think.

But why ? Why do most business schools fail at making startup-marketing killers out of students ?

Because teachers come from another world.

At their time, a successful career was joining a big and historical corporation: L’Oréal, LVMH, P&G… And working in a startup wasn’t that much a big deal. Today a lot of students still want to join these big corporations — which is good and totally understandable by the way. Thus, teachers teach what they’ve been taught when they were students and what enabled them to have a successful career — and it does work! Yet, there’s an ever-growing part of students that want to join startups, and the marketing that is been taught is not relevant for this latter type of student. It’s just not the same world.

Startups evolve in such a fast-paced environment, that if you’re not working in there, you just can’t imagine what’s useful, you can’t stay up-to-date. You can also imagine how irrelevant it is to reuse the same textbooks year after year…

If after reading this you think you’re doomed to go working in big corporations, YOU SHOULD WAKE UP!

How to be a killer

Your business school teachers don’t teach you how to be a killer, so teach it to yourself.

And it starts with curiosity. Ask yourself « What is marketing in a startup? » and use this incredible tool that is Google to find the answer. A little tip: you will not find a unique and precise answer. Marketing is always evolving and depending on the sector, the company, the team you will be working in. So just keep up with this curiosity, follow marketing influencers, entrepreneurs… Be eager to learn something new everyday! There are so many resources you can learn from.

Here are a few people, blogs I follow: Neil Patel and his blog Quick Sprout, Hubspot blog, Gary Vaynerchuk, Larry Kim… There are so many others to follow. Check out on google, you’ll probably find a tailored list! Also, read books! You have lists of “Books every entrepreneur should read” all over the web. If I should advise you one book, it would be the last one I read: Start With Why from Simon Sinek.

That’s it? That’s all it takes to be a killer in a startup? Follow influencers, read articles and books?

No. Calm down. That was the easy part.

Once you’ve read a few of these articles, you should start to understand that you lack a few skills to be a good startup marketer. And now is the time to learn those new skills.

So what’s super essential for a marketer in a startup?

• Let’s start with what hurts the most: programming.

I know, you did a business school, it’s not to come back to engineering stuff. But well… Didn’t I just tell you that business schools don’t teach what’s good for you? I’m here to tell you what’s good for you — and programming is essential. I’m not telling you you should be a full-stack developper (if you don’t know what that is I have a friend here that can help you with that). Just to know some basic stuff: HTML/CSS and SQL. Without going too much into the details, HTML/CSS will help you in many situations (for content marketing, emailing, landing page optimization…) and your boss will be glad to see that you created/changed the code yourself and didn’t make him lose his time. And for SQL: we’ll come to that later.

Where do you learn this?

I’ve loved learning programming on Codecademy. They make it super easy and fun to learn. But I have friends who’ve also learnt on OpenClassrooms and Udemy. Choose the one that suits you.

• Learn to use a graphics program like Photoshop or Illustrator.

If you start from scratch in design, like I did one year ago, I think the best way is to directly start to use it, try things. Follow a tutorial on Youtube to create your resume on photoshop. Try to find one that is very detailed and use the techniques and tools to design your own resume. The first draft may not look very sexy, but the more you practice, the better you become. The learning curve with Photoshop/Illustrator is especially steep if you practice regularly! Also, try to learn a few design notions. Such as what’s Material Design, Flat Design… The more you know, the better.

Why design?

Depending on the team you’ll be working in, you might have to think of visuals you want for your ads for instance. You’ll have to explain it precisely to your designer, or even do it yourself because no one in the team knows how to. In any case, you’ll see, design is pretty fun!

• Analytical skills

What exactly is this thing you see on every internship offer and that often comes with « Google analytics », « Mixpanel », « Kissmetrics »…?

Now is the time to tell you what marketing is about in a startup. Basically, it goes like this: Action 1 ➠ Analyze Action 1 ➠ Action 2 (=Action 1 with changes to improve results) ➠ Analyze Action 2 ➠ Action 3 ➠… you see the loop?

Having the creativity to imagine the action and do it is good. But then it’s even better to be able to ANALYZE if the action had the results you expected, and if not, to change that action so that it reaches the goal. Being able to analyze this is having analytical skills. It requires being able to understand big spreadsheets of numbers, but also addresses, interests… whatever data you gather on your web analytics tool (Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics…) and imagine links between them. Now this is where SQL also comes in. SQL is a language that will enable you to make requests to export the data you want from a huuuuge spreadsheet.

What I recommend you to do:

Learn to use Google Analytics (a very common tool, as it is free) by checking out the courses given by Google. Try to understand the general idea of GA, what you can do with it, where which data is… And then you’ll understand any other web analytics tool quite quickly. There’s no magic to develop your analytical skills. Practice. Get used to analyzing any action you take.

• You need to know what’s Inbound Marketing.

I’m not going to explain you what this is, there is a company doing it perfectly, and if you follow the courses and take the test (which I advise you to do), you get a certification for your LinkedIn profile. Here is the Hubspot Inbound Certification. Take the course and pass the test.

• Copywriting

It is basically creating the text you see on websites, emails, flyers, articles… It’s a highly demanded skill! To get better at writing you have to read a lot, about anything you like, and analyze what you read — was this article a good copy? Why?

Medium is perfect for that — you have lots of short stories that need to quickly pique your interest. Those 3 minutes reads are perfect when you’re in the bus, the subway, or before going to bed. Once again, follow people, check their stories and try to understand why some have plenty of recommends and others not. Read about marketing, but also your other passions (wait… marketing is not a passion for you??). There is a guy I like to follow and who gets tons of recommends. His stories are always very well crafted. His name is Jon Westenberg. Of course there are tons of others talented people on Medium. Just find yours.

So you should read a lot, and… write a lot. The more you write, the better you’ll get. As simple as that. If you have a blog, that’s perfect. Otherwise, write stories on Medium about anything you want: your latest travel, your heartbreak, your cat… Just write and try to make it interesting, impactful, funny, sad… People need emotions. Give it to them through your writing.

• DO

Once you’ve completed courses, you need to do things if you want to develop your skills. The best way is to join a startup. Give a few hours to a startup and work remotely, whenever you have time. There are plenty of startups on AngelList that are looking for students who want to work for copywriting, online advertising, community management… Chances are you won’t get paid, but it’s not what you are looking for. You want to practice and develop your skills! Plus, if you’re not paid, you won’t have a very strict contract: you work how many hours you want (it can be 1 hour every evening, or only on weekends…), and when you think you don’t have time anymore for this, you can easily quit. Though, try to keep good relations. Network is essential, you remember?

Another skill that is essential in startups and that you will get from such an experience is teamwork: you’ll have to work with many other people, schedule calls from different time zones, speak a foreign language… all in all, I highly encourage you to have such an experience.

• Last but not least

START RIGHT NOW! Don’t wait till next year, it’ll be too late. You’re already late actually.

That’s it. If you do those steps on a regular basis, there’s no doubt you’ll become a killer.

I wanted to finish with an important note about business schools. Of course not all schools are like that, but I’m pretty sure a majority of them are. Though, I do see a trend, where they try to integrate complementary skills such as programming or design. But I think we are far from where we should be. I also had great startup teachers… hum, 1 actually. He was good because he inspired me, motivated me to always learn more, do things. Yet he didn’t teach me practical and usable skills. It seems like today, the best teachers for students who want to join startups are platforms such as Udemy, Lynda… which always try to be up-to-date with the courses they offer.

I’d love to hear what you think of your schools, if they prepare you well for working in startups and how they do that. Also if you disagree with me, let’s talk about it!

If you enjoyed reading my advices, don’t hesitate to click on the heart, it’s always encouraging.

And if you have questions or an opportunity for me in San Francisco or New York, don’t hesitate to throw me an email at thibaud.herr@gmail.com or to connect on AngelList or LinkedIn.