Something Personal
I opened the editor to write something deeply personal. I didn’t have an exact idea about what I wanted to write. I have a sense that I want to write about my new startup. How I feel about it. How I am putting my customers first. May be my marketing strategy. I will keep this in a stream of thoughts way.
Starting up is a pretty vulnerable act. Things are almost always uncertain and you don’t know what to depend on. There’s a certain glamour attached to it these days but when you get into it, things can get pretty dark. There are countless traps that seem tempting in the moment but can pull you under before you even realize it. I have made many mistakes at my previous startup. I am determined to not repeat them this time.
The major mistakes I am looking to avoid are around marketing.
A startup exists to make money and it’s important to focus on that from day one. I mean this is obvious right. But boy is it not easy to implement. It’s simply so much easier to keep coding in your favorite corner and not bother about what customer wants. Build, build and build and nobody cares about what you built. I have been there, done that. Never again.
Your best salesman should be the word of mouth. When you are competing in a market with big names, you won’t be able to match their marketing budget or brand recall. You can however aim to start a murmur among the customers that eventually amplifies to huge roar. How do you go about that?
- Narrow market segment
- Exceptional customer experience
It’s important that the customers you’re going after form a sort of well-connected clique. They should be talking to each other and are easily referenceable to each other. It’s especially great if they are clustered together in the same geography. They are then likely to bump into each other. Your product can never go viral if these conditions are not met.
This is not so obvious to founders. They end up selecting customers in far off lands in search of higher prices. While selling to such places is okay, what they miss is they don’t concentrate all their efforts in a single place. If one of your customer is in Chicago and another is in London, they are never gonna meet and create that uproar about your product. Temptation of the siren call is super strong but you will eventually die at the altar of sales.
Once you select such a market, your initial customers’ experience will make or break your product. You need to work towards insanely great experience for these customers. Because you’re just starting out, your product will not be creating this experience. It is us, founders, who have to make them feel awesome. As you work more with these customers, you will end up building a robust product that replicates their experience. Well satisfied customers are likely to refer you to others or place repeat orders.
Founders do not do this because they consider it ‘unscalable’. They enter into a transactional sort of relationships even with initial customers. They create a fairly average experience for them, focus on “code” and the product never takes off. They build what customers say what they want. Customers, however, cannot vocalize what they really want. It’s up to founders to put customer’s words with the context they gained from deeper relationship with customer.
Selection of such “close” market and experience for this market sets off a virtuous cycle of product improvement and sales. Once you have initial success, may be you can go to an adjacent market. Temptations to veer off this path are everywhere and easy to fall for. You will find reasons to justify your mistakes. You will not know your mistakes until you are deep down the rabbit hole.
I wrote this post as a sort of sermon for someone. Really though, this post is for me. Sometimes darkness takes over and temptation to take shortcuts becomes high. As I said earlier, starting up is very vulnerable. Writing my thoughts down brings clarity and thus something to depend on.