Some startups become huge sensations without requiring any active marketing – YouTube, Skype, and Twitter come to mind. However, the vast majority of successful startups gained adoption through marketing: PR, SEO, partnerships, paid marketing, and so on. My strong suggestion would be to hope for the former but plan for the latter.
Marketing is a huge topic. Here I just want to make the point that, for starters, you need to figure out two things: 1) how information and influence flows in your market, and 2) when and where people use and/or purchase your product.
I’ll use my last startup, SiteAdvisor, as an example. SiteAdvisor (now called McAfee SiteAdvisor) is a consumer security product. Most consumers don’t learn about security products on their own. Instead, they rely on their “family/friend sysadmin” (smartest computer person they know). These family sysadmins read technical websites and magazines. In order to reach this audience, we performed studies on data we had collected, which led to lots of coverage, which raised our profile and bolstered our credibility.
Now to when and where people buy security products. Most people only think about security when 1) they buy a new computer, 2) they first get internet access, or 3) they get a virus or other security problem. The last case is actually pretty rare, so most companies focus on 1 and 2. How do you reach people at those moments? Through “channels” – in particular PC makers (“OEMs”) and internet providers (“ISPs”). (For public market people: focusing on these two channels was McAfee’s big insight in the 2000’s and how they made a comeback versus Symantec who dominates retail).
Most people don’t talk to their friends about security products so it’s very hard to do mass word-of-mouth marketing. (Exceptions would be the beginning of the spyware epidemic around 2001-2 when AdAware got super popular via word of mouth). So you have to understand and pitch to these channels.
These observations are specific to consumer security, but every startup should have a similar theory of how to market their product.
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Chris,
Your post came in when I just finished reading Duncan Brown (Infuse)'s short but insightful post on influencer marketing and differentiation (or the lack of it).
http://blogs.influencer50.com/infuse/2009/09/30...
I quote Brown: “Isn’t it ironic that marketing people demonstrate a continued lack of creativity?”
Curious: When faced with questions about Hunch's differentiation in the market, say in comparison to other recommendation services such as Jinni and TasteKid, how do you react? I find it a bit disconcerting when people ask market/business related questions just for the sake of asking them, without actually using the competing products / services.
In this new age social web2.0 world, understanding one's market as well as the ability to influence it (at least to the extent that the market tries out your product/service, for _free_) is a fascinating exercise.
I'm not sure it's ironic that marketing people are generally not creative. Finding really creative people is just hard – they are rare.
I tend to think people radically overestimate the risk of competitive startups. Startups are mostly competing against indifference/lack of awareness/lack of understanding, not each other.
[...] Understanding your market Tagged as: figure-out, figure-out-two, gained-adoption, how-information, huge-sensations, [...]
> Startups are mostly competing against indifference/lack of awareness/lack of understanding, not each other.
Wow! I re-read that line a few times. I now think it should go straight into gems-of-wisdom-for-entrepreneurs
Your choice of words and phrasing will come in handy for me. I am a tech guy [read: programmer] with little marketing vocabulary
Since long, I've been trying to say something similar to entrepreneurs who worry way too much about competition and differentiation while building a product. Functionality and aesthetics are the inherent qualities of a product that help it really succeed. Differentiation, marketing & sales strategies are accidental, even if very important. (I use the terms inherent & accident as used by F.P.Brooks in his seminal paper on software complexity – “No Silver Bullet”).
If entrepreneurs spend too much time and energy on the accidental aspects while their product/service is still under development in the labs, chances are that they over-react to each new information about a competitor-feature / differentiating-feature and end up creating products that have a bit of every functionality / feature out there, but none of which is compelling.
[aside-and-on-a-total-tangent: I am still waiting to see that scanned copy of the letter from Alan Kay
May be just a twitpic? ]
“I tend to think people radically overestimate the risk of competitive startups. Startups are mostly competing against indifference/lack of awareness/lack of understanding, not each other.”
This was, perhaps, the most profound sentence in this entire post (or, well, in the comments).
Internally at our company, for years we've debated about how exactly we should be differentiating ourselves. I've always wondered about that. Even for a services company, that's probably secondary. What we “merely” need to do is solve the problem of indifference, raise awareness of our existence, and educate our potential market about what we do (our value).
This really comes back to an abundance vs. scarcity mentality. If there is plenty of business to go around, then business development becomes more an issue of awareness than differentiation.
Its important to understand your market both on / offline before investing. Often times clients are facing a difficult challenge promoting their business after a large capital investment.
how did you discover that people rely on their “family/friend sysadmin” (smartest computer person they know)? i know it seems obvious but i wonder if there is a story behind it…
just by asking people tons of questions – both regular consumers and security industry marketers. hence my earlier posts about 1) asking lots of questions and 2) not keeping your idea secret.
Most companies fail because they have not succeeded at 1) cost-effectively putting their product in front of their audience, 2) convincing potential users that they need the product.
In an era where you have air guitar concerts, there is definitely a market for any web product. But finding, pitching and convincing your customers to open up Wallet is whole other problem.
A simple way to test traction is to create landing pages and tailor the content for different groups. Good example is Listerine changing its pitch from “Surgical antiseptic to Floor cleaner to finally Solution against Halitosis”. That's when they found success. Same product, different message.
I work for a start-up SEO firm and we often encounter this problem. We spend several meetings educating potential clients as to what is we are doing and the benefit that can be provided. We have yet to compete with other marketing firms for similar work. It may be that we target SMBs, but in general I have seen a status quo mentality with companies' marketing efforts.
I have to triple agree with Chris's insight about using data to raise profile and bolster credibility (disclosure: we worked together at SiteAdvisor)
I think many startups make the mistake of trying to directly market themselves rather than market the interesting problem they are trying to solve (which, oh-by-the-way, is hopefully solved better by them than anyone else). It's just very hard to get the press and the public interested in some new technology or website devoid of a more interesting & broad context. But to the extent a company's product or service can uniquely and credibly support fun or interesting insights, then you may be on to something.
Their current troubles (and $100MM marketing campaign aside), I can remember even 8+ years ago when major news outlets would quote “popular searches on Yahoo!” as an insight to current trends. The SiteAdvisor research studies we published were based on a similar strategy.
So essentially you are advocating pounding the pavement, as a good journalist would. The kinds of questions I really want to ask are, of the startups you see, or even the people you talk to, how many fully understand all the information in the market and all the people in the market, and from there, are starting to ask the right sorts of questions.
Or better yet- if I had to sum it up, what would be the lead indicators for you for creativity in these sorts of fields, since this seems to be where questions come from, I think.
I always get excited about channel partnerships and I am often disappointed. They also take a long time to implement. I would love to hear your thoughts on getting channel partnerships right.
Good topic. But a big one. I'll mark it down as a future blog post.
Hi Shana
I'm not really sure what you mean. Can you rephrase your question?
Thx
great, I look forward to it.
Mark me down as interested in that topic as well.
Would love to hear thoughts on how to work partnerships with the big fish ISPs/etc. — I've never played that game before.
FWIW, in setting up small channel partnerships for two startups, I found about a 1/10 hit rate (i.e. for every 10 good leads, several could get through the partnership process, but only one of them actually had the capability to sell). I've heard others tell me this is there experience as well.
So the vast amount of posts/comments essentially imply that you all are looking for someone who can pound the pavement like a reporter looking for new data, as well as someone who once s/he has said data can make sense of it in some sort of creative way.
What are the lead indicators of someone like that? What kind of behaviors do you look for in a person?
The reason is that it also sounds like most people are not understanding what is going on around them in such a way that they are willing to pound the pavement nor use data creatively. Hope this helps.
Mark me down as interested in that topic as well.
Would love to hear thoughts on how to work partnerships with the big fish ISPs/etc. — I've never played that game before.
FWIW, in setting up small channel partnerships for two startups, I found about a 1/10 hit rate (i.e. for every 10 good leads, several could get through the partnership process, but only one of them actually had the capability to sell). I've heard others tell me this is there experience as well.
So the vast amount of posts/comments essentially imply that you all are looking for someone who can pound the pavement like a reporter looking for new data, as well as someone who once s/he has said data can make sense of it in some sort of creative way.
What are the lead indicators of someone like that? What kind of behaviors do you look for in a person?
The reason is that it also sounds like most people are not understanding what is going on around them in such a way that they are willing to pound the pavement nor use data creatively. Hope this helps.
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