Thinking of a Startup? Spend 50% of your time thinking about customer acquisition

When I started StoryTruck, I spent a lot of time thinking about the product, it’s features, the user experience, what devices to support and so on. I barely spent anytime thinking about marketing or customer acquisition strategies and that was a mistake. If I ever do another start-up, I’ll spend 50% of my time thinking about customer acquisition strategies and the other 50% of my time thinking about the product. It’s not that I didn’t know or realize that building a great product alone is not sufficient to attract customers but the mistake I and many other entrepreneurs make is in thinking that having a finished product is absolutely essential before thinking about marketing. This thinking not only costs you time but also prevents you from building certain important viral features into the product.

In StoryTruck’s case the only way people could tell their friends about the app was by tapping the Share button and sharing a message on their Facebook, Twitter or Google+ accounts. In reality, very few users, less than 0.5% of the users took this action. Sharing was an afterthought and not integral to the product. On the other hand think about Groupon, Dropbox etc where sharing was baked into the product, which gave the user a real reason to share the product.

Thinking about customer acquisition early on does not only reduce your marketing cost but also helps you in getting the exponential growth that’s required for a startup to survive. In the absence of word-of-mouth marketing for your product, you can at most achieve a linear growth, the slope rising in proportion to your marketing budget and that’s not good enough “traction” for the angels or the VCs you may be approaching for any funding.

Here are two great books I would recommend for entrepreneurs, marketers and product managers. Both of them are on “Growth Hacking”, the buzzword in the industry today.

This is a fantastic book that lists all the marketing channels and puts a structure around experimenting various channels and evaluating them.

This one is a fantastic read and helps you rethink marketing in the digital age.

Here are some free resources on the web:

The key variables in viral marketing

http://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-hacking/

What are your experiences? Are small and medium sized organizations using “growth hacking” techniques too? Please share any other web resources or books that you may have read and are along the same lines.

Important Disclosure: I haven't written this post to generate affiliate revenue but I am using Amazon affiliate links to experiment this channel. If you click on this link and buy the book, I'll get a referral fee.

Why Mobile-First Strategy May Not Be The Right Strategy For You.

I learned the hard way that a mobile-only strategy or a mobile-first strategy may not work in all cases. I was rebuilding StoryTruck two years ago and there was everything going in favor of taking the mobile-first approach. 

Given that I was trying to create a Netflix-like service with StoryTruck except that it carried children's books that were to be read instead of movies to be watched, I took the mobile-first approach while considering the following points:

1. Mobile devices and Tablets are a better fit over desktops and laptops to read bedtime stories.
2. We could launch our service quickly if we focused all our resources on the mobile app. This was important given that I was bootstrapping my startup.
3. If the mobile app took off, I could launch the website in a couple of months.

It took about seven months to get our first mobile app which was an iPad app in the store. I could write a separate blog post sometime on the naive assumptions I made on building an iPad app and getting it approved. It then took us another six months to launch the Android app. While we were busy building apps, negotiating content and uploading them, we didn't have enough time to market our app. So, for more than a year our apps were only discoverable through a search in the app store and that wasn't good. 

In taking the mobile-first approach I realized that I lost the most important thing - Free Traffic via search engines. It's important to build a website even if it's not a fully functional website and does not have feature parity with your mobile app because:

1. If your user is looking for something, chances are that they go to a search engine first before visiting the app store.
2. There is more information on optimizing your site for search engines than optimizing your app's meta data for app-store searches. 
3. It's easy for people to click on a shared link and see your website than download an app.

it took me two years to get this fact and I created a search engine optimized site. Today, organic searches delivers the biggest traffic to our site.

What is your experience? Share your thoughts.