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:
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.