Startup Marketing Blog – By Sean Ellis

Milestones to Startup Success

Update added to end of post

When your startup accepts outside money (such as venture capital), you are obligated to focus on maximizing long-term shareholder value.  For most startups this is directly based on your ability to grow (customers, revenue and eventually profit).  Most entrepreneurs understand the importance of growth; the common mistake is trying to force growth prematurely.  This is frustrating, expensive and unsustainable – killing many startups with otherwise strong potential. 

Most successful entrepreneurs have a good balance of execution intuition and luck.  This was definitely the case at the two startups where I ran marketing from launch through NASDAQ IPO filings.  While we didn’t follow a specific methodology, our CEO was intuitive enough to know the right time to “hit the gas pedal.”  We didn’t accelerate until verifying that the team had created a great product that met real customer needs and we could generate sufficient user revenue to support sustainable customer acquisition programs.  It’s taken years for me to realize that our growth was less a function of clever marketing tactics than beginning with something that customers truly needed.  Some growth would have been automatic; the marketing team simply accelerated this growth.

Several startups later I have a much better understanding of the key milestones needed for a startup to reach its full growth potential.  These are based more on observing universal truths than inventing some type of methodology.  Reaching the full growth potential of your startup requires focus, specifically focusing on what matters when it matters.  In my post on the startup growth pyramid I talk about the high level milestones you must achieve in order to unlock sustainable growth.  This post looks at it on a more granular level with links to several of my previous blog posts and other resources that provide additional details.

Day 1: Validate Need for Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Before any coding begins it is important to validate that the problem/need you are trying to solve actually exists, is worth solving, and the proposed minimum feature set solves it.  This can best be achieved by meeting with the prospects most likely to need your solution.  Steve Blank published a great post on this today.

Eric Ries offers more details on the minimum viable product concept in this post/video. 

Where’s the Love?

Vinod Khosla, one of the most successful Silicon Valley VCs in history, once suggested to me that startups should think of their early users as a flock of sheep.  He explained “the flock always finds the best grass.” 

For you this means you should start looking for a signal about who loves your product and why as soon as you release your MVP.  Most products have at least a few people that truly consider it a must have.  These people hold the keys to the kingdom.  Learn everything you can about them including their specific use cases and demographic characteristics.  Try to get more of these types of people.

A good place to start collecting this information is the survey I’ve made freely available on Survey.io (a KISSmetrics product).    You can read more about this product/market fit survey in this blog post. 

If you’re lucky you’ll be able to use this early signal to find the product/market fit.

Expose the Core Gratifying Experience

The majority of our project focus at 12in6 recently has been helping startups find their core user perceived value and exposing it in messaging optimized for response.  Your objective should be to remove complexity from the initial user experience and messaging in order to highlight this core user perceived value.  Often this means burying or even completely eliminating features that don’t relate to this gratifying experience.

Metrics

Metrics don’t matter until you achieve product/market fit – then they are critical to your success.  Dave McClure has a great video on startup metrics that matter (relevant part is at about minute 2:20). 

Most of the tools out there provide way too many irrelevant metrics and miss the essential few.  Both Dave McClure and I are advising KISSmetrics on a solution to this problem.

Start Charging

Another key step before growing your business is to implement a business model.  The ideal timing for implementing your business model is discussed in this blog post . 

I’ve often heard the argument that startups are focused on user growth and prefer to delay revenue in the short term.  I believe the fastest way to grow is with a business model and explain why in this blog post.

Extreme Customer Support

Now that you have a business model in place, your first marketing expense should be to expand the customer support team.  Anyone that cares enough about your solution to contact customer support is a great source of insight about your target market.  Also, customer support will uncover issues that will help you grow faster without spending.  And fixing these issues will make it much easier to grow when you do start spending. 

If your customer support team is overwhelmed now, I don’t recommend trying to grow until you address the issues driving most support calls. Once you’ve addressed these issues you’ll have fewer barriers to adoption and will be able to grow without overwhelming customer support. 

This will enable customer support to go above and beyond expectations, which is an important way to drive customer loyalty and enhance word of mouth.  This approach pays more dividends today than ever before – as I explain in this post on Social Media. 

Update: See comments for additional thoughts on extreme customer support.

Brand Experience Over Brand Awareness

Back in the “Dotcom Bubble” days billions were wasted on brand awareness campaigns for startups.  Today most entrepreneurs understand that brand awareness campaigns are a waste of money for startups.

Instead, it’s much cheaper and more effective for startups to focus on creating a fantastic brand experience.  While startups often realize the importance of brand experience, they focus on it too early, fine tuning things that customers don’t care about.  Instead, wait until you understand why certain customers love your product; then obsess over every element of this customer experience. 

Apple is probably the best tech company out there on coordinating a perfect brand experience for its target users. I cover more on brand experience in this blog post. 

Driving Growth

Once you’ve achieved all of the previous milestones, then you can focus on driving growth.  CEOs must take an active role in driving customer growth whether or not they have an interest in marketing. Nearly all of the risk and upside in a startup is in your ability to gain customer traction and then drive scalable customer growth. The CEO should not abdicate this responsibility to the marketer.

It’s important to stay aggressive and take all slack out of the market (make it completely uninteresting to pursue the market for any other competitor).  Your early advantage is the ability to iterate on the customer feedback loop and leverage strong customer loyalty to drive word of mouth.

While ROI lets you know if a user acquisition channel is sustainable, the key focus should be on exposing lots of the right people to your fantastic product experience.  It’s much easier to get passionate and creative about this than purely thinking about things from an ROI perspective. Of course positive ROI is essential for any customer acquisition program to remain in the mix.

When it’s time to hire a marketing leader to partner with the CEO, this post explains my recommendations for an ideal startup marketing leader.  The most effective startup marketers are relentless about experimenting with channels until finding things that work. 

Start by building out free channels such as listing in directories and basic SEO.   When you begin building paid channels, extra effort should be put into channels that show strong potential for scale. 

Unfortunately you can’t count on effective online tactics working forever.  I’ve seen many hot online marketing tactics lose their effectiveness over time.  This is because online tracking makes it easier for marketers to quickly figure out what actually works.  As a result we start piling into the most effective tactics.   Eventually online tactics get saturated, as explained in this post. 

Business building

Fast growing businesses are difficult to manage.  This is the point where you should bring in some experienced operations people if they aren’t already on the team. 

It Won’t be Easy

Finally, the top three risks to growing via these milestones are:

1. You lose patience and decide that one or more of the milestones really aren’t that important.
2. VCs and/or board of directors lose patience because you did not achieve conceptual agreement on this approach from beginning.
3. You delude yourself into believing that for “our type of business” customers really don’t need to consider our product a “must have”.  For us, “nice to have” is good enough.

Building a successful business is hard.  Hopefully this milestone driven approach to growing your startup will make it a bit easier.

Update: It’s hard to write a blog post on “milestones to startup success” that covers every type of startup.  Some startup types may need to reverse the order of some of these milestones.  For example, with marketplaces (EBay, social networks, eduFire, dating sites, etc.) user gratification increases with more users so there is a bit of chicken and egg here…  Ad supported sites also benefit from early scale. Many of the articles linked to from this blog post also cover exceptions such as when a startup should start charging (it’s different for enterprise targeted startups).

Posted in 12in6, Acquiring Customers, Branding, Building Awareness, Business models, Competitors, Customer Development, Hiring, Positioning, Product/market fit, Steven Blank, VC, Venture Capital, word-of-mouth
59 comments

Free Customer Development Help – Survey.io

I’m excited to announce a project that I’ve been working on with KISSmetrics called Survey.io, which provides startups with a free and easy way to prepare, distribute and analyze an initial customer development survey. It includes the content of the survey I use to verify that a startup is ready for 12in6 to work with them.

I recommend sending the survey to a random sample of people who have:

• Experienced the core of your product offering
• Used your product at least twice
• Used your product in the last two weeks

Determine if you are ready to scale

For startups, this survey is an ideal way for you to determine if you should begin the final preparations before aggressively scaling customer acquisition.    The most important question for determining how well your product is resonating with early users is question 2:

How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?

1. Very disappointed
2. Somewhat disappointed
3. Not disappointed (it isn’t really that useful)
4. N/A – I no longer use [product]

If most of your respondents are saying that they would only be “somewhat disappointed” without your product, they are really telling you that it is only a “nice to have”.  When asking users why they selected this answer, I often find that they are focused on commodity aspects of the product and they know of a replacement product.  It’s very difficult to build a business around a “nice to have” product, so you should keep your burn low while you iterate your core experience to make it a “must have”.

If however, you find that over 40% of your users are saying that they would be “very disappointed” without your product, there is a great chance you can build a successful business on this “must have” product.  This is the time to reallocate some development resources to optimizing your funnel and messaging as described in this blog post on the Startup Pyramid.

Survey.io to develop value proposition

The survey also provides some useful early feedback for verifying use cases, developing your value proposition and positioning against the most common alternative solutions.  This feedback is directionally useful, but I recommend significantly more research (via customer surveys and interviews) before finalizing your value proposition and positioning.

I strongly encourage you to setup and run your own customer development survey via Survey.io.  It only takes a few minutes and it free.  Here’s the link again.

Posted in 12in6, 12in6 Methodology, Acquiring Customers, Competitors, Customer Development, Research, Steven Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, VC
5 comments

The Startup Marketing Launch Process is Broken

**See updates at bottom posted on Jan 20, 2009**

Originally published March 2, 2008

The majority of VC funded startups fail and a large part of the blame should fall on marketing.  Specifically, executing a flawed marketing process during the startup’s critical customer traction stage. 

Through running marketing at two startups for the full cycle from launch to IPO filing, I’ve discovered that success at various stages requires very different marketing skills.  It also became clear that early stage marketing execution was the most critical to long-term success.  Yet it is nearly impossible to get good at this critical marketing stage.  

Why?  Because effective marketers don’t get enough repetition in the early stage to master it.  Any skills they do develop become rusty.  Stock option vesting periods lock them in well beyond the traction stage (typically four years). 

I actually stayed five years in each of my last two startups.  In that final year I had very little time for hands on marketing; I was too busy with such things as managing a team of marketers, recruiting more marketers, meeting with the sales team and other executives, preparing for board meetings, traveling to conferences and trade shows, etc, etc…

I know that my skills are best suited to the earliest stage of marketing, but I wasn’t about to walk away from extremely valuable options.  Even after the options vest it’s still hard to walk away.  Beyond paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to exercise options, you also have to pay income tax on the appreciated value of those options.  If the company isn’t public, you can’t even sell the options to get the money to pay the tax…  Anyway, the point is that despite knowing I’m best at marketing during the early traction stage, I was compelled every year to let those skills get rustier as my options appreciated and vested. 

My solution to the problem may seem a bit radical at first, but considering the billions lost in failed VC investments it deserves careful consideration.  Here it is: Startups should plan from the beginning to have different marketing leaders at different stages of the company.  One marketing leader to gain traction and kick start growth, one to manage growth until an IPO and one for post IPO leadership.  Considering the average tenure of a VP Marketing is less than 2 years anyway, this really isn’t that radical.  It’s just planning the transitions rather than making a bunch of disruptive firing/demoting/hiring decisions. 

You might be thinking that a consultant approach would work here, but I believe to be effective the marketing leader needs to be totally immersed in the role.   Another common approach is just to force the early stage marketer out when they become less effective (the disruptive approach mentioned above).  If they have played a key role in the company’s success, I don’t believe this is a very ethical approach – even though it’s probably the best thing for the company.

So rather than forcing out the effective early stage marketer, have an agreement from the start that it is a short-term role.   I recommend calling it an interim VP Marketing role and planning for full time 3 to 6 months followed by another 6 to 12 months of advising (working with the longer term VP marketing).  This ensures full knowledge transfer and gives the company access to two sharp marketing thinkers during the very important second stage of the company’s growth.  Options will still be an important motivator for the Interim VP Marketing, but they should have a much shorter vesting period.  The total options allocation to marketers will be higher, but this approach should result in faster market traction, meaning less burn and less need for future dilutive rounds of funding. 

It’s probably already clear that I am now specializing in this traction stage.  Xobni is my first assignment.  Of course everybody warns that it will be tempting to want to stay on (especially since Xobni is really picking up steam), but I am very committed to developing this approach over the next few years. 

Another advantage of this approach is that it will hone my ability to identify great startup opportunities.   Even the best marketing approach can’t save a crappy idea.  The challenges and opportunities of each former assignment will be fresh in my mind when I look for the next startup to join.   I’ll try to avoid startups with key challenges that I could not previously overcome and try to join startups that have the types of assets that proved important in an earlier assignment. 
 
This knowledge is also very valuable to VCs and I already have several that have asked me to help them assess new investment opportunities.   I’m expecting this will be my pipeline for finding new startup opportunities. Given the alignment of my interest with VCs in picking the right opportunities, they are willing to pay me to conduct a marketing viability assessments to dig into target customer’s need for the solution, real addressable market size and segments and any existing current demand for the category.  If everything looks good after this assessment, the VC can make a less risky investment and I can make a less risky decision to try to take on the interim VP marketing role (if a marketing leader is not already in place). 

Update Jan 20, 2009: I temporarily removed this post several months ago with the intention of making a few edits and quickly reposting it.  Unfortunately it slipped through the cracks despite being one of my more popular posts.  My thinking has a evolved quite a bit since I wrote this post 9 months ago.  During that time I have nearly doubled my experience taking startups to market (despite being in startups for 10 years).  As much as the idea of interim VP Marketing roles sounded good at the time, it really limits my ability to help several startups and requires more energy than I could possibly muster (this is a very intense period in startups).  Instead I have shifted my focus to work alongside a long-term marketer and guide them through executing the key phases of going to market.  This approach has worked very well at both Dropbox and Eventbrite. 

We still have a long way to go before the launch problem is fixed at VC backed startups, but there has been a lot of progress in the last year.

Posted in Launch, VC
6 comments