Marketing a Start-up

Forget stealth. Once you have decided who your target customer is and what benefit you are bringing them go out and talk to people, lots of people. You can’t shortcut this. There is no real substitute. When you look someone in the eye and explain what you are doing you can read reaction in their eyes.

This is why I have used this approach at companies like NCR, Traveling Software, and Door to Door Storage. No matter what else I was doing I set up a goal and schedule for face to face customer and prospect meetings. At Traveling Software we actually had a routine of holding group customer meetings once a month. At NCR we did a series of blind interviews with IT executives using a research firm. We wanted to do it blind to eliminate bias. I accompanied the researched on the interviews under the guise of being with the research company. I wanted to personally see the reactions.

The feedback you get is invaluable. Don’t mix up one on one discussions with statistics. You are not looking for percentages and don’t try to turn them into percentages. You want insights. You want validation or rejection of gut feel. You want the “oh, I didn’t realize that” thoughts. In researching consumers for a photo sharing company I found out through discussions like this that customers with 2 megapixel cameras thought they couldn’t print quality prints. As a result we had to educate them and prove to them the opposite.

So, don’t formalize your discussions into structured market research. Let your discussions be free flowing, but have a punch list of topics that are key areas you want to get feedback on. Just make sure you have covered them before you are done. Here are some typical things you’ll want to know:

• Is this concept interesting?

• How would it make your life better?

• What words would you use to describe it?

• Would you tell others about it? Who? What would you say to them?

• Where might a discussion of this product come up? Business meeting, etc.

• What else might this product do that it doesn’t appear to do as described?

• How would that improve your life?

• Would you buy this product? Why?

• Would you be the person to decide on a purchase?

• Who else would be involved?

• Would anyone else have to approve this purchase? What aspects would they be interested in before they approved?

• What purchase would you have to forgo to make this purchase, or in other words, what are the competing purchases for your dollar?

• Who else should I talk to? Can you introduce me?

Having narrowed your market, creating the key message will be much simpler. You will not have a number of different market segments with different priorities vying for the key message. This is a good thing.

It should be relatively simple to decide what is the key pain point you are solving. More difficult may be couching your solution in a way that is provocative and exciting. This is critical. It isn’t sufficient to have a solution that is “as good as everyone else’s” or “is an interesting twist on established solutions”. You are looking for a solution that causes your audience to say “wow, thank you for solving that problem” or run off and tell others about what they found. Remember that people like to be “in the know”. They like to inform. They like the praise of having helped someone else. People love to be able to tell someone they found something that is relevant and will make a difference in the other person’s life. It makes them feel good. That is the essence of what you need.

Let me give you an example of what it is not. I used to be VP Marketing for a company called PhotoAccess. We were an early web service for hosting and sharing digital photos. We were revolutionary at the time. Since then there have been many new comers to the game. Recently I ran across a company that had just raised some serious angel money for a new photo sharing web site. The site is nice, easy to use and frankly on par with a number of other sites. The uniqueness they felt they were bringing to the table was the integration of blogging with photo sharing. The problem with their offering is that there are dozens of web sites that let people create stories around their photos including Facebook, Myspace, Myfamily, Famspam, WordPress and many others. They feel they have a better balance of both and that it is simpler than other implementations. This is a great example of a service that people will find, many will use, and probably nobody will talk about because frankly there is nothing compelling to talk about.

Can you see a person saying “you wouldn’t believe what I found! There is a web site where I can post photos and write stories around them that is really easy to use”? It isn’t news and nobody will care. Just ain’t gonna happen.

So, make sure that you can spin your solution into something that raises the bar and changes the game in a way that is newsworthy so that you gain the viral marketing you need to get you off the ground.