Startups 5 things I wish early stage SaaS startup founders knew about marketing |
- 5 things I wish early stage SaaS startup founders knew about marketing
- Moved to San Jose to help build company, struggling with personal finances other co-founders not wanting to use Company money to help? Need advice
- Funding?
- I am targeting a niche. How do I get my first users?
- Hire a contractor and protect myself with a monorepo
- Equity split for early "helpers" and protection against future disputes
- How to publish my app idea
- SaaS going from series A to IPO? Skipping B,C,D funding rounds??
- What would you do? – Great job candidate but they'd be stretching our salary budget
- When do you start running checks on your suppliers/customers?
| 5 things I wish early stage SaaS startup founders knew about marketing Posted: 04 May 2021 06:03 PM PDT Why is it that some startups do exceptionally well while many struggle? There's a host of reasons ranging from leadership to product-market fit to environmental shifts. From where I stand though, I'm particularly interested in the impact of early marketing decisions. I've made my fair share of mistakes but I've also experimented with approaches that led to big wins. Here's my marketer's perspective on what works and doesn't work. - - For context, I've been around the innovation and tech startup space for longer than I care to think about. I've helped grow small startups, mid-size scaleups, and big fat companies along the way. - - Ok, here we go... 1) Startup vs. scaleup marketing: This is a common scenario: You're in the early stages of setting up your company and you've got a product and some customers. Naturally, you want to see more growth, fast. It sounds counterintuitive but please don't be so quick to turn to marketing to crank up the demand gen engine. Marketing may be the last thing you should invest in right now. If you take a look at your churn numbers and NPS, what story does it tell you? Many startups get excited by total customer numbers but they neglect to understand what happens to customers once they've signed up. Dig deep to identify the in-product activities that cause friction and those that create customer value. Now use that knowledge to adjust your customer onboarding (in-app or otherwise) so you can guide users to value as quickly as possible. This is where a good product marketer will be super helpful. They can also identify early fans that you can leverage to amplify your brand's reach. It's a bit of a manual process, but unless you get it right, you really don't have a solid foundation to scale from. You have a leaky bucket. I've been there and trust me, it's a lousy place to be when you have to replenish your user base every year plus grow your revenue. First, walk. Then, run. 2) Different phases call for different marketers: When you're starting out, your budget is tight, and you're reaching into your network to find someone, anyone, with a doer attitude and a bit of digital marketing experience. Heck, your first marketing hire might even be straight out of school. And it's fine while you're still at the product-market fit stage. Just realize that someone else has to put on the strategic hat - and it's going to have to be you. Now here's where I've often seen things go sideways. Once you've established product-market fit, you turn to one of your first marketing hires and give them the mandate to build out your marketing team, and strategy. Chances are you even gave them a big title like Director or Head of Marketing when you hired them to compensate for their low-ish salary. Unfortunately, your early-career hustlers may not be equipped to lead growth at this stage. So, before stacking the responsibilities on them, go through the exercise of figuring out what you actually need from marketing. Some things to think about:
My point here is that you should create an "ideal head of marketing profile" that's not skewed by the capabilities of your initial hires. You'll have more clarity when you go ahead and promote your existing employees or hire above them or below them. You'll know how much support you need to provide. And you'll be able to justify your decision to anyone who questions it. Final word of advice on this. Save yourself the headache and don't give big titles to your first junior marketing hires. You can always upgrade them later but you can't downgrade them. Again. I've been there. 3) Marketing is a revenue-driving function: Now here's something else to think about on the topic of marketing leadership. I'm always surprised that there are still founders today who think of marketing's role as "doing social and managing the website." This is 2021, and if your intention is to grow, you need to shift your mindset and lean into marketing - not just sales - to drive revenue. Yes, even if the sale is always closed by a real human being. Both functions have to work in sync. Failure to recognize this means that you're not optimizing metrics like customer conversion rate, pipe velocity, or CAC (customer acquisition cost). You're basically running marketing like it's 2009. Sorry. So, as you start scaling, look for a marketing lead who:
That kind of talent sometimes comes with a hefty price tag, especially if they've got experience. It may not be possible to bring them on board now. What is possible though, is to get yourself an advisor who is that person so they can guide your big marketing decisions - like strategy and hiring - and also coach your existing staff to up-level their skills. 4) Marketing can't be an echo chamber: I hinted at this earlier but I want to expand on it. Anyone on your marketing team who creates content (website, articles, videos, ads, emails, etc.) needs to deeply understand your ideal customer profile. If they don't, your message won't land. And don't fall into the trap of thinking that you, your co-founders, or sales can just "tell them what to write." Sure it'll be good enough at the start but it's not a strategy to build a business. So, make "customer interactions" an integral part of your marketing teams' job from day one and give them the time to do it. Here's what I've seen work really well:
5) Beware the fake voice: Let's imagine your product is a FinTech app you sell to Finance Directors, or a tool you sell to Developers. We're not talking about a mass-market product here but one that solves a problem for a specialized audience. Do this test: Can your marketing content creators speak credibly to your customers face-to-face? Even if they do all of the immersive work I mentioned above, could you, for example, put them on a podcast to intelligently discuss industry challenges with some of your customers? If you target an industry or audience that's specialized in any way, carve out some time from your schedule or your co-founders' to be the face of your company (assuming you have subject matter expertise.) Or hire an SME/evangelist early on. No amount of prep and scripting behind the scenes will make your young marketing manager sound credible talking to a technical audience on video, on a podcast, or in person (unless they come from the right background.) In 2021, more than in recent years, customers want to feel a human connection with brands. Even in B2B. I know this type of SME is a unicorn - part technical, part educator, part marketer - but it's 100% worth it. It works. People buy from people and brands they trust, even in an era of zero touch sales. There is so much more I'd like to discuss but for fear of boring you, I'll stop right here and title this post "the 5 things" rather than "the 10". If you're still reading, I hope I got some of your neurons firing in the right direction! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 May 2021 02:50 PM PDT So basically, our startup decided to have me move out of my parent's place (we're all students still btw) to go to the Bay Area to do essential in-person product work. At first, we decided that since we have some money (about 15K non-dilutive grants), we could use that to help pay for at least the Couple of months I'm here before I start my full-time position end of July. I don't have much parental support financially, and I don't have steady savings since I did college on all financial aid and just minimum wage jobs to get by, so I don't have the ability quite yet to "bootstrap" even basic things like living expenses until I start my Job in late Summer. Our team now doesn't want to "loan" me money for personal expenses as they think that once we raise Pre-Seed, it'll look bad to investors that we paid temporary salaries with Grant Money instead of spending it on "Company specific needs". I'm not struggling too bad, but expenses are adding up quickly like getting furniture and putting down deposits, so I'm running quite low on funds and trying to save as much money here and there, but even with all this, it's tough to get by at least for the rest of Summer before I start my job. I'm curious if me wanting some of our Company money is asking for too much, or if I should maybe phrase my financial situation better to them? We're super early-stage right now, and I personally don't think its a huge deal, but I'm just inexperienced if this expenditure will actually effect us in the Future? Appreciate any thoughts EDIT: By "full-time job" I mean working somewhere else NOT the Startup. I don't receive any salary or anything from our Startup now, and once I start my other Job, I wont be paid. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 May 2021 09:15 PM PDT How do we get funding if we're from poor backgrounds? Should we go straight to seed and pre-seed investors? Is that the same as angel investors? I know an angel investor and can probably get in touch with a bunch of other angels, but idk if it's the best idea. I feel dumb going to an angel investor and telling them I have no funding. Most entrepreneurs either have rich friends/contacts or rich family. I have some wealthy friends but I feel awkward asking them for money. Plus they've seen all my faults and know my flaws. I'm a great professional but only a fairly above average human. My friends are stingy af too. They wouldn't give me $10,000 or whatever rich people lend each other. They barely even spot me for lunch. [link] [comments]  |
| I am targeting a niche. How do I get my first users? Posted: 04 May 2021 03:51 PM PDT Hi everyone, I am building a tool for people who work on websites. Could be web developers, designers, product managers, executives... I don't know yet who would be the more interested. It's a tool to give analytics and data about the website in a cool way. But right now, I am a bit confused about where to find my first users. The problem is that I got some visits on my landing page but almost nobody downloaded my product. I published the website inside my networks (friends, family, alumni, colleagues etc.) who are probably not interested at all in my product and just checked it out by curiosity. Thus, it's hard to draw conclusion about my idea. Was it a bad idea? Or I just don't have the right people on my landing page yet? So, right now I am not sure what to do. I don't even know if my product is good or not since I had too few people trying it. And as you can imagine, I don't want to work more and release updates on the product itself yet (which is really frustrating, because I have a lot of ideas haha). [link] [comments]  |
| Hire a contractor and protect myself with a monorepo Posted: 04 May 2021 04:58 PM PDT I have a React Native project where I am considering hiring a contractor to do some design and front end work. I have everything in a monorepo: native clients, web, backend, etc… The monorepo is great for productivity, but I'm a little concerned giving a contractor access to ALL of my source code. The amount of effort to just steal my work and setup their own app would be negligible. Has anyone encountered this situation? How did you handle it? Any suggestions besides a professionally drafted agreement/SoW? [link] [comments]  |
| Equity split for early "helpers" and protection against future disputes Posted: 04 May 2021 03:52 PM PDT TLDR; I'm splitting equity for a company/idea I've been working on for ~6 months part-time (~20-30hrs/week). Two others have helped ~2-5hrs/week while I bootstrapped and did a vast majority of the work. Now that I'm funded, they will settle into an advisory role. What is a fair equity split for these early "helpers"? This is my idea and it's still very early with no revenue or IP. __ After a 6 month journey, I finally raised a small pre-seed round for my startup and I'm ready to form the company. During this 6 month period, I've been working with two others who've helped provide advice, review assets, make introductions, etc. On average, they spend 2 to 5 hours per week helping. In contrast, I've spent 20-30 hours per week, $10k+ of my own money, produced all assets, did the fundraising, etc. Early on when excitement was at its peak we discussed the possibility of being co-founders, committing full-time, and splitting shares evenly. Nothing was in writing and discussions included the 1-year cliff and commitment to work full-time. After a few months and the excitement died down, they realized it wouldn't be possible to act as cofounders but would continue to help where they could, advising, etc. At this point, I'm a solo founder with a couple of advisors and I need to split the equity. I'm happy to offer the 0.5% that YC and others recommend for early advisors but I'm concerned this will not meet their expectations given our early conversations and ambition to be cofounders. I want to acknowledge their early support and be ethical in my approach but at the end of the day, neither will have much of a role moving forward. I'm curious how others have handled similar situations and came to a conclusion that helped avoid any potential future disputes. NOTE: This is my idea, we are pre-revenue and there is no IP. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 04 May 2021 04:29 AM PDT I have a startup idea for a semi professional social network, I started learning app development to create my MVP. But now I am very confused on how to get that app out to the public, should I just publish it in app stores ? How can I get my app out and get idea validated, I learnt many articles and blog posts on idea validation yet I can't seem to wrap my head around it. If there is anyone who launched their App MVP please share your experience, if possible someone please help me giving a direction Thank you so much for taking your time to read this post and responding ! [link] [comments]  |
| SaaS going from series A to IPO? Skipping B,C,D funding rounds?? Posted: 04 May 2021 06:47 AM PDT Seeing that most companies go from series A, B, C, etc. But I came across a company that raised 13M USD for Series A, and is now going to IPO. Why do companies go this route? What benefits are there from skipping those rounds of raising? Are they just confident? [link] [comments]  |
| What would you do? – Great job candidate but they'd be stretching our salary budget Posted: 04 May 2021 02:22 AM PDT Hi everyone, I was wondering if I could get a second opinion from other entrepreneurs. I'm looking to hire somebody to join my small business. I've got someone in mind – they're the perfect candidate. But as we've started discussing salaries, it's become clear that they want more than I was originally prepared to pay them. We're talking a few thousand (not tens or hundreds) more than I proposed – but the amount I proposed was a bit of a stretch to begin with. For context, my business is very small (under 100k turnover), our work is ad-hoc and fairly impromptu, and we've been affected by the pandemic. We could be affected again if harder lockdowns come back into force, so I'm naturally apprehensive about any long-term commitments at the moment. At the moment I'm running my business entirely on my own. As a result there are things that are being neglected because my attention is elsewhere. For example, sales and marketing. If I hire this person it'll free me up to do some of these activities, which could result in more income which would of course generate money to pay this person... but equally it might not result in anything other than an additional cost for my business, which will be paying two people instead of one. So my question is... is it worth taking the risk and stretching a bit further than I'd planned to hire this perfect candidate with the hope that I might be able to make the difference back, or should I take my time to shop around for a candidate who might be more receptive to the salary I had originally proposed, but might not be as perfect for the role? [link] [comments]  |
| When do you start running checks on your suppliers/customers? Posted: 04 May 2021 05:30 AM PDT I'm working on the SWOT analysis and was wondering when is it a good time to start paying attention to the background of the external actors we deal with? Is it even neccessary? I imagine it depends on the industry. What do you think, any good practices you can recommend? [link] [comments]  |
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