10 marketing lessons for early stage tech startups
I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. I have adopted the motto “ good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment .” We need to learn from doing, by trial and error.If I can help you avoid some of my first-time mistakes it would be a victory. The following are some lessons I learned about early-stage startup marketing. Because market is such a broad topic, I’m restricting these lessons to PR marketing (as opposed SEO, SEM, product marketing, etc.).
1. Where Stealth is Good – There’s a lot of discussions on the Web about whether startups should be stealthy before they launch or not. The truth is there isn’t a “right” answer for your company. You need some guidelines to make decisions. My general rule is that it’s good to be stealth in the early days while you’re building your product and testing your market. Stealth does not mean constipated, paranoid and totally untrusting of others. It does mean not telling more people your future plans than is necessary. It means avoiding drinking too much at cocktail parties with other tech people and bragging about your plans. It means not over-sharing your deal with VCs or other investors.
The truth is that we work in a very small, tight-knit industry and news and plans spread fast. In the early days you don’t really want three extra teams hearing your ideas and gearing up to compete before you feel you’ve got a solid head start. Most people totally advise against stealth. They think that only by being open and testing your ideas in an open marketplace can you be successful. Be careful about this advice.
Also be careful about VCs. Most ones that I know have very high ethical standards, so I’m not concerned about that. But once a VC has heard your idea he can’t “un-think” it. And these ideas have ways of seeping into board discussions with portfolio companies as in, “have you ever thought about trying A, B or C?” It’s mostly unintentional, but tacit knowledge about ideas spreads quickly amongst the chattering elite.
I actually like finding entrepreneurs who are more circumspect, less braggadocios and generally more planned about their actions.
2. Where Stealth is Bad – I do meet entrepreneurs who clearly fall on the other side of spectrum and are totally closed. I worked with an entrepreneur who was to appear at a startup networking event where he was to talk about his company’s plans. He considered pulling out of the event because he wanted to stay in “stealth mode” and felt an event like this compromised him. I counseled him to do the event (it was high profile) and talk in broad themes about the areas in which his business would compete. There are very few truly novel ideas so talking in broad themes certainly wouldn’t give away any grand strategy. Instead he went to the event and told everybody “we’re in stealth mode and can’t yet reveal what we do.” It went down like a lead balloon.
Mini Writing Lessons - News
One strategy I encourage is to break up mini-releases into exclusives that you give to different journalists to spread the love around and give everybody something unique to write about. Nobody likes writing re-hashed stories.
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