Category Archives: Start-ups

Founders Confess

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Founders have more war stories than some combat vets. SandHill.com and Silicon Strategies Marketing recently co-sponsored a survey of founders. We were intent on discovering what founders did and did not know about marketing when they launched their first company. The results were interesting though predictable. Most of the mistakes to which founders confess are well known to me and amply illustrated in the Start-up CEOs Marketing Manual. Yet the survey nicely summarizes those places where even founders clearly see how their lack of marketing strategy savvy caused them harm. Unrealistic markets: Founders admit that they knew the size of their total market and planned for selling to everybody instead of smaller addressable and realistic markets. This led many survey respondents to misallocate promotion resources, span to Buy influencers: Most founders entered markets not knowing that many people influence buying decisions, and worse yet not learning their clustered motivations. Fulfilling … Continue reading →

Invisible Competitors

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Want to see me cringe? Be a start-up founder and tell me you don’t have any competition. Every company and every product has competitors. They may not have offices, there may not be a product, and your prospects may not know they are using your competition. But everyone has competition and it can come from very unexpected sources. Even Google has tangent barriers. Google’s Android mobile operating system is the most popular on the planet, especially in China where they appear on 90% of smartphones. The competition is not the hodge podge of OSs in the other 10%. Nor is it the gaggle of Chinese knock-off companies that wish Google would release the source code to new Android versions more quickly so they could create near-real-time Android clones. The new competitive threat is the Chinese government. Mao’s mavens are not entering the smartphone market. These control freaks simply don’t like … Continue reading →

Outsourcing Savvy

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Happily, outsourcing marketing strategy works for everyone. Last year I got a call from a global conglomerate that rakes in over $20 billion each year. They were launching a new product from within one of their divisions. Savvy as they were, they needed help in new product go-to-market messaging.  In the division of that giant corporation, the native knowledge was unavailable. Sadly, this doesn’t happen all the time. Nobody is universally competent. In large companies, even specialists with necessary knowledge are not portable between organization boundaries. Smart marketing executives inventory their talent and outsource as needed to assure everything that needs to be done is done, and is done well. Companies that don’t fail. Early in my consulting career I was hired to help with the pivot of all pivots, changing an entire post-IPO enterprise from a hardware company into a software vendor. The company was successful at what they … Continue reading →

Targeting Buyers

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Marketing is a bit like target practice. You aim for the middle to score the most points. Start-ups are notoriously bad at targeting their buyers. Instead of using a hunting rifle, they choose a shotgun, scattering their marketing spend over vast areas of ill-defined buyers. Thus their spend per new customer is higher than it should be, and their stable of customers contain awkward fits who will be less happy with the product that well targeted buyers. Start-ups entrepreneurs shoot their investment wad and go home without winning. Go-to-market plans need to identify everyone that influences a purchase decision in a viable market segment. If you have not segmented – properly or at all – and you have only vague ideas about the functional and emotional motivations of buyers, their bosses and subordinates, then you are shooting blindfolded and will miss your target. Here are the essential steps in formulating … Continue reading →

Funding Fumbles

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About the time this blog post goes live I’ll be breaking the hearts of a handful of entrepreneurs. Sadistic as that sounds, my job is to insert reality into uncomfortable places. In my speech today I’ll be telling some tech innovators why no angel investor would ever give them a dime. Tears will be shed, anguished screams will be head, and I may get a new laptop if someone throws theirs at me. Entrepreneurs here in Silicon Valley are more common than belfry bats. They exist on the hope of changing the world and getting hit by the money truck. These two aspects mean that they are commonly irrational and unreasonable about their products and prospects. Some of them succeed because they are unreasonable – nothing important has even been accomplished by a reasonable person. Where they often fail is funding. Despite being digital demigods, they rarely put themselves in … Continue reading →

Departmental Detrimental

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Businesses should not resemble circular firing squads. While presenting to the Silicon Valley Forum’s Marketing SIG last night, one audience member noted her company’s marketing, product development and sales staffs were unaligned. Well, “unaligned” might be poor wording. They appear to be as completely disjointed as drawn and quartered traitors. This is not uncommon in tech companies where the three groups have come onboard at different phases of corporate growth, believe they own the customer and move ahead despite what other teams are doing. Circular firing squads are more efficient and less violent. In early phases, techies are product managers and interface with customers directly. They believe they listen to prospects though this is often self-delusion. Techies (and particularly techie founders) only listen to customer input that agrees with the original product vision. This form of founderitus is so prevalent in Silicon Valley that my audience was not surprised when … Continue reading →

Break Down

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I spent last Friday coaching a well funded start-up on the fundamentals of market segmentation. Yes, in Silicon Valley you can still romance venture capitalists without a complete go-to-market strategy. Segmentation is the second most fundamental marketing strategy activity, and one that founders rarely contemplate while running headlong into a market. Granted, between technology vision and early adopter myopia, there is little reason to segment market in the earliest phases of corporate life. But go beyond the early days and quick sales to innovators and early adopters and you will see a company flounder as sales slow and individuals attempt selling to anyone. Since new products don’t fill anybody’s whole product definition, selling to everyone means selling to almost no one. Next comes an entry in the dead pool. Founders tend not to segment for several reasons, none of which are rational: Ignorance: Some founders don’t know what market segmentation … Continue reading →