Compared to established companies, startups often have to play by different rules. They are just starting their journeys into the business world and face additional challenges to conquer early on.
One of the biggest challenges is marketing. Because startups have little to no brand recognition and often offer a niche product or service which might be difficult to explain to outsiders, a foray into marketing has to be carefully considered. Whereas other companies may make use of tried-and-true techniques, startups have to be more creative in order to succeed.
5 Key Steps to Market Your Startup
1. Identify your key audience and influencers
When we go and do the things that the Lord asks us to do, He will prepare a way for us to accomplish it. See 1 Nephi 3:7 in The Book of Mormon. A New Standard of Care is Here Delta CareStandard SM At every step of your travel journey, you can be sure that we’ve raised the standard by putting measures in place to help keep you safe and give you more peace of mind.
- Explore 1000 Journey Quotes by authors including Lao Tzu, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Henri Frederic Amiel at BrainyQuote.
- Line-by-line modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Instant PDF downloads. Refine any search. Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more.
Before you take one step, first identify where you will market your product. A staggering 42 per cent of founders cite a lack of market need as the number one reason for failure. Even if you have an outstanding product or an excellent service, it is absolutely useless unless people actually want to use it.
Of course, that’s not to say you should only cater to an existing audience. Steve Jobs famously said that people don’t know what they want until you give it to them.
For instance, smartphones were adopted extremely quickly, yet few people could have predicted their popularity. Even so, you must understand exactly who your product will be marketed toward so you can create relevant content and marketing campaigns that will actually interest your audience.
How to Choose a Market
- Size
- Wealth
- Competition
- Value Proposition
I performed a Journey Lines team building activity (that I learned from Lyssa Adkins) with various teams. In general, I was really happy how it went (and so were my colleagues).
The Idea
The idea of Journey Lines is that each of the participants draws a line showing ups and downs of previous jobs. Each chart contains also some additional information like technologies used, skills acquired, names of companies they worked for, or any other comments that people find important. This activity:
fosters self-organization and cross-functional behavior because it reveals a person’s skills, experiences, background, etc. This way, the rest of the team knows what this person “brings to the party.”
Some observations
- Some people need to check LinkedIn to help them remember all the places they used to work (especially freelancers with short-term contracts really need such reminders),
- The time required to tell the story differs – some people needed 6 minutes, for others even 15 seemed to be not enough (next time I will probably put some time constraints). The whole exercise took an hour (for 4 people team) and more than 2 hours for 8 people (including 15 minutes pizza break).
- Even though this activity is intended to be used when forming a team, we played it a long time after the team was created and it was also fun & informative. Team members learned a lot about each other, even though they worked together for a long time already.
- Personal things (marriages, kids) showed up rarely.
- It was very interested to see how many different ways lead us to this particular company that we work for now. Also, it was funny to notice that in the past we all went through similar stages (e.g. freelancing during high school, hacking games etc.).
- Some people draw really beautiful charts with nice fonts and additional drawings.
- There was a lot of new things about each team member that no one knew before.
Probably the most interesting for me was to learn about the “down” moments (where the line of journey went down, down, down – often very abruptly and usually resulted in job change). There were few reasons for this:
- people issues – stupid team lead / manager / boss can ruin even the best place,
- stagnation – nothing new? maintenance and bug fixes for too long? people will look for a different place to work,
- people leave their jobs when put in a position they did not want (e.g. someone was appointed a PM, another dev ended doing some office-management tasks),
- a lack of vision (“why are we doing this?”) or lack of business impact (“we did it, but then they started to argue if they really need it, and it never went to production”) is a serious motivation killer
Reciprocity
One more thing. I like this activity because it creates a symmetrical situation – “I show you mine, you show me yours”. Also, each participant can decide how much he wants to reveal. The only potentially intimidating thing is that at some point you need to stand in front of your colleagues and tell your story. But somehow, it hasn’t been an issue for any of devs I worked with.
P.S. Ask participants to write neatly on their charts so that later all can read it! 🙂
New Themes Are Here Introducing Journey And Clean Lines Free
P.S. 2. The original blog post by Lyssa Adkins is not available anymore on her blog, but I guess it went into her book that you might want to buy.