One of the most counter-intuitive things I heard about startups was: do not market this product.
I was working with a growth marketer, John, who we hired to support a Beta Boom portfolio company in the healthcare space. My goal was to kick-start sales for this startup since they had gotten a few early customers. Instead, I learned a vital lesson.
After John had talked to the founder about her ideal customer (ICP), her product’s positioning, and her initial sales, he determined that the company was not ready to start marketing.
Sure, they could have put money against email marketing or paid ads, but it would probably be a waste of money at this point, John explained. You see, while the founder had a thesis about her ideal customer, an initial positioning statement that sounded pretty good, and had sold to a few initial customers, she still had a lot of learning to do.
They were selling to healthcare organizations, but there were many different kinds. Some bigger, some smaller. Some rural, some suburban or urban. Some had plenty of resources; others were resource-constrained.
Not only that, in each potential customer organization, there were many different players involved in the buying decision process, and the founder hadn’t yet cracked the code on who would be the best champion, who had the political capital, who would be detractors, who could write the check, and who could be the right point-person for implementation and onboarding.
As an investor, hearing that one of our portolio startups should NOT market their product seemed like insanity. What do you mean “Don’t market?!” Why in the world would I tell them not to make more money?
Now, with the benefit of experience gained from trying to help many portfolio companies grow, I realize that learning is far more valuable than revenue in the early stages. Learning who exactly is your ideal customer in real life and not in your head is worth more than thousands of dollars of early sales. Understanding what about your product truly resonated with customers is critical. Discovering how to repeatedly sell into an organization is a prerequisite to scaling.
If your startup is selling to businesses big and small, you might benefit a lot more from taking the time to learn rather than burning money on inefficient, ill-informed marketing.