Attacking three sucky excuses for not marketing

9 comments Speak Your Mind By Casey Schorr

When I naïvely helped start our tech company in 2004, I thought I understood marketing. I was a marketing major and a good student. Surely I knew the basics. I graduated cum laude with a marketing degree from an overpriced private college. The world was my oyster bitch!

But looking back, I didn’t know shit!

It took me years before I understood the most fundamental aspects of “online marketing”. I’m still figuring out the basics seven years later. Marketing is hard. Maybe that’s why I made up so many excuses for not doing it.

Even though I knew half of corporate america is in sales & marketing, for some reason I thought 100% of our startup’s resources should go into building a kick ass product. Marketing was an afterthought.

As long as we build a kick-ass product, it will sell itself.

I kept telling myself that. I whole heartedly believed it. So we kept spending time on our product. Way too much time. I violated lean startup principles so bad, I’m sure Eric Ries will cry if he ever finds out we spent two years building Printfection inside a vacuum before launching it to the public!

Even with a balanced 50% tech-minded, 50% business-minded team, it’s easy to make these kind of mistakes. In hindsight, they look amateur and rediculous. But lots of startups F-up marketing.

Here are some of the excuses I kept telling myself to justify not doing marketing, and the resulting consequences. Please don’t repeat my mistakes!

Excuse #1: Our product is awesome.

Our product really did kick ass. Our quality, customer service, and overall user experience were better than the competition. The problem was, I thought this was all that mattered. Our competitors continued with their mediokre quality, customer service, and user experience - but still kicked our ass. Why? Nobody knew about us.

Just because you build something awesome doesn’t mean it sells itself! The company with better marketing almost always beats the company with a better product!

For example, 37signals isn’t known to have the world’s best project management software. It’s ‘good enough’ software, backed by brilliant marketing. You could say the same about HubSpot. Both of these companies prioritize marketing as much as – or more than – product development.

Why? Because most people use the product or service they hear about first, usually a word-of-mouth referral from a friend or colleague. And if you build a relationship with your prospective customers, and they trust you, you can get away with an even less-awesome product!

A good developer could probably build a Basecamp clone in a few months. But it doesn’t matter. Because you’re never going to replicate their 130,000 subscriber blog, speaking gigs, and best-selling books.

Excuse #2: We’ll worry about marketing closer to launch

I waited until a week before launch to worry about marketing Printfection. I thought I could just whip together some form emails targeting online communities and they’d think we were so great they’d sign up with us right away. After all, we were helping them engage their community and make a few extra bucks selling t-shirts! How could they resist?!

Not only did I think most of them would try us out, I was positive they’d tell their friends. The business would start scaling, and I was going to become rich! Part of this came true. The business did start to scale. But then we hit a plateau. At $1 million in sales, things started flattening out. We couldn’t figure out why, nor did we know what would push us to $2 million.

Excuse #3: We don’t need more customers, we need to build the new features prospective & current customers are demanding!

When we plateaued at $1 million, we started asking our customers what they wanted from us. Mainly because all the smart people with popular blogs tell you to do this.

How could listening to your customers possibly be bad? When you’re listening to your most vocal customers at the expense of acquiring new customers who would pay for what you already have.

Your most vocal customers are the ones participating in your community forums, e-mailing new feature suggestions, and chatting endlessly on the phone. Their suggestions are probably awesome. I’m sure they will use the new features you build.

But the real question is: does building new features drive as much revenue as if you spent this time acquiring new customers who already love what you already have?

This is where we went wrong. We built tons of new features. All of them came from listening to our customers. But this didn’t translate to significant increases in revenue.

We should have spent that time figuring out how to acquire new users who already liked what we had built. Or spent the time trying to up-sell our current users into buying more of what we already had figured out. Or made our service easier to use, thus converting more potential customers (trials) into happy, paying customers.

Bottom line: building new functionality might be fun for you and your customers. But it likely isn’t the most effective way to grow your company.

Excuses #4,5,6,7,8,9, and 10

There’s a whole lot more excuses I told myself. Off the top of my head,

  • I can’t focus! Marketing is a distraction.
  • My time is too valuable for basic outreach. We’ll hire an intern to do that.
  • Who has time to blog on a regular basis? We’re trying to build a business here!
  • Who has time to submit speaking proposals and travel to conferences to give a 30 minute talk?
  • I can handle marketing myself. The rest of my team needs to focus on the ‘real’ business.
  • I’ll attend some local meetups. That’ll do wonders to get the word out.
  • Etc, etc, etc.

I’ll save these for another post. Right now I’m curious to hear from you: what excuses do you tell yourself to justify not marketing? Or if you are a great marketer, what do you tell yourself to justify time spent marketing?

9 Comments »

  1. Totally agree Casey! The lesson about features is also why Basecamp can do so well because they know what their product needs to be and makes very little additions and features. :-) Well said!

    Comment by Richard – August 4, 2011 9:35 am

  2. Casey,

    Good post. As you know I’m currently in the process of starting my company and getting ActiveState off and running.

    However I too am putting marketing on the backburner because “I don’t have time now” and “I need to get all my products published so I have a good selection”, etc. etc.

    The last one is a big one, I don’t want to market my company/website before I have lots to offer. But after this post, I think it may be a good thing to start marketing and over time, mix that with uploading new products for sale so customers will return and have new reasons to be returning customers.

    Do you agree?

    Lorne

    Comment by Lorne Bourdo – August 8, 2011 8:53 am

  3. Richard: I’ve learned so much by following 37signals and Basecamp.

    Lorne: I can totally relate. I’m a perfectionist too, and sometimes you do really need to work on your product so you have something valuable to sell (market). But if you have something that’s done, IE one awesome design, start selling it! No need to wait till you have 10 widgets when customers are happy to buy the first widget. You can always sell future designs later into your existing customer base.

    For example I wish we had more products like dry-wicking shirts, hats, more trendy shirts, the list goes on. But that cannot stop us from selling what we already have.

    Comment by Casey Schorr – August 9, 2011 3:26 pm

  4. In addition to all of the above, there’s the issue of how we’re brought up. I’m in my 50s and was brought up to be a “good Catholic girl,” which included things like not being big-headed and boring the world talking about yourself (or your work, or your husband, or your kids). Being an ex-Catholic, reading and learning about marketing isn’t enough. It’s really difficult to put it out there, even when I know that folks just don’t know about my products. That’s an issue I need to take up again and push through the barriers.

    Comment by Nancy C. – September 14, 2011 4:12 pm

  5. Nancy – that’s a good point! I never thought about how your personal background could dictate your marketing succeess. Makes sense! Maybe you’d be better at “eduation” style marketing, where you are providing real value to the recipient. Instead of just “putting yourself out there” to get your products known, you’d be helping people, which in turn would make them actually want to know about your products?

    Comment by Casey Schorr – September 15, 2011 2:19 pm

  6. Humm, something to think about, Casey. I’ll see if I can wrap my head around this concept and will come back to let you know.

    Comment by Nancy C. – September 18, 2011 12:04 pm

  7. Printfection has really good quality product at a really good price…but why I’ve sold tons at the two other PODS I work through, and not here, is that they have NO MARKETPLACE. OK, they DID…and then they hid it, and then they brought it back, and now it’s a small little link at the bottom of the page that goes to http://www.printfection.com/shop. Why is this not in BIG PRINT UP AT THE TOP so that people can search for and buy things that shopkeepers at Printfection have to offer? I mean, sure, it’s nice when shopkeepers will do your marketing for you…but as you pointed out in this article, sometimes the most talented artists may not be the most talented people at marketing. But if YOU marketed for them…just a little…by making it easier for customers to find and shop their designs in YOUR marketplace (not burying your marketplace where no one can find it) then maybe you would be making more sales.

    Comment by Gale – December 5, 2011 9:32 pm

  8. CORRECTION: I meant Printfection has no marketplace, not the other too PODS. And yes, I concede that Printfection does actually have one…but I really don’t get why they make it so hard to find.

    Comment by Gale – December 5, 2011 9:35 pm

  9. Gale: I completely understand your frustration with the fact Printfection doesn’t have a “marketplace” like many POD (print on demand) companies do. And to address your (accurate) correction, yes, we have purposefully made the marketplace hard to find by putting a link to it in the footer only.

    We’re actually planning on removing the marketplace completely someday. Let me explain why…

    As we’ve said for many months (years) now, we’re moving away from the shopping mall (marketplace) business model. If you’re an artist or designer not interested in building your own brand, and just want to upload artwork and let someone else do the marketing for you, there are a few great print on demand companies for that. CafePress and Zazzle come to mind. They have great “marketplace” style shopping malls.

    However, if you already have a brand, group, club, business, or organization, and want to give your fans and supporters logo’d merch, we’re a great choice. Or, if you’re an artist, you might sell your artwork on other PODs and on Printfection, so you get the best of both worlds.

    It’s kinda like using Twitter and Facebook to help build your brand, but then directing everyone back to your own website from these marketing channels. For an artist, that might make the most sense – use Printfection as your main store, for example http://merch.artistname.com and then also put some products on other PODs and try to drive traffic back to your artistname.com website, where you’d link out to your Printfection store (which can be on your domain, completely white-labeled, etc).

    For us, it’s all about allocating limited resources. Instead of spending resources building & maintaining a shopping mall of aggregated designs, we’re putting our resources towards improving stores, improving merchandise selection, and improving the account backend so it’s the easiest POD to setup a store and attach it to your existing website, facebook, etc. And we’re continuing to expand our white label options. We also differentiate by having personalized one-on-one customer support from our “love team” which is no joke!

    Once you’ve mastered “the merch store” we help you grow your brand by introducing you to our Giveaways service (SwagLove) which will help you grow your brand even faster than a merchandise store will.

    Basically, we’re the promotional merchandise company you come to when you already have a following, already have a brand, and want to provide logo’d merch to your audience to build your brand. We give you all the tools to do this and make it super easy.

    These type of folks don’t want or need a shopping mall, because their designs mainly appeal to their own audience, or they’d rather do the marketing themselves on their own site/ domain. Same reason these folks love our white-label packaging, so their brand isn’t confused with their printing companies brand.

    I hope that clears things up and helps you understand why the main tab for “shop now” (the marketplace) is gone, and why we’re no longer updating keywords in the mall. Soon, we’ll remove the marketplace all-together and simplify things even further.

    A side benefit: removing the marketplace actually improves the SEO of your store. Our goal is to help your store come up in Google, not a shopping mall with your product in it. A shopping mall and a store page conflict. Google has to choose which one to index and display, and they usually choose the shopping mall.

    This is all about making changes that fit our vision – we’re helping people build their own brand using promotional merchandise.

    Comment by Casey Schorr – December 6, 2011 2:47 pm

Speak Your Mind