One of the things that I see that is counter productive is that startups are treated like “little companies.” No startups aren’t little companies. I see this a lot with economic development organizations.
- Startups need to find customers. No, customers aren’t just there in your web browser. Startups need to go find customers early on and look at them face to face. Startups need to knock on doors, introduce themselves, have conversations regarding pain points, talk to enough customers to get a broad understanding of of industry problems, figure out how to tailor solutions to meet those customer and industry problems.
- Too often, I see startups that Are afraid to go talk to people face to face. They make every excuse to not do the leg work. I hear this argument against this “customers don’t know anything….blah blah blah, talking to customers is a waste of time, etc.” customers have pocketbooks and money. Ignore their needs at your own peril.
- Build a solution that is for one customer thinking it will work for everyone. Writing code that is for a particular customer, just to get a sale is incredibly common, but leads you down the wrong path. . I did an inventory at one customer that had at least 100 reports, each report doing what one customer needed specifically in a search report. That’s 100 pieces of code that must be supported, but you are only getting paid for it once. Why not build a report that allows for customer customization so that each customer can build the query that they want? I’ve done this and it isn’t very hard. Instead of 100 reports that must be supported for the lifetime of a product/company, I built four screens that allowed a customer to tailor the search criteria involving 100+ criteria. 100 screens of custom code that has to be supported and can’t be shared or four screens of code that can be customized by the client to their heart’s content and when one improvement happens, everyone gets the update.
- Marketing is a great thing to do, once you have a product that is worth selling. I see these economic development organizations that push startups to do more marketing. I get it, economic development organizations are marketing people. That’s not the most important thing early on in a startup. Economic development want to grow and think everyone else should to. Until a startup has a defined product and a defined target market, marketing is like the ICBM that you launched but you didn’t tell it where to go. You don’t have a recall button and you never get that second chance to make a first impression. The marketing bros might be great once you have a defined product, a defined market segment to target, but early in, marketing bros of economic development whether independent marketing bros or the self proclaimed experts that do talks and have classes tend to do more harm than good. You have limited resources. Sure, take some shots early in, but don’t just blindly spend money, which is a problem I see.
This isn’t a condemnation of economic development organizations. They can be good if you use them properly. There are a lot of decisions that have to be made before you should spend the first dime on marketing. As a startup, you don’t have infinite resources or money. Stop, pause, and think thru what you should do first. Engage with a few local customers that you know personally. That will get you going better than anything else. Once you’ve done that and proven that there is something there, then engage with economic development groups, angels, VCs, etc.
Does you startup need some help? Do you have ideas, but don’t know how to get started? I can put you on the right path, just contact me. https://www.linkedin.com/in/wallymcclure/
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