Ask HN: What subjects should be covered in a marketing book for startup founders | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What subjects should be covered in a marketing book for startup founders

I am working on a book that will help start up founders with their marketing. I've been consulting on this very subject for many years but want to hear your thoughts on what should be covered.

My goal is to stray away from generic marketing books that focus too much on large brands and big budgets while also cleaning up the mess of "growth hackers" and other BS that gets told to founders.

So what subjects would you like to see covered? What do you think gets missed in other books?

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Truly understanding your “Ideal Customer Profile”, or better yet; Understanding the problem that your product solves so well that you can speak to most objections to your product.

I’ve worked for startups that knew they wanted to solve a problem, but the goalposts kept shifting when they couldn’t reduce churn because the goal was never so clearly defined. It was just defined enough to get capital and burn some more cash, but never truly solved anything that stuck with people.

On who to market to, it ties in to deeply knowing your problem space. The best places to understand where the solution is most useful is going to the places where people give valid (and not so valid) complaints, but at least give constructive criticism alongside (showing they have a vested interest in a better solution).

Parachuting into an area outside your depth of knowledge or understanding and saying you have the solution is a sure way to turn off otherwise possible customers/evangelists for your cause.

Largely from a B2B perspective.

Marketing is product. If your product is a mess no one will buy. Most products are a mess. Get your funnels and acquisition flows right, but get what happens after conversion right as well. If you spend $100 getting a customer to convert and then they churn because the product is a mess you’re burning huge piles of cash - and depending on your product your customer base might be small enough in the early stages that word gets around.

Marketing is about onboarding. If customers can’t get significant value wins quickly then there’s no point sending them to your product.

Marketing is incremental. Yes, you want to drive thousands of people to your product right now because the numbers mean that X thousand eyeballs means n customers. You’ll feel pressure to do this; going too early is as bad as not going hard enough at the right time.

Marketing is price strategy. Your product is too cheap which makes people think it is disposable and has little value. Your product is too cheap which means you can’t afford marketing and support. Your product is too cheap which means you hit a problem in six months time when you have to put up your prices.

Marketing is simplicity. If you need three lines to explain something that’s probably two lines too many.

Marketing is your brand voice. I see far too many startups playing buzzword bingo rather than trying to communicate in a clear and authentic way about their product.

Marketing is them, not you. If you spend time telling people why your product is great they won’t listen; it’s like writing films: show, don’t tell.

Marketing is leadership and knowing how to get people to coalesce around your vision and how to nudge people towards decisions so that they think your best ideas are their own.

Marketing is obsessing over the right shade of yellow, or the right typeface - but knowing that getting it done well enough now is better than doing it perfectly tomorrow.

Marketing is about having a replicable toolkit that gets done what you need to get done and absolute fluency in those tools. Find the right tools and learn to use them in a way that lets you bend them to do what you need to do. Less is more. Complexity is death.

Marketing is about defining and understanding when the needle is moving, and ignoring bullshit metrics.

And marketing is about tying together a bunch of glib truisms in the hope that people feel like you know what you’re talking about.

It will be better if you first share what you have in mind since you have consulted on this for many years. As a tech founder who often struggles with Marketing, I would love to hear your thoughts first.

So, tell us what subjects you already have in mind and then I am sure a lot of us will chime in further.

I think the sweet spot is pitching to customers. We can assume that founders know how to pitch to investors, or at least it's something everyone picks up on the job. But how do you get that pitch to the right target market?

I've met founders who tried to sell ships with FB ads. So I think there's a lot to be said about experimenting with channels. A lot of the BS is treating a specific marketing channel as a nail - everyone tried to convince you that you need FB ads, Google ads, SEO, mailing list, billboards, whatever it is they are good at.

Guerrilla marketing would also be quite useful. It's not brought up enough today, because it doesn't scale (some investors hate it). But it's a good way to start the momentum with a very low budget.

A book that has a major impact on me is “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek. It would be great to emphasize why people do what they do as the entire company strategy depends on it. Other important topics is identifying the big pain and why it needs to be solved now. Marketing strategies are also important, e.g. while Product Led Growth is a “thing” now, a top-down sales approach makes much more sense and can be super successful.

Might be worth focusing towards either small-business founders (looking to create a lifestyle SaaS or similar) or unicorn-hunting founders (looking to build the largest business possible.

The skill set to build is going to be very different.

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