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| Recommendations for Startups and Entrepreneurs |
This goes against every piece of wisdom you’ll find in the startup world, but I’ve seen it work and lived the experience at Moz.
If you build a great product and find that the market you thought would love it isn’t biting, you’re up a creek. You’ve invested valuable time, emotional energy, and likely financial resources to build something that isn’t getting traction, and even if you’re following lean startup principles, the real market often behaves very differently than your early adopter test customers.
But, if you build a marketing machine first, you are in an enviable position. Even if your early products don’t take off, you have a captive audience that’s returning again and again because you’re producing something of value (usually content, thought leadership, educational resources, unique data, or free tools). You can literally create wireframes or a slide deck-based product and see how your audience reacts.
Moz was built on the back of a blog. For the first 18 months of our “product,” we had very little except a few tools (many of which were available in free versions elsewhere on the web) and some guides I wrote. But, because we had a large audience – 10,000 marketers a day read the blog when we started our subscription in 2007 – we could iterate, grow, and learn with their help. By late 2008, we had a unique product that was pulling in subscribers far beyond just our community of blog readers. Without that “marketing first” approach, I’m skeptical if we ever could have gotten a product off the ground.
The process of building something small and minimal, then iterating on it is a really good one. We’ve actually gotten away from that at Moz over the last couple years and are trying to reign it back in. But, there’s a big caveat.
7 Unlikely Recommendations for Startups & Entrepreneurs | Rand`s Blog
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