Marketing advice for startups

• Download Keywords Everywhere to see keyword volumes on all your searches (it’s cheap). This will help you with naming products and features, discovering features and concepts users search for, understanding competitor popularity, developing SEO content ideas, and more.
• Create two email lists: one for all users who signup and another for your marketing. These help with distribution, keeps you top of mind (inbox), and makes you less reliant on ads and platforms. Cross-promote your marketing list on your signup list.
• Publish your opinions. You’re never going to win by being the same as competitors. Opinions get attention and appeals to exact people who will become early adopters. People will forget if you change your mind about things in the future.
• No startup wins because they are better at paid ads (although some won because they spent more).
• LinkedIn is dumb but if your product is B2B, your audience is probably there. The key to a good LinkedIn post is a good image and first line.
• For large influencer sponsorships to work, you need strong product-audience-influencer fit. The audience needs to be engaged and trust the influencer while your product needs to actually be relevant to them. Having an influencer already use your product is the ultimate version of this.
• The best marketing helps people succeed. It helps people use your product to accomplish their goals and become who they want to be. This means you should cover how to get started and the basic use cases of your product.
• SEO is still valuable in the age of AI. SEO success seems to correlate with GEO (AKA SEO for LLMs) success. Where do you think they get the training data from?
• Great marketing sparks joy. This is not in a playbook anywhere and its impossible to distill what this means into a sentence. What’s important is that you should make space for weird, fun, unorthodox ideas, even if they are “low ROI.” These are often the most important ones. Read Unreasonable Hospitality or my related blog post.
• Get someone else to review the content you create (if possible) or develop a strong sense of what your audience does/doesn’t understand (walk in their shoes). This ensures your marketing connects, is understandable, and makes an impact.
• Tell people about what you built. Better yet, show them. A surprising number of features go undiscovered because users aren’t told about them. Your UI only reaches a tiny amount of your total addressable market.