In MFN’s latest webinar, marketing expert John Wall shared practical advice on what early-stage founders should focus on to attract and retain customers. Check out these highlights from the webinar- and follow MFN on LinkedIn to get updates about other webinars!
Q: There’s so much out there nowadays, and it can be hard for founders to pick a direction. Where should founders begin their marketing strategy?
A: The most common mistake founders make is talking about product features instead of focusing on customer outcomes. Using mousetraps as an example, people don’t care that your mousetrap is faster or cheaper, they care about getting mice out of their house.
Your pitch should center on the result your customer will experience, not the technology behind it. Framing questions around how your product changes your customer’s day-to-day life can transform your sales conversations.
I recommend reading Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff to learn how to frame your story around the customer’s experience, not the details of your product. It’s important to remember that your product is the tool that helps the customer succeed.
Q: How should founders decide which marketing channels to invest in first?
A: The framework I return to again and again comes from the book Traction by Justin Mares and Gabriel Weinberg. The authors studied startups to understand what worked and what didn’t when it came to growth.
Two key lessons stand out. First, founders should aim to spend half their time building the product and the other half growing the business and talking with customers. The biggest trap is spending 90–95% of your time on the product. You need constant feedback from prospects and customers to ensure you’re on the right path and not wasting valuable resources.
The other key point is to limit yourself to three channels to focus on and review their performance regularly.
The Traction framework identifies 20 possible channels across four categories:
- Product marketing (e.g., built-in sharing features, referral loops)
- Awareness (earned, owned, paid, and shared media)
- Marketing analytics (measuring what works)
- Sales (direct customer contact)
There are two main areas of product marketing to explore. The first is engineering as marketing. This is building sharing or referral features directly into your product so it spreads on its own. If there’s something in the product that automatically requires you to share it with other people, you know, that kind of scales infinitely.
The second is partnering through existing platforms or markets. Look for companies in the same space that don’t compete with you and find ways to collaborate.
For example, a pool-cleaning company might partner with landscapers; they serve the same homeowners, and both benefit from referrals.
Q: Any advice on the best way to engage clients?
A: Even before your product launches, start collecting contact information from interested users. If you’ve got a website with a form that says, ‘Sign up to learn when we launch,’ you’re already building momentum. That email list or community becomes your first audience when you’re ready to go live.
Looking to start using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool to help keep track of your client list? Through the Hubspot for Startups Partner Program, MFN is able to connect startup founders with discounted, “startup-friendly” prices for Hubspot software and tools. Learn more about that program here.
MFN offers a growing library of Go-to-Market resources for startup founders, including more insights from John Wall and a deeper dive into important topics. Check out the full resource here.
