If your V factor is 3, it means that for every person using your product, they are attracting interest from three other persons. For viral marketers, the goal is to drive the V factor. Virality factor- Going viral is every marketer’s dream and has become a benchmark for growth for many founders. Founders of well-funded early-stage businesses make the classic mistake of hiring a sales team too early and expect it to deliver numbers.
Before they create their A-team or hire sales executives, they themselves must be the first to make customers come on board. Michael Hageloh, a former Apple sales executive and author of Live from Cupertino, writes that Steve Jobs’s real talent was “seduction” of making one fall in love with Apple products.
Vanity metrics may lead to further funding but will definitely not lead to the long-term survival of the business.Įvery founder is a salesman - The best salesperson, in my opinion, was Steve Jobs. Helping focus the founders towards meaningful metrics which are actionable and in sync with the business goals is a duty of investors and advisors. Many founders, especially those who have raised some funding, go overboard to impress their investors and create a ‘media buzz’ in the market. Vanity metrics - In the startup world, we have a term called ‘vanity metrics’. Learning from early movers, enables a later-mover founder to take advantage of the market development, customer education and awareness, infrastructure development and also, strong reference data points to make meaningful decisions.Īlso read: Purpose Behind Brand Purpose: An FIY Guide The book was written in 1994, when the network effects weren’t as viral as they are today one didn’t have the ability to reconsider their options with the touch of a phone button and innovation wasn’t a constant process of evolution. Al Ries and Jack Trout came up with the management philosophy of ‘first-mover advantage’ in The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. The market development and learnings can thus be made at the expense of someone else. An experienced founder must step outside their comfort zone and engage with as many of his potential consumers directly to get their feedback.įirst-mover disadvantage - It is sometimes better for the founders to go slow, let the markets mature and then go all out. This reflects a natural inclination of founders to keep doing market reality checks from ‘PLU’ (people like us) and to live in an echo-chamber, convincing themselves that a market exists. Whenever I meet startup founders and they explain to me that they have got market feedback, I ask them if they are suffering from the ‘Koramangala Syndrome’. If that’s the case, then the idea is already frail, with no moats to protect the business, and is easily replicable.Īs soon as you are certain about your business idea, you should be out and testing your thesis, talking to industry professionals and even others in the market to gauge if your idea has wings, and if you can build a business out of it.Īvoid the Koramangala Syndrome - Koramangala, an amicable neighbourhood in Bengaluru has become the hot-spot of startups. They worry that someone might steal their idea if they disclose anything and execute it better. Some founders tend to be extremely secretive, even bordering on paranoia. Openness about products - In the startup world, ideas are not proprietary. What then is the best form to launch products and services in a startup? They are in the classical ‘analysis-paralysis mode’. The other extreme are founders who spend incessant hours talking to customers, reading research reports and strategizing their ideas prior to the launch. Before these founders realize it, they are too far down the path without any feedback loop, deluding themselves into thinking they know what the customer wants. While this plays to the entrepreneurial impulse, it is a recipe for disaster. Due to lack of resources and deep research, many decisions are instinct-linked. But marketing in startups has a different contour than in traditional enterprises.
Akin to all businesses, in startups too, marketing remains the heartbeat of the business. In today’s uber-charged startup ecosystem, the amount of funds raised by startups raises its ‘glamour quotient’. (Illustration by Anirban Bora)By Bhaskar Majumdar
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