Very often startups and companies write to us asking to review their product or share their press releases with our audience. This is part of their way of market and letting users know about their products, call it a distribution channel in a way.
One thing we miss while we get lost in building our product is how we are going to get customers and not until the product is done, is when we start sweating to plan on how to get customers to use our systems/products. That is the time we start writing to the different media outlets to consider running our stories or try to use search engine market and any other form of marketing available.
This notion of “build it and they will come” doesn’t work for most startups, and they end up failing and should therefore, be ignored in case you want to get real traction. What if they don’t come? Do you close shop? Do you change to a different marketing strategy? Do you even have the budget to do this? Do you have the time?
If you have a plan for all those questions then go ahead and ignore me, but if you don’t I suggest you think about how you are going to distribute your product even before you launch.
Make sure you address all the risks that might be involved in acquiring your customers as early as possible, this will help reduce your risk of failure.
Have your marketing guy run a blog on your website to get people excited and signing up to use your product. I find this very motivating to the product development team because they are very sure the product is going to meet real people.
Takeaway: Strike a balance between the product development and traction development.
