This article conflates advertising and marketing right from the get-go rendering most of its advice, at best, as quite limited. Blowing $1.5MM on ads with no result is a sign of no marketing at all.
Marketing is a two way process you should start right away -- "before starting", actually.
Marketing is understanding your market: who wants your product, who uses it, who decides that it should be used, and who pays for it (sometimes four different people), both at the micro (individuals) and macro (demographics, market lifecycle ("crossing the chasm"), external factors (changing environment)). And then why -- what matters to them? And only later in the process do you start to think of how you might reach them -- ads? What kinds? What tone do you set?
At the very beginning you want to get some idea of 1- would anyone at all actually ever use this and 2 - how many o of those people will there be on day 0 and how many in a few years?
The other thing you learn is how to design your product: what features actually matter, and for my SaaS how big a back end infrastructure will I need -- with multiple answers like in the first year and when it's time to scale. Lets' you design a small product with affordances for later, revenue-funded changes to make it scale. You don't need K8s on day 0, maybe never, or maybe someday so you design your MVP without supporting k8s but with it in the back of your mind. This all comes from marketing.
Many years ago I raised a $20MM A round (when $20MM was a lot of money and there were rarely seed rounds and no "pre-seed" nonsense) on a powerpoint-deck-only plan with no TAM $ analysis at all. It was a drug, and I knew (from talking to doctors and patients) that on day 0 people would pay thousands, and their doctors could sell it to them (specific market where that was the case). Then I had a slide talking about demographic trends (aging baby boomers). Because the marketing was so compelling the investors did their own TAM in their heads.
I mention that not because I think you should ignore TAM! But in my case TAM $ was impossible to calculate; OTOH I had enough market data (and the one VC who did some DD doing his own survey confirmed it, to his surprise) that I knew enough about the market to be able to talk about how I could steer (as much as you can in the pharma business) as certain numbers turned out to be wrong.
Hey there, author here! I fully agree - this is exactly where I want to get to with my article series. This is just the first post, talking about objectives. If you click on the next article, it talks about branding and after that, how to define your target audience. More to come! This introductory story was just a horror story of what can happen without great PMF or clearly defined marketing / advertising objectives. Thank you for reading!
Marketing is a two way process you should start right away -- "before starting", actually.
Marketing is understanding your market: who wants your product, who uses it, who decides that it should be used, and who pays for it (sometimes four different people), both at the micro (individuals) and macro (demographics, market lifecycle ("crossing the chasm"), external factors (changing environment)). And then why -- what matters to them? And only later in the process do you start to think of how you might reach them -- ads? What kinds? What tone do you set?
At the very beginning you want to get some idea of 1- would anyone at all actually ever use this and 2 - how many o of those people will there be on day 0 and how many in a few years?
The other thing you learn is how to design your product: what features actually matter, and for my SaaS how big a back end infrastructure will I need -- with multiple answers like in the first year and when it's time to scale. Lets' you design a small product with affordances for later, revenue-funded changes to make it scale. You don't need K8s on day 0, maybe never, or maybe someday so you design your MVP without supporting k8s but with it in the back of your mind. This all comes from marketing.
Many years ago I raised a $20MM A round (when $20MM was a lot of money and there were rarely seed rounds and no "pre-seed" nonsense) on a powerpoint-deck-only plan with no TAM $ analysis at all. It was a drug, and I knew (from talking to doctors and patients) that on day 0 people would pay thousands, and their doctors could sell it to them (specific market where that was the case). Then I had a slide talking about demographic trends (aging baby boomers). Because the marketing was so compelling the investors did their own TAM in their heads.
I mention that not because I think you should ignore TAM! But in my case TAM $ was impossible to calculate; OTOH I had enough market data (and the one VC who did some DD doing his own survey confirmed it, to his surprise) that I knew enough about the market to be able to talk about how I could steer (as much as you can in the pharma business) as certain numbers turned out to be wrong.