JESSICA LIVINGSTON: The most important thing an early-stage startup should know about marketing is rather counterintuitive: that you probably shouldn’t be doing anything you’d use the term “marketing” to describe. Sales and marketing are two ends of a continuum. At the sales end your outreach is narrow and deep. At the marketing end it is broad and shallow. And for an early stage startup, narrow and deep is what you want — not just in the way you appeal to users, but in the type of product you build. Which means the kind of marketing you should be doing should be indistinguishable from sales: you should be talking to a small number of users who are seriously interested in what you’re making, not a broad audience who are on the whole indifferent.
Successful startups almost always start narrow and deep. Apple started with a computer Steve Wozniak made to impress his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club. There weren’t a lot of them, but they were really interested. Facebook started out just for Harvard University students. Again, not a lot of potential users, but they really wanted it. Successful startups start narrow and deep partly because they don’t have the power to reach a big audience, so they have to choose a very interested one. But also because the product is still being defined. The conversation with initial users is also market research.
Jessica Livingston: Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing
