Week 1: I said I'd do what?!
Look, it’s a universal truth: the coolest part about starting a company is telling people you’re starting a company. Starting four startups in four quarters is especially cool.
After that, it’s down to the nuts and bolts that fewer people want to hear about. But that’s why you’re here.
I want to talk to you about two things this week: my marketing strategy and my approach to landing pages. But before I get to that, let me frame them by answering the question you’re probably wondering: “What are you building?”
The $10,000 demo problem
Have you ever noticed that once your company reaches a certain size, building a demo of your own software becomes a nightmare? I have.
I’ve been part of plenty of demos for companies of all kinds, and I’d peg the average cost of building a demo at $10,000 worth of time.
Most of that time doesn't go into configuring your software, but to injecting data into your system to elicit the behavior you want.
You need data that is:
Realistic looking
Relationally joined across many data sets
Produced at a cadence that matches the real world
Deposited into many different backend systems (e.g. Kafka, Postgres, Mongo)
What happens, over and over, is that some poor team builds a complicated script to wrestle their data into exactly the shape they want. It’s a hacky, shameful script that no one ever wants to see the light of day—and it never does. The next demo comes, and the whole cycle starts from scratch.
And it gets worse, because this doesn’t just happen for demos. It happens anytime an engineering team needs to replicate a customer workload, or send shadow traffic to their production environment.
I think there’s room here for a business: a containerized service for declaratively generating data, packed with controls to perfectly match your production traffic.
With that in mind, let’s talk about getting customers.
Building a funnel
It takes all the self-control I can muster to stop myself from banging out a prototype of what I just described. This haunting quote from Peter Thiel sobers me up, though:
The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
There are so many variables in business that make it hard to say why you succeed or fail, but as long as I’ve been doing this, one thing has been clear to me: many of my failures can be attributed to a lack of go-to-market (which is slang for getting your stuff in front of people who want to buy it).
The temptation, especially as an engineer, is that I can build it, market it for a week, and assume that because it’s good, it’ll just catch on.
Nope.
The reality is that you not only need an initial marketing push, but a strategy for continually getting in front of customers for months afterward. You can only post on social media about your new product so many times, only give so many interviews, make so many cold calls.
So the critical question is: how do you do that? How do you get a steady stream of could-be-buyers showing up your door?
There’s many answers to that question, but mine is this basic funnel:
The idea is straightforward (and not invented by me):
I post useful things on social media, driving people to the newsletter
I dissect my business in the newsletter, tangentially talking about what I’m building
Some of the people reading the newsletter may have use for what I’m building and become customers
I like this funnel design because it creates wins for everyone. Readers learn for free, and I get continual feedback about whether I’m building the right thing.
I heeded the Peter Thiel’s advice and spent 3 days this week building out a month’s worth of social media content.
Making a landing page
If there’s a second sin that engineering-entrepreneur’s commit, it’s talking to customers about our solutions, not their problems.
My remedy to that is to do something unusual: I make the landing page before I make the product. Why? It forces me to describe the problem I solve early, which helps me get better feedback, which helps me build a better product.
I spent 2 days this week beginning a minimal landing page, which includes:
A good tagline
A concise description of the problem I’m solving
A visual mockup demonstrating, in code, the solution I have in mind
A side benefit of doing the landing page first is that it packages up your pitch exactly how you want it described—no one can warp it in a game of telephone.
Put it in action
Get in front of customers. Build the funnel. Articulate the problem.
See you next week!
Thanks for reading! If I could ask a quick favor—reply to this email and send me feedback on this newsletter. Is it useful? Should it be shorter? Longer? Cover different topics? You’ll have my eternal gratitude.