“If your product is remarkable, getting noticed is a lot easier.”
–Giacomo “Peldi” Guilizzoni, founder of Balsamiq

Want to make marketing easier? Build the right product for the right audience.

When something is truly exceptional, people talk about it. They want to share it with others.

Think about the last app you bought. Chances are, you heard about it from a friend, reviews in the app store, or on social media.

Great products generate word of mouth.

Researchers at UCLA found that when we discover something new, our brains are wired to spread the news. Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA psychology professor, states here:

We always seem to be on the lookout for who else will find this helpful, amusing or interesting, and our brain data are showing evidence of that. At the first encounter with information, people are already using the brain network involved in thinking about how this can be interesting to other people. We’re wired to want to share information with other people. I think that is a profound statement about the social nature of our minds.

Don't overcommit

Years ago, I was watching an episode of The Dragons’ Den on Canadian television. On the show, aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their products to wealthy investors.

At one point, a married couple (John and Peggy) came on stage. They were pitching a series of sports trivia booklets, the kind you might see in the checkout aisle of your grocery store. The investors asked John and Peggy a series of questions. In the midst of this questioning, an ugly truth emerged: they had been working on this idea for 11 years and hadn’t yet earned a profit. Even worse, they had invested their entire life savings into the business.

Why had Jon and Peggy invested so much of their time and money into an idea that had so little traction?

There’s a risk for creators like us to fall in love with our ideas. Sometimes we succumb to the sunk cost fallacy. We feel like we’ve invested so much time, energy, and money into our idea that we couldn’t possibly give it up.

If your goal is to achieve product traction, you have to be brutally rational about your idea. You can’t put good marketing after a bad product and expect good results.

Does this story sound familiar to you?

It’s 1 am, and you can’t sleep. You have a brilliant idea, and you can’t get it out of your head. After fidgeting in bed for an hour, you go down to the basement and start coding.

By 7 am, you have a working prototype. You keep working on it evenings and weekends, creating new features, refining the design, and building out the billing system. Soon, the whole thing is ready for launch. You deploy it to production and wait for your first customers to sign up.

But the customers don’t come.

You double-check your analytics. Everything’s set up correctly, but no one is showing up. At this point, you might feel like you have a marketing problem. It’s much more likely that you have a product problem.

Notice how that whole story revolved around you: you had the idea, you built it, and you launched it. Who is missing from this picture?

The customer – and what they want.

Customers don’t care about your idea; they want help with their problems.

Remember: inspiration doesn’t always lead to great products.

Sometimes, we’re inspired by technology:

• “I could build this on the Twilio API!”
• “I could learn that new CSS framework!”
• “I could use this new tool I just bought!”

Motivation can also come from our need to make money, to impress others, or to validate ourselves.

Instead of being focused on the customer, we’re focused on ourselves! We need to change our thinking. Want a profitable business? Make products that improve your users’ lives.

A visit to the barber shop

Last year, I was walking to the barbershop and started daydreaming about how technology could improve his business.

I thought about how I’d booked my appointment: I’d called him, and he’d looked at his calendar on the wall and told me what times he had available. “What an inefficient system,” I thought. I began to create software (in my mind) that would eliminate these inefficiencies, save him hundreds of dollars a month, and increase sales exponentially. Then I walked in for my haircut and received a reality check.

The conversation went like this:

Me: “So, have you ever tried using scheduling software for your appointments?”

Barber: “Oh man, I’ve tried like ten of them. Terrible! They’re all terrible.”

Me: “Really? None were helpful. Why?”

Barber: “Almost all my bookings happen on the phone or by text message. There’s nothing I’ve found that’s more efficient than looking at a paper calendar on the wall and finding an open slot on it. If I have to walk over to the computer, I’ve already wasted too much time. I have five seconds to look and determine when I have a spare block. All the software I’ve tried gets in the way.”

In one conversation, I saved myself the hassle of creating something people didn’t want. Instead of "code first," I went to a potential customer first. My barber was actively seeking a software solution, so I didn’t build it.

The most important skill

The most essential product marketing tactic you’ll learn in this book is listening.

You’re probably a fan of quantitative research: aggregate numbers that we can collect without human interaction. I’m a fan too! It’s awesome to look at big data sets and be able to crunch the data and observe patterns.

At the beginning of the process, the most helpful data usually isn’t quantitative; it’s qualitative. The advantage with this type of data is that you don’t need much traffic to produce results; you can go out and listen to real people until you start to see trends.

“You can’t track very much in the early days: you just don’t have enough data. Typical “startup metrics” don’t solve your core questions at the beginning: What is my target market? How can I get product-market fit? And most importantly, can I get anyone to pay for this?”
– Lars Lofgren, Fractional VP of Content

In the beginning, you have to answer three critical questions:

1. Which markets am I uniquely positioned to serve?
2. Of those markets, which can I reach efficiently?
3. Are they motivated and financially able to pay for things?

All of this leads to the million-dollar question:

How can I make their lives better with software?

Good marketing isn’t about employing the latest growth hack. At its core, good marketing is correctly identifying a legitimate problem that people will pay you to solve.