Before you know what works

Get our working paper on marketing for startups. Written for the period when the product, the customer, and the business model are all still being discovered.

Most startups aren't failing because their marketing is bad. They're failing because they're trying to do established business marketing on a business that hasn't yet figured out what it is.

Steve Blank defined a startup as a temporary organisation designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

Two words there are important. Temporary: because a startup either finds its model and becomes a different kind of business, or it doesn't. Searching: because, unlike established businesses a startup is looking for its model rather than executing one. Marketing's role in that search is fundamentally different from its role afterwards.

Our 'Before you know what works' working paper is about how marketing needs to function in that early, uncertain phase. And how to build a marketing capability that develops alongside the business, rather than treating marketing as something to bolt on once the model is clear.

Inside:

• A framework for adapting marketing to each of the five stages of startup growth

• The case for treating marketing and product development as one practice, not two

• A method for finding a niche before trying to find a market

• A working argument for balancing growth hacking with growth nurturing

• Reflections drawing on Steve Blank, Eric Ries, April Dunford and Bob Moesta