Simon Martelo

Founders: Find something that is both important to you and resonates with a group of people at this particular moment in time. In the early days you’ll need to frame your story—to recruits, to partners, to investors, and to the entire outside world—along those lines. Talk about why your company matters, not just what it does. Make sure your product... See more

3. Amazing Customer Care is your best marketing tool: - Separating customer care and marketing may leave them with non-aligned goals and as your company starts growing, with communication problems. This can be avoided by making customer care part of your marketing strategy, coexisting in a harmonious symbiosis.

Understand your audience. You must know who, precisely, you are building for. Understanding this early on in your company life cycle can be especially powerful, as it allows you to prioritize acquisition efforts. The hope is to build an early user base that will drive you toward your end goal.

It’s critical to start with the right set of early customers to kick off all the self-reinforcing growth cycles we’ve discussed above. You have to start by knowing who your best early customers will be — for productivity/collaboration companies that’s often knowledge workers on remote and distributed teams, and often engineers.

That next endeavor that you launch, whether it’s creating handcrafted products for the farmers market, starting a new coffee shop, if you share your story and give people a way to follow your journey, they will. Some will buy your products, others will tell their friends, and still more will cheer you on.

An audience is actually easier to build than... See more