Simon Martelo

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.

Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good.Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before... See more

Some founders are not only the first-and-best sales-person, but also natural evangelists. More, they’re on a mission to educate the world about their passion. They don’t see a lack of interest as a barrier, but as an opportunity to change minds. That is a difficult, expensive, and slow path7, but it is a path, and one that could result in zealous,

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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.

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.

You can stand out by offering unique features for your biggest supporters and early adopters. Nothing creates a more powerful marketing initiative than rewarding your current top supporters. They’ll go out and sell for you like crazy when they are regularly acknowledged and rewarded for being part of the founding community.