{"id":15621,"date":"2018-06-01T22:14:26","date_gmt":"2018-06-01T21:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/?p=15621"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:55:39","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:55:39","slug":"startup-marketing-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/startup-marketing-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Startup marketing: strategies for year one"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most important tasks for any early stage startup are to write code and talk to users. When we started Intercom the latter was my job.<\/p>\n

About 50 percent of my time was spent communicating with potential users, whether that was asking them to try Intercom over email, meeting them at conferences, responding to them in blog comments or talking to them on Hacker News.<\/p>\n

Looking back, I didn\u2019t see these activities as marketing with a capital M, but they absolutely were. They allowed us to reach an entirely new audience who would never have heard of Intercom had I not talked to them. If you were to look at the first 100 paying customers for Intercom, I\u2019d bet most came from one of these channels.<\/p>\n

Probably the most common question I get about this phase is some version of \u201cWhere did you find the time?\u201d, and the answer I give is always the same: the same place we found the time for writing code, designing our product, raising capital, etc. You have the time; you\u2019ve just decided that these tasks are lower priority. I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Building an audience<\/h2>\n

There\u2019s a great story in Dr. Seuss\u2019 “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.” It\u2019s about a boy who, no matter how many hats he removes, always finds another underneath. Founding a startup is a lot like this. You\u2019re likely going to wear multiple hats\u200a and juggle them continuously.<\/p>\n

The plan was simple: get people to learn about Intercom and talk about Intercom<\/p>\n

In the very early days of Intercom the marketing hat fell on my head, but I\u2019d be doing marketing a disservice (and 2011 Des a disservice) if I said that\u2019s what I thought I was doing. I didn\u2019t have a perfectly mapped out startup marketing strategy. I certainly didn’t have an \u201cacquisition strategy.\u201d The plan was simple: get people to learn about Intercom and talk about Intercom. So I was the person responsible for writing the blog, meeting people at conferences, speaking onstage, etc.<\/p>\n

These tactics worked because they appealed to the types of people we were selling to. Writing articles about how to run a SaaS business<\/a>, how to scale a SaaS business<\/a>, how to grow your audience<\/a> and how to pick your features<\/a> was the best way to reach our audience \u2013 people working in small SaaS companies like Intercom. Our audience was approachable, attainable and addressable.<\/p>\n

Choosing a tactic for your addressable market<\/h2>\n

Does that mean that everyone should invest in content marketing early on? Absolutely not. Depending on the industry, customer type and addressable market at your disposal, picking the wrong marketing tactic can leave you dead before you\u2019ve even started.<\/p>\n

You have to start by understanding the behaviors of the people you\u2019re trying to reach<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re building a new iPhone game aimed at children under 12, opinionated articles on the industry aren’t going to help you get traction. At a fundamental level, marketing is about reaching people. And you can’t reach people in ways that they’re not reachable. Much like you can\u2019t ring people who don\u2019t have a phone, you can\u2019t \u201ccontent market\u201d<\/a> to people who don’t read nor to industries that aren\u2019t as self reflective as SaaS. You have to start by understanding the behaviors of the people you\u2019re trying to reach, and then choose a particular marketing tactic based on those exhibited behaviors.<\/p>\n

For example:<\/p>\n