Marketing at an early stage startup is nothing like marketing at a Fortune 500 company. A year and a half into the fast pace of startup life and having done more than I thought was even possible in such a short period of time, I realised that I had to re-think my approach to product marketing. From adopting a customer centric approach and running customer interviews out of a Starbucks, to hacking data to find quick wins. In this keynote I’ll share everything I did and learned about driving growth for an early stage startup.
Maya Grossman:
Hi everyone. My name is Maya Grossman. I am a marketing advisor. In the last year, I've been working with companies to really help them put together their marketing team, sorry, their marketing strategy, so that they can grow and scale. And I've been doing marketing for more than 15 years. I was a marketing executive, worked for companies like Microsoft and Google. But today I want to talk to you about my experiences working for an early stage startup and really understanding how product marketing and understanding your customer can really help you grow and scale. So let's just jump into it. Let me share my screen with you and we can get into it. Perfect. Let's just move this over here, so that we can present.
Maya Grossman:
Okay. So as I mentioned, I want to talk to you today about my experience working for an early stage startup called Colu, and Colu was a digital wallet app. And what that means is that we were working with SMEs to allow them to accept mobile payments without having to buy expensive hardware and kind of changing their point of sale. And on the other hand, we were also responsible for recruiting the end consumers who are using the app because we were building this marketplace and we wanted to make sure that our SMBs had customers who were willing to pay using their phone. And this was a really interesting experience. I joined as the first marketing hire and I had to build marketing from the ground up. And one of the first lessons that I learned is, that you can't assume anything. You really have to validate. You can't rely on your gut feeling or something that you learned during your previous job.
Maya Grossman:
You really have to validate to get data, to get information, to make sure that your assumptions are correct, otherwise you're basically driving with your eyes closed. So every time I join a new company, I start by performing an audit, kind of going back, seeing all the data, all the information that we have to make sure that it's not just based on ideas and assumptions, but rather on actual information. And when I joined Colu early on, we didn't really have that data. We weren't collecting enough data about our customers. So it was pretty challenging to know who our customers were. And there were all these assumptions, so I remember early on talking to the founding team, interviewing the product team, the sales team, even some of the engineers. And there were a lot of assumptions and ideas, but no one really had data. So we thought our customers were predominantly male, we thought they were probably younger in age and potentially tech savvy.
Maya Grossman:
But I didn't have the information, so I wanted to validate it. And all I did is I put together a survey super simple, Google forums and send it out to our entire database at the time that was about 5,000 people. And within a week I had about a 100 submissions. And surprise, surprise, we were talking to a completely different audience. Our audience was actually split evenly between men and women. And our biggest age bracket was actually 30 and above, which was completely the opposite of what we imagined.
Maya Grossman:
And understanding that we have a very different audience than what we assumed was groundbreaking, because now we could tell a different story. We can change our means of communications, we can think about other channels and we're going to be able to deliver a different type of value because those customers wanted something else out of our application. So it was super important that we understood who they were, but demographics are not enough. You also want some qualitative information. You want to be able to talk to customers and really get their point of view. There's something so unique that happens when you let customers speak their minds.
Maya Grossman:
And just to give you an example, when you go through the process of interviews, and I have to be honest, it was really challenging for me. It was a little bit embarrassing to randomly reach out to people sometimes through texts and say, "Hey, do you want to meet me at a Starbucks? So we can have a conversation about this company whose product you're using." And I had to get used to it. It kind of felt like going through online dating all over again. But once I kind of got through that challenge, it became an amazing process. We learned so much. And what I wanted to emphasize here is that when you go through that process of asking questions, you have to be careful not to get your customers bias. You have to be careful not to put words in their mouth or kind of lead with your own assumptions.
Maya Grossman:
You have to start with a blank canvas and make sure that you give them the opportunity to say what they want to say. And just to give you an example, we constantly used mobile payment as a way to explain what we were doing, but customers were continuously using digital wallet and not mobile payments. And we could only figure that out by not feeding them mobile payment when we started the conversation. So just think about it, when you talk to your customers, and make sure that you give them enough time to share their ideas and their thoughts before you actually dive into what you care about from a business perspective.
Maya Grossman:
Yeah. And the second lesson I wanted to talk to you about today has to do with knowing your market. And I know it sounds so obvious, but you will not believe how many people actually skip this step because they kind of know it, they've been in the industry, they know what's happening, but they don't really take the time to reevaluate what's happening right now. And it's not just about knowing who your competitors are and believe me, that's really important, but you also want to understand what are your customer's alternatives? So if they're not using you, do they have better or easier or simpler ways to kind of do what it is that you're trying to help them do? And for us, that was actually the biggest challenge, because you see mobile payment is great, but there's nothing wrong with credit cards.
Maya Grossman:
They are still easy to use. They are pretty accessible. All you have to do is, take the credit card out of your wallet. So our work wasn't so much about differentiating ourselves from competitors early on, it was just about educating customers, why they should even consider mobile payments, why it was better or unique or why it's going to be valuable for them. And the third thing I try to look at when I evaluate a market, I try to think about trends. And it's not always just about trends that happen within your own market. For us, for example, there weren't a lot of changes in the Fintech industry that were relevant to us, but because we were working very locally, so we were going city by city to recruit businesses and customers. Anything that had to do with local economies was really important to us.
Maya Grossman:
And we actually relied on some of these trends to build our story and to differentiate in the market. And this is actually our next lesson, which is all about how you can position yourself out of the competition. And you've probably heard it before, different is better than better. And I always thought it's just a cliche, but I actually ended up using it and it was very successful. So now I'm a little bit more open to it. And just to kind of explain the process we went through. When I started evaluating our value proposition, I looked at our competitors, and this is a real list of value propositions. I just changed the names of the companies so we don't insult anyone, but they all looked the same. I couldn't tell them apart. They were all saying the exact same thing. And I knew it couldn't be just one more mobile payment app.
Maya Grossman:
We had to be different. We had to bring something else to the table, which is what brought us to our initial value proposition. We only wanted to work with small businesses, so we didn't include any retailers or big chains. We wanted to do something good for the local community. And this is what we built our story around. So yes, we were a mobile payment app and you could use your phone and it's easy and convenient, but you were also doing something good for your own city and for your own community as a customer. And on the business side, we were this great partner who wanted to give small businesses, a competitive edge. We wanted to give them what all the big retailers had and we wanted to drive more traffic and more people to buy locally. So it was pretty much a win-win situation. And by telling this story, we got a ton of attention, a lot of PR because this story was so unique and special, and it was also happening right around the time that Brexit happened.
Maya Grossman:
There was a lot of uncertainty in the UK, and this was one of the markets we operated in. So it just kind of was the perfect timing to tell this story. The fourth lesson I wanted to share with you is about understanding how to focus on your best customers. And as an early stage startup early on, yeah, you want to work with anyone who's willing to talk to you. We basically sprayed and prayed, but after a while, when you start working with customers, when you have a nice database or pool of customers, you really need to try and understand who are your best customers, who are your kind of moneymakers, the ones that actually drive revenue because not all businesses are created the same. Yeah, we still spend the same amount of time and money on acquiring them. And from a business perspective, that's just that ROI.
Maya Grossman:
So we had to figure out who are our best customers. And to do that, you have to start with a hypothesis, you have to figure out for your own company and your own product, what are the criterias that are going to make a good customer? And for us, we actually had to. So the first and foremost was about revenue generation. And obviously you want the customers who bring in the biggest revenue but for us, we also had a second criteria that was really important. And that was around acquiring and retaining end consumers. Because you see, business owners every time that someone would walk into their store, they would actually convince them to download the app and become a customer. So they were driving a big portion of a marketplace. So when we looked at best customers, it wasn't just about revenue, but it was also that how much they were helping us increase our overall community.
Maya Grossman:
And once we had those two criterias, we had to go back to our database and actually rank our customers, but we didn't have the information about driving registration. We never thought we had to track that data, so we had to get really creative. So here's what we did. I was working with the product team. We didn't really have a data scientist. So we just had to kind of wing it and make it work. We were working with a software called Mixpanel. This is where all our data was. And we had to play with it to find the information that we needed. What we decided to do, we looked at customers who downloaded the app and made a purchase within a 10 minute timeframe. And every time we could do that, we attribute that customer to the store where the purchase was made.
Maya Grossman:
It's not accurate, but it was close enough that we could get that information without starting to track it from scratch. So once we had that information, we ranked our entire customer database and we started focusing on the top 30%. And because we didn't really have any fancy tools, it was basically about looking at the data and trying to figure out what do those companies have in common. And it wasn't a size. Some of them were bigger. Some of them were smaller. It wasn't employee count. It wasn't their location. Some of them were, in the center of the city, some of them were in the suburbs. So we kind of wrecked our heads with it for a while. And what we ended up with, we realized that the businesses who were driving the most value to us, they had some component of habit to them.
Maya Grossman:
So whether it's buying your coffee every morning, or having lunch every day, or even buying food for your pets, something that happens at least once a week, it has some repetitive elements. Those businesses were the biggest revenue drivers. And last we realized that the sales team started focusing only on those types of businesses, but we didn't really want to disregard everyone else. So we created a self-service option on our website. It was just a lending page where businesses could apply to become our partners. They would fill in all their information, and they would have an onboarding conversation with one of our reps, but that was different than actually going through the entire sales process and the whole town heading that, the sales team was doing with our best customers. And early on our numbers actually dropped.
Maya Grossman:
So we really had to be long-term greedy and make sure that we wait long enough to see the results and the results at the end were very positive. We actually increased our revenue significantly by focusing on our best customers. So sometimes you just need a little bit of patience to make sure that, a strategic move is actually paying off. And last but the not least, and this is probably the most important lesson that I'm going to talk to you about today. If you don't take anything else, just remember this, you have to talk to your customers. And I know it is so much easier to rely on emails or surveys than actually meeting people in person, but you're going to miss out on so much if you don't do this. So here's a good example. When I worked for Colu, I went on a road trip with our VP of product.
Maya Grossman:
We had this line of features coming up and we wanted to talk to business customers to see what they thought about our features. But we were smart enough to know that we have to start with a blank canvas. Like I mentioned before, we had to ask really general questions and let our customers speak their mind. And it's really good that we did, because we discovered something completely new, something we would have never thought about. So you see small businesses rely heavily on cashflow. It's basically their lifeline. And when they were working with other processors like Visa and MasterCard, they could see money in the bank within 24 hours of making a purchase. And when we were processing money for them, we could only settle with them once every other week. So we were basically holding these businesses money, hostage for almost two weeks at a time.
Maya Grossman:
And it just didn't work for them. They really needed that cashflow. So they didn't care about how fast the app was. They didn't care about the new features, all they wanted is to get their money earlier and on time. And once we realized that we went back and we actually completely changed our roadmap, we only focused on giving them what they needed. And the result was amazing because once we were able to do that, it was much easier to onboard customers, and they were much likely to encourage customers to use the app. So retention went up significantly as well. So this just goes to show, sometimes you have to talk to your customers, and you don't have to wait until you have a specific feature or a product that you want to test. You should probably do it on an ongoing basis and create a process.
Maya Grossman:
And this is what we ended up doing at Colu. We had this advisory board on their consumer side, and we were setting up interviews once every month on the business side. And to be honest, it is so simple to make it happen. We just wrote this really nice email that invited our customers to become beta testers, to become part of our community, where they could see features before they go out, they can share feedback and they can really help us shape the product. And all they had to do is maybe spend an hour with us every now and then. And we got a ton of people who wanted to participate. We put them in a Google group, and then every month when we wanted to have a session, we would just shoot out an email to everyone and tell them, this is a time and place can you make it?
Maya Grossman:
And we would end up with like 10 or 15 people actually coming over and having a conversation with us. And throughout the entire time that we did this, I'm sure we came across amazing insights. And it was also super helpful every time that we wanted to really shape a new product or a new feature, it was super helpful to get feedback from customers directly. So to be honest, this is probably the best growth hack that I know. Just talking to your customers and more importantly, listening to them and then taking action, because if you don't actually do something with those insights, it doesn't really have impact on your company. And our conversations with customers, were probably the biggest drivers of growth for Colu early on. So yeah, just make sure that you talk to your customers on a regular basis. Yeah and that's pretty much it.
Maya Grossman:
Thank you so much for spending time with me. I hope this was useful. I know a lot of those lessons are pretty basic, but sometimes you really have to make sure that you focus on what matters and, validating your assumptions, understanding your markets so you can position yourself better and talking to customers. Those are probably the biggest lessons and they apply to smaller startups as well as bigger companies. And sometimes you just have to remember that basic could be really important. So thank you so much again. Feel free to stay in touch and shoot me an email, if you want to talk about anything, I'm always happy to talk about marketing. Thank you.
