Who to better market a product if not its founders?
One way for founders to get their products out there is by sharing their journey, learnings, and failures in public.
This is called building in public.
Why does founders marketing make sense?
To increase your product awareness, you need to build an audience surrounding your product. However, as Kevon Cheung said below:
You can’t build an audience surrounding your product without a personal brand. Therefore, as the founder, you need to grow your personal brand.
To grow your personal brand, you need to have a personal voice. Choose a few topics you talk about so your audience know what to expect by following you. No one likes to hear from a person who says this and that randomly.
For example:
- My journey building Product X (building Product X in public)
- My journey as an IndieHacker who left a 6-figure salary job
To have a personal voice, you have to know yourself. Who are you? What are you good at? What have you experienced in life?
Why build in public?
Idea validation and product feedback: Find a few people in the space and share your idea. Interview them:
- What’s missing from the current solution.
- What they did to hack the current solution to achieve what they want.
- If your tool exists, would they pay for it.
Build an MVP: Ask people to beta test your MVP and gather their feedback.
- Iterate your product based on your beta testers’ feedback if it aligns with your goal. Ask them to test your product iteration again.
- Keep doing it until they love your product and are willing to pay.
Typedream’s journey:
- Once we formulated our idea, we immediately tweeted about transforming Notion pages to websites. Since it was a popular topic at the time, hundreds of people wanted to be interviewed to help us validate our solution.
- Once our solution was validated, our team quickly built an MVP, and we shared the MVP in public again. People then gave us real feedback about the product (onboarding flow, missing features, and most importantly, what we needed to do to make them willing to pay).
Building community
Share your journey in public, what you’re building, lessons learned, successes and failures. Build a following of people who are interested in your product.
Get ten people who love your product by iterating your product based on their feedback. Get ambassadors. They are your power users who will market your product to their friends and families.
Typedream‘s journey:
- Through sharing our product in public, we built a community of people who loved our product as the product was made based on their feedback.
- When we launched Typedream to the public, our community helped us build the hype around our launch.
How to get started
Show up every day, try to tweet about something. Treat Twitter as a daily standup.
- What are you going to do today?
- Anything you learned yesterday?
- Any success/failure story to share?
Follow influential people in your space and read what they tweet about.
- If you find a tweet you can relate to, engage in that tweet
- If you’d like to re-tell the story from your own POV, do that, tweet about it
To maintain deeper relationships, utilise DMs.
As you build your business and scale your product, marketing will become increasingly important to securing, connecting with, and retaining customers. And the best way to do it would be through building a promising personal brand.
I hope this article has provided you with some food for thought as you begin to develop your marketing strategy.
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