Marketing Debt

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Target Marketing 101 for Startups

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Picking a marketing strategy is a lot harder for startups than it sounds. Why is that? Basically, it means making three inter-related decisions (that is, the answers to #2 and #3 change as #1 changes):

  1. Who are you talking to? That’s your Target Market.

  2. What are you talking to them about? This is the Frame of Reference, or the product category or the group of competitors to be dealt with.

  3. Why should they choose you? This is your Point of Differentiation.

But notice, the first key decision is “Who is the target market?”

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A Marketing Startup Story: What was it Like to be a Passenger on the “Titanic”?

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When White Star decided to change strategy from building fast ships to building large ships, it still needed to find a way to differentiate its ships. So, it decided that the Titanic would be both the largest and the “finest” ship in the world. Its innovations would rival even today’s massive cruise ships. To accomplish this goal, it had a number of engineering and design challenges to overcome – 

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Is Our Product Finished Yet? Secret Answer: For Startups, the Product is Never Finished

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One of the fun things we did as part of writing “The Titanic Effect” was explore stories of startup successes. One of the first stories we dig into in the book is that of Randy Hetrick who created the TRX fitness system. So, let’s talk about how he developed this product.

Randy Hetrick was a Navy Seal on deployment on an anti-piracy mission in Southeast Asia in 1997. He was looking for a way to exercise in the limited confines…

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Why Getting to Product/Market Fit can Sink a Startup

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The most important job of a startup in the early stages is figuring out product/market fit. Turns out that this is much, much harder than it sounds like. You know the basic story:

-     Entrepreneur has a great idea for an unsolved problem to fix

-     They envision what they think needs to be done to fix it

-     They built that product (BTW – when we say product, it could be either a product or a service)