Product marketing tips for startups

I found myself always playing catch-up in early-stage product marketing. The product changes fast, the founders present differently at every call, and we're all still figuring out what works anyway.

Here are a few tips which would've helped my younger self. Caveat: I'm still learning and things evolve quickly.

It's your job to bring high-level clarity on the product

Unless you work in an authoritarian-style startup with an enlightened founder, different founders and leaders will often have different visions for the product.

As a (product) marketing leader, you'll need to define one way to present your product. At least to get tranquility for a few months — I recommend aiming for 6 and knowing it'll die much faster.

So get the CEO to sign off on a standard message to present the product. How?

Website > messaging doc

It's likely that the CEO will keep changing the message. To avoid commenting battles on Google Docs, I recommend treating your website as the source of truth.

H1, product features, benefits, persona... All these should be clear on your home page, which should be updated with every change anyway. Then save yourself some time and extract the messaging guidelines from there, ideally with a skills.md doc that updates itself at a set cadence.

When joining, first start with product marketing

How to present the product is often the main weakness of early-stage startups. Unclear positioning (what is it?), changing ICP (who is it for?), missing benefits (what's the value?)...

Resist launching a bunch of new activities if the above is not set, as it should obviously direct what to do. Instead, here's a contrarian opinion...

Take the time to really understand your users and customers

That's the basis of marketing. Whatever your core skills, you should intimately know who your users are, why they use the product, where they hang out, etc.

Challenge what your product, sales, and customer teams will tell you and build your own understanding. That's the only way you can assert what marketing initiatives are worth doing and decide where to spend your time.

Don't pay attention to the fluff

There's a new framework out every day (or hour?) revolutionizing how to present products. Outside of the standard positioning by April Dunford, most will be aimed at Frankenstein products to be simplified on highly detailed slides in large orgs, of no use in early stages.

Keep things simple and clear for your marketing team, and challenge when things start to spill out (e.g. matrix of different messages per industry and persona that marketing should maintain). Use principles and pray that the sales team thinks for themselves instead of sending the old deck anyway.