5 most common launch mistakes that lead to 0 customers

Launched a new product but…can’t hit your marketing targets?

You are not alone.

Every week founders reach out to me about this for their tech startup.

Founders share that they:

1. Spent weeks / months building a product

2. Launched their startup but can’t get customers

3. Got a few early adopters but can’t get more

4. Can’t figure out how to monetize

5. Can’t find time for marketing

I have been there 2x times:

• At the first startup, I joint after they had early traction and was tasked with solving exactly this problem: why can’t we get customers? I discovered the root cause, and re-launched the product surpassing 10K MRR while setting the foundation for much more.

• For the second one, I joint pre-product. This time I knew better. We launched with thousands of users. But, still made some mistakes.

I’ve easily spent 10,000+ hours working on / with startups on 0 to 1 marketing and advising founders on launching their tech startups.

I’ve seen the same few mistakes with tech startup launches. I’ve also learnt how to avoid them to increase your chances of achieving product-market fit, without burning cash and time.

Here are the 5 most common mistakes I’ve seen tech startups make (and made them myself!) including a solution for each:

0 to 1 marketing is all about the process - come up with a hypothesis, execute, learn and iterate. There is no room for perfection. Founders often dwell on the ‘right’ strategy or tactics. The likelihood of your first hypothesized marketing plan being correct is far too slim.

Solution: Build a marketing routine to allow for an iterative process.

E.g. If you only have 20 hours to give to marketing this month, it’s better to spread it out in one-hour blocks over the entire month so you can be learn and adapt. This iterative process is important to figuring out a marketing strategy and routine that actually works for you and your tech startup.

2) Mistake: No alignment with the business.

If you’re like most founders, you are managing marketing for your tech startup all on your own, along with other competing priorities for the business eg. the product. Often I see founders, even if they are a team of 1 or 2, thinking about product, marketing and other operations separately. This leads to marketing work feeling disconnected and overwhelming. For many, it just falls off the list.

Solution: Connect marketing to the next business milestone.

This is the best use of your limited marketing time and budget. Set one to two marketing objectives for the month that align with the next business milestone you’re trying to hit. Eg. If you want to get to 100 customers or $1 million in ARR, your objective this month might be to get 15 customers or $10,000 in MRR, and next month your objective might be to grow 2x month over month.

Whenever I am advising or coaching a founder, I always ask: what is your marketing objective? If they don’t have one, the first thing we do together is set them. Every month, in the Founder-Led Marketing Club, founders get peer feedback on their objectives and brainstorm new ideas to achieve them.

3) Mistake: Throwing spaghetti at the wall.

I said there’s no room for perfection, so the other alternative is to ‘just try things and see what works’, right? Wrong. I see founders waste months with this approach, and often they run out of steam (and money) to keep going before they hit product-market fit.

Solution: Be thoughtful about what you prioritize every single week.

0 to 1 marketing is also about being strategically scrappy. This doesn’t mean long strategy docs. Instead, it means taking 15 mins of your weekly marketing time to pause to define your marketing priorities for the week. How do they align back to your marketing objectives for the month?

4) Mistake: Broad target audience.

This is often the *root cause* for a failed launch. I recently shared about 3 founders who reached out to me in the same week facing this situation. Founders often say to me, “but our product is for a much wider audience”. Picking a specific target segment feels like a compromise on your vision. But if you try to appeal to everyone, you resonate with no one.

Solution: Start with a specific target segment and obsess about their problems.

Yes, investors want to see that you have a large TAM (total addressable market), and your dream is to build a billion dollar business. But you need to start with a super specific segment. You dramatically increase your odds of getting your early customers because you will know where to find them, have authentic conversations with them about their problems, and can build a marketing playbook to capture this segment. Then you can expand out or sideways, building on your learning (and revenue!). This isn’t a sacrifice of your dreams. It is just taking the right (and easier) first step towards it.

But, what about your billion-dollar dream? This is just the beginning! Most unicorns started with something specific e.g. AirBnB started with 3 airbeds in the founders San Francisco apartment!

P.S. Are you one of these founders running marketing?
You could get help setting your marketing objectives, feedback on your priorities, and weekly accountability to keep making progress. Want in? Apply to join other smart, kind founders in the Founder-Led Marketing Club.

5) Mistake: Ignoring revenue.

Waitlists and email sign ups are a useful starting point. It’s also smart to have free users whether on a trial or as part of a free beta to inform the product roadmap and validate some key marketing hypotheses. But, ultimately one of the riskiest hypotheses for most tech startups is, ‘is there a target market that is willing to pay to solve this problem’?

Solution: Ask for money, not just about.

Launch a paid offer asap. This could be a manual / service version of the tech solution you are building, or it could be a specific minimal viable product targeting your super specific segment’s pain points. This will help validate the demand for the product. You’ll learn about marketing including pricing. And, it doesn’t hurt to start to generate revenue either, does it?

BONUS:
6) Mistake: Lack of learning to inform the next stage.

If you nail the above 5, you’ll end up with marketing that is working for you. If not, you will likely run into a wall. Either way, you need to know what did or did not work so you can prioritize new marketing experiments accordingly.

Solution: Set up basic tracking for marketing asap.

Monitoring does not need to be complex. Simply get started with a free Google Analytics account including conversions. I also like Hotjar or a similar tool to understand how customers are engaging with your landing page. Finally, create a simple Google sheet to track your funnel metrics at least monthly.

In a recent strategy session with a B2C SaaS startup with ~40 paying subscribers, I provided the key metrics to track including benchmarks, and a sheets template they can customize. We also discussed how they will use their existing data, even if limited, to guide decision-making for which segments to capture first, and which channels to prioritize. It is never too early, nor too late, to add structure with the right metrics to your marketing routine!

I get it. All this can feel daunting.
But, it doesn’t need to.

One founder recently said to me, “what if I set marketing objectives and then I can’t hit them? It feels easier not to set any goals instead.”

I empathize with this because I have been there.

I’ve learnt that to hit marketing goals we need 3 simple things:

1. Useful frameworks to identify the right marketing priorities

2. A bit of accountability and structure to actually make progress on them

3. A supportive community for when we inevitably get stuck

That’s why, based on demand from founders, I created the Founder-Led Marketing Club - an invite-only community-driven program for founders running marketing at their tech startups. If you are ready to make real progress on marketing for your tech startup, apply to join other smart, kind founders doing the same.

Have follow-up questions, feedback on this post, or requests for the next one? I’m always just an email away!