Startup geek around town

Telling your story – episode 1

Over the past few months I have been watching new technologies come to life  in the silicon forest of Portland.  Although I see some great new solutions that actually have a fighting chance, it has become clear to me that messaging is something that eludes even the smartest of the entrepreneurs.  It seems to me that there is almost a void when it comes to the concept of marketing with the small teams.  The focus remains on the technology for the duration of the project and only at the very end of the cycle the team spends a morning at a coffee shop trying to figure out how to market what they have built.   In a three part series of posts beginning with this one, I plan to  offer a bit of my assistance to help the young company come to grips with the fact that marketing must be part of the bigger process.  Marketing must be something you think of when you start your project, as your build your project and even past the day you launch the project.  Marketing isn’t just using twitter to tell your peeps about your cool application, it’s a process that takes some thought and process.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Marketing isn’t always about yelling “Sunday Sunday Sunday, big monster trucks in the mud.”  Marketing is as subtle as a simple story that explains what you are doing.  Unfortunately many think that marketing is rather simple and doesn’t really require much thought.  This would be yet another one of those mistakes that the entrepreneur can make.  Creating your story takes a little patience on your part and an understanding of what your target market wants to hear.  Creating the story is more than telling the world why you build something or what it actually does.  Telling the story is explaining why the software will help the user in terms that the USER understands.

Let me offer a scenario to make my point.  You are at a cocktail party and you are mingling around the group.  As you make your way across the room you are approached by the slick salesman wearing his pimped out suit and shiny shoes.  He introduces himself and starts to tell you all the great things about his condo project.  The earth quake proof building and how it took a design team 5 years to architect it.  He talks about the two story glass pool.  He talks about the great access to public transportation and the soundproof walls and the high speed elevators.  He goes on and on about the condo project.  You sip your drink and smile politely waiting for the opportunity to escape.  After he divulges all these great amenities he asks you if you would like to stop by to see the project.  You politely decline, telling him you like your home and aren’t in the market for a new one.    Finally you walk away and think to yourself, wow that’s 5 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Let’s make the correlation to what I see with software companies.  Many of the companies are just like this sales guy.  They start to spew out feature after feature hoping that something in there will gain interest by someone (I think we call this throwing s*&t against the wall to see what sticks).  They think to themselves “If I show all the features or how many whiz bang buttons I have, the audience will see for themselves that our solution is vastly superior and they will use it instead of the competitor.”   DING DING DING….wake up! This won’t happen.  Success isn’t a magical event.  It’s a planned strategy that takes time, hard work and great timing.

To create your story, the first step is to define your audience.   I won’t harp too much on target market, but if you have read my previous posts you are starting to see a pattern.  Once you know who you are speaking to, you will have the insight to speak to them in the terms that they will understand.  Your story should use words that make sense to the audience. If you are speaking to small business owners, drop the techno-jargon.  If you are speaking to doctors, talk about patients, medical records and insurance forms.    Do a little research about your target markets and find out how they refer to the issues or challenges that you solve.  Create a list of these keywords to use later in the process just like you would create simple functions to use later in your code.

As an example, if your application manages documents then get more specific based upon your audience.  In the case of MioWorks.com, we help to manage documents between companies and their customers across six verticals. But instead of just saying documents we look deeper at our target markets and find out the types of documents they use on a day to day basis.  This allows us to talk to our customers in terms that they will associate with and easily draw conclusions between our software and their business.

Now that you know how to “talk the talk” it’s time to take a walk through your own solution.  Put on your customer hat and view your application as if you were a customer.  Think about a day in the life of that person.  Think about how they would actually use your software.  One ritual I always perform with my applications is to physically set up an instance as each customer type.  I then try to mimic their use of the solution.  I also try to find a few people I know to help me simulate the role of the customer.   Afterward we have a chat about what we thought were the most compelling reasons for using the software.  At the end of this session you should have the foundation to your messaging and this is what we need to move onto the next step of creating your story.

Stay tuned for episode 2.