By: Noah Kagan
When I first got the job at Mint, Aaron Patzer (founder) told me I had to get Mint.com 100,000 users 6 months after launching. I began by making a start up marketing plan. Honestly, I was a bit nervous.
The result: after 6 months Mint had over 1 million
How did that happen?
First off, the product was awesome. That makes marketing less about “marketing” and more about educating and sharing with people. Still, there is always that annoying quote about if a tree falls, blah blah you know what I mean.
Instead of doing “social media marketing” and flailing around with random posts throughout the web we needed a framework and a new approach to pre-launch marketing.
Quant Based Marketing.
Work backwards to the solution of what you need (that is the best way to guarantee success) and map it in Excel. Dave McClure is an Excel / PowerPoint guru if you ever need some inspiration.
Target: 100,000 users in 6 months.
This is the KEY to any pre-launch marketing you are doing.
Most people have the tendency to wait for their thing to launch, email a few friends, tweet about it and get on their knees to pray it works.
There are two columns, total users and confirmed users. When you setup your metrics on the pre-launch and then confirm the marketing channels you cannot fail. Only confirmed matters!!
You must confirm the marketing ahead of time: blogs, twitterers, ad buys, etc… Don’t leave it up to chance.
The Meat:
- Make your target list prior to launch.
- Figure out your target list through: wefollow.com, Buzzsumo, google searches, pick specific niches (at Mint it was Personal Finance, geeks (Paul Stamatiou) and GTD people) and other wild ways
- Track with the Google Spreadsheet to know what’s working and what’s not.
- Consider testing 2-3 different messages to people to see which get highest responses.
- Use new methods to get a hold of people. Don’t be like everyone else
- Oh yea, build a great product.
Source: Noah Kagan (AppSumo)
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