Early Stage Sales & Marketing Playbook.wav

Speakers: Jackson Moses (Founding Team Member & Head of Partnerships at Mainstreet)

Key Points

• How to run a tight Pre-Seed to Seed fundraise: Venture investing lifecycles have gone from 5 or 6 years to 2 or 3. Funds need to deploy capital fast. Founders are more important to VCs than they generally think. You are what they need. VCs do not eat, live, and breathe what you are building and generally they are not operators. They have collected best practices from osmosis and have seen what success looks like but are not in your shoes. No one knows your business more than you. It is very important that you don’t act on VCs timeline and are confident in yourself. It is okay to get a no and it is better than hanging in limbo for a month. You should have mutual expectations on a decision with the VC. Dictate your own process & terms, present well, and have high confidence. Don’t get pushed around by VCs but also know when you are pushing limits. Your conviction in your own product and business is good. It is okay to push back against VCs.
• How to market your brand early on: Make sure what you are sharing with the world early on is in line with your mission, your vision, and is memorable. Your brand awareness and attention to detail is a strong signal to the public. There are core things early on businesses can fix before they get too big. In terms of a name, you want something unique and memorable rather than something that is general or correlated to a term that is linked to a larger business. Really important at the beginning of your journey that you differentiate by name and can build a unique presents around. This makes accessing your content much easier. Make sure to have a social presents on Twitter, AngelList, Crunchbase, Medium, and have a sleek website. These are all good for fundraising. These things all increase SEO. If your competitors aren’t doing these things they could be seen as inferior.
• Remember no company ended how they started. Pivoting is not a failure. You will constantly iterate on marketing and sales similarly how you do with product. You do need to have north star indicators that you stay true to.
• Go to market strategies: You get one opportunity to set the customer journey and experience straight from the beginning. From the early stage, you don’t need paid social you should tap into your network. The allusion of traction actually leads to traction. Remember that founders help founders and there is quid pro quo in the founder world of you help me I help. Everybody that has done it knows how hard it is to build something from nothing. Always try to identify friendlies who will help out. It’s not a secret or coincidence that everyone’s websites look the same (e.g. backers, testimonials, etc.). It will be hard to fundraise without customer feedback and legit partners.
• Marketing Channels: It’s naive to think you can grow without spending money unless you are more in the B2B channel. When it comes down to B2C direct acquisition paid referrals are a great way to go about this. On the partnership level it is good to find companies who need to grow their user base just as much as you need to that are in a complimentary space. Be comfortable with saying no to partnership opportunities. You will want to say yes to everything but you can’t. First, you have to pin down what your ideal customer profile is. Marketing is an approach to effective distribution that leads to acquisition. Early on don’t be afraid to experiment different strategies to find what works extremely well.