As we step into 2024, I'm curious to know what resolutions other startup founders have set for themselves.
My top resolutions: - Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I'm cringe every time I do it. - Attend at least one networking event a week. - Contact much more people (prospects, partners or VCs) I've been pretty product-focused up to now to build it, but it's time to be obsessed by sales. - Exercise. This isn't really business-related, but it's more about understanding that I need to take some time for myself, because building a business is a marathon, not a sprint.
Is this what people that create all Twitter and LinkedIn cringe content tell themselves? Why do it?
You really can't come up with any way to market your company that feels good? Can't you think a bit more about the problem and frame it as "what can I do that is net positive, doesn't make me feel like crap while doing it and will still get the word out"?
Why does it have to be "beat myself up continuously until I'm as bad as the other bad guys"? Is it just because it's easy to do cringe posts in 30seconds on LinkedIn? I think it is.
My product was featured in random tech blogs, the “PC magazine” stuff that a lot of techies look down on. At one time, it was also featured in a high-profile trendy tech magazine. Initially, it drove a lot of traffic. But after only a few days, things were back to normal, and the user uptick was minimal. It turned out that even though not cool at all, the tech blogs were much better for me, because they had visitors that needed my product.
The point is: the spaces you hang out can make you think that “every important thing and person is here”, which can distort your view of the world. As a business you want to be where your customers are. You don’t have to be a “thought leader”.
The fault here is on the platforms, they reward these practices, or maybe they just don't interfere and that content is really what drives people to interact with the content.
Either way, when you're playing a game, you reinforce what's working. When you watch your competitors eating your cake, unless you manage to come up with a strategy of your own, you end up going down that route sooner or later.
I think we just have too many trash products (software and non-software) which no one really needs. This is why there are massive spam/ad campaigns everywhere to convince people that they need "new trash product xy".
One of the problems being that you cannot really build wealth today by doing your job as an employee in most cases. The result is that more and more people want a piece of the "founders pie" even though they don't have any valuable product to add.
And this not only applies to founders/start-ups.. when I look around I see 95% of all products as trash. Established big corps are guilty just the same. If you bought a washing machine 20 years ago there is a good chance it is still running. Today my washing machine has AI but dies after 3 years..
Sorry for the rant.. I hope some founder has as a resolution to make actually useful and durable products.
Here are examples of what not to do -> https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/
2) I don't think that everything on Linkedin is cringe, there is a lot of very interesting people out there. I find my own posts cringe like for example, I find celebrating my birthday narcissistic, but I love celebrating other people's birthdays and I don't think their posts are cring. It's just a weird cognitive bias I'm trying to fight.
3) Of course there are other ways of marketing my product, and most of it doesn't come from these networks. But building an audience is always useful.
4) I was only sharing good resolutions, i.e. actions to stop procrastinating on specific points. However, my goals and plan of attack for my company are very different from that.
I mean ... I'm really not looking forward to reading all the 'I'm delighted' posts on linkedin when I get back to the office ...
I am giving myself 6-ish months to release a product enough that it can start taking income and see how it goes. That’s my mission for 2024 :)
I've seen pretty great (not always financially successful) things come out of people genuinely enjoying their work.
Validating things with customers - in my experience - can be extremely tricky as they might not even know what they want
So with that in mind, I've pretty much settled on learning Svelte, Tailwind, and DaisyUI, as well as really working hard to bone up on javascript / CSS fundamentals. The goal is to get to a point where I can build front-ends for tools that I use for myself, and for products at least up to a demo / MVP level.
I'll probably never be a web-design guru, but that's not really the goal. I just need to be able to build things end-to-end without needing to pull in somebody else.
Everyone I ask for advice tells me to just start with 10 a week and see where it goes after a few months. So that's what I'm going to do.
Dev wise, going to try and develop plugins for more marketplaces as a means of improving the visibility of the product (confluence, slack, mattermost, etc).
When I started last year, I told myself I need to get competent at sales, or I will always need some CEO by my side and never have a business that's truly my own. Now I'm pretty decent at sales, but I can't fully leverage that since I don't have enough prospects to truly scale things. So figuring marketing out seems like my biggest lever.
How, I don't know yet. Pretty sure I won't post anything on LinkedIn I consider to be cringy :) What I already did is hire a fractional CMO to coach me - getting help from people already good at this seems like a reasonable tactic.
But I'd definitely exercise caution: Most marketing people I met have been the "let's do fancy rebranding, post on social media and go to events" types. Took me a while to find someone more suited to what I'm looking for. More strategic, less... arbitrary.
- Holding myself and my co-founders accountable with metrics. If we say we're going to reach out to potential customers there will be a number/time_period involved.
- Doing with intention with a direct goal and deadline instead of just generally building.
Last year I spent 90% of my time coding. The last 2 months of the year I talked to more businesses than I have in the last 3 years and started to see progress in idea development. My team just bought ZoomInfo and we're setting up HubSpot. My #1 goal is to spend time on the business and not just code 60 hours a week.
If marketing is making you cringe, you're marketing to the wrong audience
That is todays Mantra it seems. But there is no second chance to correct a first impression, if your rushed prototype was too rushed and no one gets the value beneath the flaws. It really depends on your product and market.
For the past 3 years, I was the kind of "it has to be done in a weekend", now I am trying to focus on getting it right, explore possibilities, reflect, and then execute.
I also set longer deadlines for myself now (3-6 months instead of a week or two).
I don't really want to play the LinkedIn game (at least for now).
I need to continue to increase my presence there, and I feel an almost physical resistance.
Feel dirty whenever I put my marketing hat on and wade into that pool of narcissists.
I'm seeing as many people as I can in person to try to keep myself sane, and in the meantime reminding myself that most of the stuff on there is (thankfully) paid/ghostwritten/chatgpt and not organic.
I'd guess that for another company which is B2B but with an audience more technical than ours (easily achieved) it wouldn't be/seem as important.
I am curious why you are concluding this if you dislike it so much? I am not judging here, I definitely recognize the feeling..
There are some people who have climbed to relative positions of power not by producing value but by playing the business social metagame.
It's not about having the best quality product, there are two ways to reach those people. They need to either see you as a means to an end for them (caveat: they only deal in shallow self-promotional narratives, not nuance or detail), or they need to see you as one of them.
If the competition weren't happily(?) playing the game it wouldn't be necessary, but given that they do and that I have an obligation to shareholders I have to play along.
