#MVP #Startup #Business #Marketing #Engagement #SocialMedia #DigitalMarketing
So, you’ve put in months of hard work and dedication to develop your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and it’s almost ready for launch – congratulations! 🎉 But what’s next? How do you ensure that your MVP reaches its full potential and attracts the right audience? In this article, we will discuss the key steps you need to take to secure successful engagement and drive growth for your startup.
Identify Your Target Audience 🎯
Before you dive into marketing your MVP on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, it’s crucial to first identify your target audience. Who are the people that will benefit the most from your product or service? Conduct market research, analyze your competition, and create buyer personas to gain a better understanding of your potential users. By knowing your target audience, you can tailor your marketing efforts to reach the right people and generate more engagement.
Develop a Strong Marketing Strategy 🚀
With your target audience in mind, it’s time to develop a robust marketing strategy to promote your MVP effectively. Utilize social media platforms to create engaging content, run targeted ads, and collaborate with influencers to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your MVP. Leverage the power of social media analytics to track the performance of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing efforts.
Focus on User Engagement and Feedback 💬
To build a strong user base for your MVP, it’s essential to focus on user engagement and gather feedback from your early adopters. Encourage users to provide reviews, testimonials, and suggestions for improvement to enhance the user experience and drive continuous innovation. By listening to your users’ feedback and addressing their needs, you can build a loyal customer base and improve the overall success of your MVP.
Pitch Your Business Case to Investors 📈
As you work towards achieving your growth projections, it’s vital to prepare a compelling business case to pitch to potential investors, such as venture capitalists (VCs) or angel investors. Showcase the value proposition of your MVP, highlight your competitive advantage, and present your growth strategy to demonstrate the scalability and potential ROI of your startup. By articulating a clear vision and convincing business case, you can attract funding and support to fuel the growth of your MVP.
In conclusion, the key to securing successful engagement for your MVP lies in understanding your target audience, developing a strong marketing strategy, focusing on user engagement and feedback, and pitching your business case to investors. By following these steps and staying proactive in your approach, you can drive growth, build a strong user base, and position your startup for success in the competitive marketplace. Good luck on your entrepreneurial journey! 🚀
Next you show your MVP to a bunch of customers, collect feedback and iterate the product based on insights from your most passionate customers. Rinse and repeat until you have a solid product and dedicated customer base. Go raise money, make it bigger, and chill on a yacht in Marbella after that. Happy days.
Yah building resources around customers. When you have a large TAM if this is the case, and it almost always is for C2C, having active users and an engagement or sign up funnel is important.
Working your way into having, just like an example to provide food for thought.
– Maybe like you end up building a podcast for one side of the funnel, and an email list or newsletter or even nothing for the other.
– And so the sort of middle ground, is that you’re building metrics and MAU which can attract investors and partners for the project, simultaneously, there’s some form of a valuable model which can take advantage of economies of scale and networks.
Basically, again super generalized without knowing anything about the product space, you’re able to say, “even when we’re not growing, we’re growing, and these are the things which any entrepreneur says is always enviable.”
Away from this, whatever ideas of paid or organic social and audience curation, ends up making sense, you’re able to sort of generally get into this point as well. It should make sense when it makes sense, because your MVP is in production and users are having experiences and staying on the platform.
This is the thing we hear on stages, sometimes…the 10% of the time, Tony Xu of Doordash could say, or Uber guy, Lyft guy, “we could have done anything, and it would have worked.” It’s basically saying, if the product is good enough, everything is free.
Short answer: how do you know what you built is actually a minimum viable product?
Building an MVP is the beginning of a phase of discovery. The next step is definitely not marketing! You need to spend time figuring out if you’ve built the right features for your target market.
That involves tons of user feedback, making lots of changes and could even lead you to abandon what you built and pivot to something else. Let feedback and metrics guide you, even if they’re bad.
The biggest mistake founders make is rushing to promote what they’ve built.
Race to finding one customer by hand. Through people you already know, go and find someone who actually wants it enough to pay you. Then do that again. You will find you’ve missed big things and built stuff wrong, and you will wish you had started by serving customers instead.
When you’ve managed to serve a lot of customers and they’re delighted, make sure you figure out why they’re _actually_ choosing and using your thing.
Don’t do any marketing at scale until you know that.
What have the customers that you interviewed before you got started say? They are the ones you need to be talking to, getting users, and monetizing with regards to.
Consider leveraging influencer marketing and targeted advertising to reach potential users and stand out from competitors.
now the real work begins.
– find first 5 customers
– refine ICP
– fix bugs, add requested features
– marketing funnels
– cold calling/emailing
get churn down then double down on funnels
Share what the product / service is so we can help you brainstorm the right GTM strategies
You’ll want to keep figuring-out (refining) your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and, in turn, refining your MVP into something you can actually sell (Minimum Sellable Product, and eventually into Product-Market Fit, which is a step and steps beyond an MVP).
As others have pointed out, you gotta get your MVP out in front of potential ideal customers, to the extent you’ve defined them. You’re looking for quality over quantity (ie fewer ICPs vs more non-ICPs) but if you can get a bunch of near-ICPs already then even better, potentially.
Just be careful about the “signals” you get going forward. They can be extremely focusing and targeted (on your inital set of “must-haves” vs “nice-to-haves” functionality to deliver an initial set of desired outcomes). But the signals can also become very distracting and lead you astray or even demoralize you if you’re not focused on your ICPs and their desired outcomes.
If you had talked to a group of potential customers in creating your MVP then this group could be a great place to start.
And remember that intent and praise and kind words are cool and all and *are* signals of some sort…but ultimately you’re looking for a small set of people/companies who will put their $$ where their mouths are by paying 😉
Share more details and progress as you go and I’m sure we’d all be happy to chime in with more specific an actionable feedback.
Best of success!!
The next step is to sell it.
The MVP is just the start out your journey, not the end: https://linear.app/blog/rethinking-the-startup-mvp-building-a-competitive-product
No marketing. Talk to users and find out if you have solved the right problem, and solved the problem right. If not, pivot or adjust the product until you have. You may need to pivot away from your entire idea.
You are now trying to achieve product market fit. You’ll know you have when they use it and/or pay for it without you doing any marketing and the user base grows so fast that it completely overwhelms your capacity.