Starting a business is definitely one of the best experiences of my life. So nice that I repeated the experience several times! Serial Entrepreneur, Slasher, I love to take on and launch new projects because I believe entrepreneurs have the ability to change the world.
And for my clients who start businesses, I take on the same commitment, because I am aware that starting a business is not easy!
There are so many things to think about… And the very first thing for most entrepreneurs is developing a good product.
Except that in the end, when their product is discussed in every detail, everyone realizes that a good product is not enough to sell it because one essential component is missing: good marketing.
The question of whether a good product or good marketing makes sense is therefore actually unproblematic. The real question is to look at your marketing roadmap at the same pace as your product development roadmap and ensure consistency through concrete storytelling.
In this article, I’ll explain how, when you’re in the business creation phase, you create a coherent strategy to make sure you find your customers!
Business creation: design your product as work in progress
When I work in an incubator, I meet many entrepreneurs who tell me the following: before they start communicating, they want the best possible product, in short, their product to be fully completed.
While I understand this logic, I still know that it goes against the logic of creating a sustainable business. Paradoxically, in order to be successful, the entrepreneur must give up the idea of striving for perfection.
This is where design thinking can be of great help for the entrepreneur to redefine his idea of a marketable product. A marketable product is no longer the “perfect” product, but the so-called MVP, i.e. the Minimum Viable Product. This product, this MVP, if it contains all the characteristics of the project, it is not necessarily a final product: it is a work in progress. Advantage: User feedback allows for improvement based on their uses, and the company can use this ongoing work to tell a story and thus develop a coherent marketing strategy.
The storytelling of your company or the story of an emerging product
Designing your product as a work-in-progress allows you to create a true storytelling strategy. In a way, by aligning your story with the ongoing evolution of your product, you create a particularly fruitful narrative loop, since your story is permanently oriented towards your users’ feedback and thus their uses.
There is a real misunderstanding about what storytelling is and how to structure it. Yes, the most important story to tell is that of your customer. But for that story to really change, it needs to stay connected to the story of your product! We can’t make the product disappear entirely, at the risk of story supplanting and wiping out the brand.
Good storytelling can only be used around the roadmap for the operational development of your product, because this roadmap guarantees that you can continue to focus on the story of your user and their usage through the feedback from your users and the customizations you have made.
Business Creation: Design your marketing strategy as work in progress
This process ultimately leads us to design the marketing strategy from a new perspective: as a work in progress that is constantly being redefined at the same pace as the development of your product.
This very minimalist approach to marketing is still not very common: today, most agencies sell ready-made strategies, but without thinking about their evolution over time. However, a company, and especially a newly founded company, develops quickly and changes a lot, which very quickly makes marketing strategies obsolete.
Therefore, it seems to me essential for the product to introduce a new term, that of MVM or Minimum Viable Marketing. This new approach to marketing is, in my opinion, the only possible approach that allows:
- to align your marketing and thus your communication with the product development roadmap
- Not to lose the anchor with the product in your marketing measures
- To really consider usage and evolution of usage by your users
- Optimize your business strategy accordingly
As we have seen, it is not about having a good product or good marketing. The question, especially at the startup stage, is to build a lasting relationship with your goal thanks to evolutionary marketing around your product development roadmap. Only then can you build a sustainable business.
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