Throwing money into ads to reach new customers is easy, but it’s likely a waste of money if you don’t get this part right first.

Write code and talk to users on any early stage startup. Find time to prioritise even lower tasks: they build your business.

Depending on the industry, customer type and addressable market at your disposal pick the right marketing tactic. Otherwise, it can leave you dead before you’ve even started.

At a fundamental level, marketing is about reaching people; start by understanding the behaviours of the people you’re trying to reach, and then choose a particular marketing tactic based on those exhibited behaviours.

If people respond with “Piss off. Don’t ever contact me again”, this tells you that you need to refine your message.

Getting significant attention among the target audience will not pay the bills; do enough to capture some of the early adopters.

Constantly be working on marketing tactics. No matter how successful your early tactics are, you cannot rely on them forever, eventually you need to reach a fatter part of the market.

No matter how good your product is, if you can’t tell a cohesive, compelling story about it, you’re going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when you actually do take it to market.

Start with what the company wants to sell, and then tell people why they need it.

People don’t discover and buy a product just because of its features. Start your story with “Why” and discover goods for them.

Create the end-to-end story to capture attention and motivate action, before you build anything.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Have a crystal clear idea of what your company stands for to tell a compelling story about your product.

Marketing is not about a company’s mission but understanding why a customer would care about that mission, translating that understanding into a story, and ultimately make a purchase.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

People don’t care about you but about themselves and their problems. A good story is a lot like the strings on a piano: When it hits something of the same frequency, it resonates and your story sticks.

Decide who your target customers are, what problems you can solve for them in a way better than anyone else can.

Once you’ve sold, claim about how effective your product will be in solving their problem to accelerate decision making.

Features can often connect the dots and put a story into a greater context, help to stand apart from the competition. Show customers what results they achieved with your product.

What’s most compelling to a buyer isn’t how they can measure customer satisfaction, but rather how they can take specific actions based on that insight.

Product and marketing are two sides of the same coin but aren’t two antithetical forces. Get your marketing and product teams in sync, and you’ll have created an advantage that nobody else can copy.

Most obvious that the first impression people get of the product and company is also often the last.

The majority of people who visit your marketing site don’t have the time to invest in learning what it is you actually do. If you can’t communicate that clearly on your homepage they’ll just bounce, quite literally, off your site – an opportunity gone.

Amplify the things your product team is building. Build and talk about entire features of your product.

When it comes to announcing new features, don’t equate effort and importance with what’s appealing to your customer.

Don’t overpromise on something before it ready. If you don’t manage to produce what you have promised, people will remember that for a long time. Eventually, it ships and flops.

Set the right expectations inside your company, from day one.

Look for special and interesting features to talk about. The most important piece of effective marketing is a good story to be told. A good story captures people’s attention and motivates them to take action.

You can accurately describe the feature, but that doesn’t tell anyone anything about why they would want to use it or how it’ll make their lives better. Highlight the things people want to do, rather than the feature itself, because people understand the value in doing them.

Don’t think the product is in the past, sometimes people still need it. Make a research to be convinced whether people are still looking for it.

Determine what position you want to hold in people’s minds. If you want to build a bridge to the future, marketing have to get people to that bridge first.

Getting that story right is hard, but it creates a better outcome for everyone, including your customers.

Don’t delay aligning your product and marketing teams. If you do, you’ll live to regret it.

Be grateful enough for any word of mouth you can get. Sure, you can’t control what words come out of whose mouths, but you can encourage people to say the right words.

Find a way to explain; have an opinion about what people are saying about you, because if you stand for nothing you’ll fall for anything.

There are thousands of strategies for acquiring new customers, but word of mouth is the most powerful way of getting them. It is your first traffic source.

Word of mouth is unpredictable, but you can do your bit to encourage it.

As your product expands the number of things it can and will be used for will grow. Which means some people might call it a time tracker, while others will say it’s for tracking vacations.

Great messaging is simple, compelling, specific, differentiated and defensible.

Simple. It’s easily understood by current and prospective customers.

Compelling. It describes something that is interesting or desirable to them.

Specific. It captures what your product does, not an overly abstract statement of it.

Differentiated. It includes something that makes it unique among peers.

Defensible. It shouldn’t be easy for your competitor to adopt/copy your messaging.

Invest your time and energy in creating content that people want to consume. That’s subtly but fundamentally different than creating content we want people to consume.

When you’re producing content as a brand there’s a temptation to optimize for popularity, rather than relevance. But a good content program is about producing popular material that’s also relevant to both your product and brand.

Ask yourself: “What’s different?” or “What could be different?

Your business relies on having customers that are going to last, so relationships matter.

Events rely on difference. Events might be a lot harder than some other tactics, but nobody said marketing was easy. It’s never too early to build events and it’s never too early to meet and conquer.