Growth & Performance Marketer | Meta & Google Ads + Full-Funnel | Built a product from 0 to 100 recurring customers | Remote
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Most of what founders file under marketing is a shelf problem.
The buyer had the need, thought of your name, reached for you, and hit a form. I have been that person more times than I can count, and never once because I forgot the name.
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"I have been meaning to try your product." That is not a compliment, it is a report of a failure.
Byron Sharp splits it in two. Mental availability is whether you come to mind. Physical availability is whether you can be bought in that same moment.
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Atlassian put 44 percent of revenue into the product and 21 percent into selling it, and then let the product do the explaining.
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The story is that Atlassian won because developers love Jira, which is a strange thing to say about Jira.
The duller version is that a team tried it, paid with a card, added seats when they needed them, and nobody from Atlassian was ever in the room.
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Atlassian's 2015 IPO filing says it plainly: no direct salesforce, no quota-carrying reps. 51,636 customers. $319.5 million of revenue that year.
Marketing and sales took 21 percent of it. Research and development took 44.
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A post on your own site reaches the people you already have.
A post on somebody else's reaches the room they spent years filling.
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I wrote five guest posts once, nothing moved, and I decided guest posting does not work.
Widrich wrote 150 in nine months. Five was not an experiment. Five was the cost of learning what one editor wants.
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Leo Widrich said guest blogging alone brought Buffer around 100,000 users in its first nine months, and that he wrote about 150 posts to get there.
That is a post every other day, on somebody else's site, for no fee.
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You are not trying to persuade thirty small businesses. You are trying to make one accountant better at the advice they were already going to give.
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The person your customer checks with before they buy is not on your list.
A bookkeeper, a consultant, the developer who set up the tool you plug into. One of them gets asked your question every week and has never heard your name.
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You are winning customers one at a time, each one its own act of persuasion.
Gusto's accountants page puts it at more than 23,000 firms on their partner dashboard. One accountant is not one customer. It is thirty small businesses already asking them what to use.
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A template somebody copies is worth more than an article somebody finishes.
Only one of the two requires an account.
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I have never once forwarded an article about a product. I have duplicated plenty of Figma files.
Content asks to be read. A file asks to be used, and using it requires you.
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You publish good things and nothing moves.
A Figma Community file is not content about the product. The button says "Open in Figma", a copy lands in your own drafts with Community in the name, and you need an account before any of that can happen.
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You can ask somebody where they look for tools like yours, or you can ask what they last paid for and who said the name first.
Only one of those two things has already happened.
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I have run the call where you ask a customer where they look for tools like yours. The answer always sounds plausible and it is usually wrong.
Asking instead about the last tool they paid for gets you a transcript of something that already happened.
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You have four channels you could try, no way to choose between them, so you are doing a little of each.
Rob Fitzpatrick's second rule in The Mom Test is to ask about specifics in the past instead of opinions about the future.
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Distribution lives where the alternative already lives, because that is the only place your customer is already awake to the problem.
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The last time I asked a customer what we had replaced, the answer was a spreadsheet one person maintained on Fridays.
Not a competitor. So the room to be posting in was wherever people hand each other templates.
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