I started my first {real} company when I was 17 years old (2001), it was a digital marketing platform that connected mortgage lenders with mortgage borrowers. I had no clue what the process was behind getting a mortgage nor did I understand the amount of money and affect on people’s live that I mortgage had. I did though have a number of companies that were mortgage lenders approach asking that I generate leads for them and they would then in turn pay me out on a cost per lead basis.
To me, generating leads was the act of finding “people who were interested in borrowing money” it didn’t seem quite out of the ordinary as even though I was still young I had marketed a lot more unique products earlier in my career. I didn’t know that brokers charged large fees for doing loans, all I knew was they offered to pay me $20+ to get a user to fill out a mortgage form and I was going to find a way to generate a significant amount of leads, even if I had to invest almost all my free time into it.
I had found that there was this giant disconnect between home lenders and people looking for mortgages online, in turn, after working with lenders for a year I proceeded to build out a platform that would intelligently connect mortgage borrowers and mortgage lenders. I had a lot of success connecting borrowers with lenders until the mortgage crisis happened and a lot of the lenders we worked with went out of business.
For my whole career and for nearly my whole life I have only done online marketing and I have only done user acquisition (I am not a branding guy) . After my mortgage platform, I worked full-time as an affiliate marketer whereas I would get paid a referral fee for each new client or sale that I drove for a particular web site. I was an “affiliate marketer” for a large skin care brand, various nutraceutical companies, fashion brands, financial lending companies and more and had a lot of success scaling campaigns and driving a significant amount of new users.
Now, though my life has changed a bit, I work with startups, venture backed companies, established companies on the most important driver of their business “new user acquisition”. I take the same marketing tactics and strategies that I used to do as an affiliate and apply them to real world companies.
One question, I get all the time from people is “When Should I Start Acquiring Users” or ” I don’t want start marketing my product as it isn’t ready”. I always say the same exact answer when somebody asked the “when question” and that answer is “NOW”. I have about 15 reasons why I say “NOW” but I am going to through 3 of the most obvious ones for this post
(A)The Product or Offering:
You are spending all this time and money building this amazing product line or building this eCommerce store and you are waiting until it’s perfect from a branding perspective to launch. You are expecting at the moment of launch that you will have people buying your product at a very profitable “CPA” cost per action.
You, then start running Facebook ads and you are seeing people comment on your product (some negative, some positive). You don’t know why people aren’t purchasing your product, you see people to coming to your cart but not purchasing. What da heck is wrong?
Run Ads Earlier:
(A) Pain Points: If you start running ads earlier in your product life-cycle then you can start seeing your users pain points or why they aren’t purchasing? How exactly do you know the pain points of your users without marketing to them? In turn, how exactly could you solve for those pain points without exactly knowing them?
(B) Ad Trust: Consumers are becoming very smarter, very rarely do they make a purchase on the first ad impression. It usually takes 6-8 touch’s before they actually make a purchase. If you reach them early in the product life-cycle, even with a “signup to get a free discount” ad then they are more likely to make a purchase of your product at launch. This has been proven time and time again.
By starting marketing pre-product, you will learn mission critical information about your user-base including what elements of the product they love, why they might hesistant to make a purchase, what features of the product they care most about, and also most importantly how much they are willing to pay?
(B) Email List: Most start-ups or new entrepreneurs launch strategy includes giving away all the money they raised immediatly post launch to Facebook and Google. They don’t have a pre-existing email list or any remarketing list of people who are already interested in their product. This leads to a lot of wasted money and a lot of stress as most likely they are going to make product changes based on the feedback they receive from their initial ad campaigns.
By acquiring users right away with a “Coming Soon” or “Get a specific reward for registering now”, you now have an email list of pre-existing users who have showed purchase intent for your product. This is another valuable asset that could be built by launching market pre-product.
(C) Market Research:
So much of my market research over the years has come from “running ads” on Facebook and not “Googling”. Most of the products, I work on solve a specific need but people use products for different reasons, each user usually has a specific use case.
Example: I had a company that was “selling women leggings on Facebook”, I wanted to figure who my exact competition was and how much they were selling their leggings for. This was very important to my business model.
In essence, I created a fan page around people who were passionate about leggings, then on that specific fan page I posted a question ” What is your favorite place to buy leggings and how much do you usually spend?”, then I ran ads directly to that question and I got an insane amount of feedback which I then applied to both my product and its pricing.
The point is, everyone thinks running ads is all about getting users to purchase or getting them to do an action. The truth is, its not. You can run ads on Facebook for so many different purposes that don’t have to do with getting people to purchase.
I run ads continually to figure out how to solve complex problems within my business as the greater part of the unbiased society that I reach from my ads is usually right
Conclusion
In my opinion the best time to start acquiring users and testing out market fit is right before you start building your product (if your building a B2C product) or while in the process of going into Alpha.
I am sure you have many questions about how users will react to your product/service, if this is the case then run ads to get “Feedback”.
If you have a product that is B2B focused with a very small targeted set of users, your ability to start marketing your product is probably during the later stages of product development. The thought process here is you can do most of your product development around the feedback you are getting from speaking to possible clients as your audience is most likely very small.
In conclusion, if your product is heavily predicated on your ability to drive qualified leads, sales, and acquire customers at scale then you need to understand your customers on a very deep level and that’s why it is very important to deeply understand your users.
