Rocket Watcher Product Marketing for Startups

Most mediocre or just plain crappy startup marketing I see if the result of making this one critical mistake.

Startups often try to cram too many features into their messages and include benefits that aren’t differentiated or are irrelevant to their target market. This post covers a method for getting to a more streamlined value proposition.

Gaining early market traction as a lot to do with getting the right products for your market but it’s also important to define who the early adopting customers are in that market. The way you construct your value propositions, your call to action, how you attract early customers and possibly the look and feel of your early product will be influenced by what you define those early segments to be.

I sat in on a strategy session this week with a company I am working with that is looking at entering a new vertical market.  A VC moderated the session and shared his methodology for looking at potential new vertical markets and I thought I would share it because I LOVED it. The Bowling Alley [...]

I got a thoughtful comment on my post called “3 signs your market segmentation might suck” from Rob saying: I worked in a company that had some good software and some smart folks that solved hard problems. They were small, about $5M in revenue and they were in Financial Services, Health Care, Government, Automotive, Transportation, [...]

In my last post I said I was going to talk next about how to get started with a decent segmentation.  In my practical experience the whole reason you want to have a few target segments is so you can build company expertise around a particular business problem in a particular market.  This understanding helps [...]

I think most start-up execs don’t really believe in segmentation. Sure, if I ask for their segmentation they dutifully blow the dust off a fairly nice looking slide that shows what markets they are targeting.  Then I look at the customer list and the two things don’t line up whatsoever.  The execs know they’re supposed [...]