Tech Startups Often Put the Cart Before the Horse

I have met with several tech startups in recent months regarding marketing positions, and what I have almost universally found is that marketing has been left for some undetermined future time while the tech innovation, the website, the everything else have been developed.

In my opinion this is putting the cart before the horse.

Any new tech product or service should be evaluated (and then pivoted per Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup”) to answer the needs of identified target audiences. Creating something first and finding its audiences afterwards is just not an efficient development cycle.

To start with, some of these companies with whom I’ve met, when asked a direct question about their revenue model, will admit they don’t have one.

Now in part I understand this. After all, innovation can lead to financial opportunities that have not yet been identified.

But not starting out with an initial marketing focus, and then pivoting when experience indicates the need to do so, seems particularly foolish in such an information-rich marketplace.

Many of the company founders with whom I’ve spoken have used observations to make inferences and then acted on those untested inferences.

Because of this particular standard operating procedure, I was especially struck by the user experience presentation of Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering (UIE.com) to the UXPA of Los Angeles meetup on February 1, 2016, sponsored by Cross Campus and Vitamin Talent.

Spool spoke about the mistakes usability designers can incur when they make a single inference from a set of observations and assume that this single inference is the correct one! In fact, there can be several inferences from a set of observations, and these inferences must be analyzed, preferably with real metrics, to figure out which is the most actionable one.

(As a typical Internet user who gets her fair share of unnecessary error messages, I was thrilled by one of Spool’s recommendations for fixing a point of user frustration on a website or online form. Find out which error message is thrown the most – and fix that issue so it doesn’t happen so often. Light bulb moment!)

To return to the subject of observations at tech startups – what I see often is that founders are so close to their “baby” that it is hard for them to consider what their target audiences might actually need to know in order to be engaged with the “baby.”

And just as Spool gave a light bulb moment recommendation about error messages, I’d like to give what I hope is a light bulb moment for the main image at the top of a website. Use that image to include your target audiences!

If you are using photos of people – and it is a good idea to do so as people are attracted to images of other people, especially ones that look like themselves:

• Consider diversity of gender
• Consider diversity of race
• Consider diversity of age
• Consider diversity of activities depicted

Just two examples of companies whose founders I have spoken to recently (although one is not a tech company):

• A new undergarment-for-women company with the website top home page image of several models – all white. Apparently the one African-American model hired for the shoot was unable at the last minute to appear. Perhaps this company has not heard of the amazing things that can be done today with software such as Photoshop.

• A financial rewards company with the website top home page image of a white male and female drinking champagne on a private boat. How does this photo speak to the rewards people can earn with their everyday activities using this new tech opportunity? (Perhaps the subtle message is that you will save so much money you can also afford to enjoy this activity, but that is an awful lot to expect a new site visitor to instantly grasp.)

In both of the above cases, the company founders are using images – observations – to produce inferences that limit engagement goals. A picture is worth a thousand words as we all know. That top home page picture should resonate powerfully with the target audiences identified by marketing insights fueled by inferences that are analyzed using real data.

In conclusion, a marketing person should NOT be the last position for which a year-old or two-year-old tech company hires. To do so is to put the cart before the horse.