Does your startup have its 'marketing MVP' ready?
A brief guide to getting your startup's marketing basics in place
This is a really important concept that I have written about a lot before. I first came up with it in 2020, and use it in my marketing approach even today. I’m bringing it back because it is now even more tried and tested, and is the best model to start up your marketing.
Let’s get to it.
So what is the marketing MVP?
Think of this as the macro part of your marketing: Your marketing strategy, content strategy, positioning, your brand, your design and visual language, what it stands for, and so on. From there, you can get to the marketing IPs: Your blog, your newsletter, and so on. This is your marketing MVP.
For example, at Atomicwork, our IPs are a podcast, a blog, a report, a newsletter, our events, and so on.
Why do you need to get to the marketing MVP quickly?
Because only then can you start moving really fast on the micro part of your marketing, the tactical part: producing the content, writing the messaging for your demand generation campaigns, the context of your product marketing, the announcements for upcoming features and launches, the focus of your sales enablement and collateral, and so on.
The emphasis on time is because freezing the marketing MVP, their branding, and their cadence first lets you move very quickly on production and distribution. For example, if your website, visual language, and positioning is clear, your content strategy is easy to arrive at. Once you have that, your activities become clear: You can get to a calendar, hire a few freelancers, and churn out content that will compound over time.
Contrast this with a startup which does not have this clarity yet. If they don’t know what to write about, they can’t scale content of any kind, SEO or otherwise. They can’t get to any kind of GTM. And if they can’t scale fast, results will be slower to accrue.
And this is just one example. Every other aspect of modern SaaS marketing will be better served if your MVP is clear and serving as a radiant north star, giving you and your team direction.
At PushCrew (now VWO Engage), I took about 4 months to get to the marketing MVP. We executed a design revamp, figured out our positioning, got our strategy spot-on, started getting our landing pages out, and generally got our act together in that time.
The 2 months after this, we executed aggressively on content, SEO, and SEM. By the end of that phase, our traffic was starting to move up, and with that traffic, came leads, revenue, and growth. Though this timeline is replicable, that was 2016, and PushCrew was an SMB player. Atomicwork is not, so the timeframes are different and the execution styles are different. Plus there’s a lot more competition now, and so this plan has to be adapted to your product and the domain it plays in.
Is the marketing MVP fixed? What if the strategy changes?
This is the next logical question, and a very fair one. The answer is that there is no if. The strategy will change.
And as it does, your marketing MVP will change too. The companies I have worked for have had some sort of meaningful relook/revamp of their larger marketing strategies every couple of years. When that happens, the MVP may shift too. But the idea is to have IPs and larger strategies that won’t change, and can compound.
For example, I named the Atomicwork podcast Atomic Conversations, for a reason. We started out with HR as our ICP (ideal customer profile), but with iteration, quickly realised that IT was our actual ICP. Even though our customer profile shifted, I didn’t have to break the compounding of our podcast. It’s still called Atomic Conversations, and going strong.
And because marketing is (also) repetition, you need to arrive at these fairly quickly, and start creating. Because only when you get enough reps in will your marketing start working.
So if you are just starting out and trying to figure where to start, or are unconvinced about where you have already started from, trying to nail down your marketing MVP can be a great exercise.
September was a rather slow month for the newsletter. But there was a reason. Atomicwork celebrated its second anniversary, and the team headed out to Sri Lanka to celebrate. I really enjoyed the trip, plus I needed the down-time. With family and work and other obligations, adulthood can be a bit of a strain in itself, and I’m still coming to terms with it all. So the break was really welcome!
Here’s a picture of me and some of the team chilling on the ramparts of Galle fort.
My only disappointment was not being able to catch some test match cricket there, but you can’t have everything in life!
On a personal note, 2 years of Atomicwork also means 2 years for me at the company. Some day I will write about this journey, but for now I will say that it’s been the most challenging and also the most satisfying 2 years of my career yet. I have been, and I’m being tested again and again as a marketer and leader here. The learning has been ridiculous. I have to thank Vijay Rayapati, Kiran Darisi, and Parsuram Vijayasankar, the founders of Atomicwork for trusting me with our marketing and with the team I’m now privileged to work with. I’m very grateful.
As soon as we returned, it was straight back to work as we announced the news of a new strategic round we raised from a who’s who of CIOs and CXOs, taking our seed fundraise to a total of $14 million.
It is a signal of trust and the quality of our product that so many of our potential customers want to invest in us. Our existing investors also came in again, giving us more firepower to invest in talent plus GTM activities.
You can read more about this raise here on our blog. I’m very excited for what’s ahead of us at Atomicwork!
The team and I had been working on the Q4 plan last week, so I felt it was only fair that I do the same for the newsletter as well.
Here’s a snapshot of what’s coming to the newsletter in Q4:
An essay on the career path for content marketers in a post-AI world, how they should think about their growth, and how to design a new kind of role for themselves.
I had a rather deep conversation on SaaS marketing and its future with Srikrishna Swaminathan, co-founder and CEO of Factors. I’ll share some things I think are useful from that conversation, which I enjoyed a lot.
Later in the year, I will write about how my team and I are building an inbound marketing machine for the US enterprise market from India, something I’m particularly proud of.
So please subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t yet, and tell your friends too!