What a year of marketing at a startup looks like
An unfiltered behind-the-scenes look at Atomicwork's Year 1 of marketing
As I start writing this from a cafe in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I want to take a look back at a whole year of start-up marketing with Atomicwork. And what a year!
The highs were great, the lows were infuriating, but all of it was fulfilling. I’ll go over some of that in a bit, but I also want to take some time on what it means for a year of work to begin and to end.
We began the year slowly at Atomicwork, as the product was being built, and my brief was to quickly build a brand for the product we were trying to put into the world. We knew what we were building was useful but didn’t yet know what form or shape that would take. As any marketer will tell you, this is a difficult proposition, and also a great challenge. It’s difficult because you don’t know who you are building a brand for, who is supposed to respond to this, and therefore you don’t know which marketing buttons to press. But it’s also an opportunity because you can do something special, experiment with formats and channels that you wouldn’t have time for later.
This is how Atomic Conversations happened, a podcast about employee success, a concept we thought would appeal to everyone using software to make their employees lives easier. We did a whole season last year, and some episodes were heard hundreds of times, testament to the content we put out. This was the starting point for us to put Atomicwork on the mind map of software buyers thinking about their employees.
Something else we dreamed up in the early days was to bring together a community of HR professionals we called Day 1, a name that came from our CEO. It was an attempt to pull together a group of engaged people professionals who cared about employee success and give them a platform to talk about how exactly they could improve on the processes and tools they used for their employee management.
This took a lot of talking and debating among ourselves to understand and kick off, but we did and made a good fist of it.
Atomic Conversations is now recognised as our official podcast, and I have heard a lot of feedback from folks who really enjoy the conversations, for which I’m thankful. It was the first thing that put us on the map. We did a whole season of it, and it is returning in 2024 with a lot more energy and frequency.
We also interviewed a few HR leaders and their teams about their employee success problems, solutions, and tactics, which became instant hits on our blog. This is also something that will continue for 2024.
As the year sped on, we worked on more important things. To build a strong brand, I wanted a strong viewpoint, and together we came up exactly that: A way to tell the world what we were about and how we could help them. This lined up well with our funding announcement and we went all out to tell our story to the world.
I have done a few launch announcements, and helped do a few of these with Accel, so I went all out with my team to make sure we had a great launch. And it did. The work to get this done the way we wanted took at least 3 weeks - talking to journalists, planning content, giving out guest posts, doing podcasts and planning launch times, coordinating to make sure all of this happened around the same time. And we nailed it. It was the best launch I have ever done in my career, and I’m proud of how well we pulled it off.
We also were able to plan, shoot, and produce this video in time for the launch, and it helped to clearly articulate the message we were attempting to put into the world.
Things started moving really fast after this.
In Q4, we had some stuff to do. We were planning to launch our product to the world at a conference in the US. The idea was to make a big splash, and thereby talk directly to our prospects, and see what they actually made of our product and our story.
My team and I started working on a plan to do this in a big way, to make things people really wanted. Something we did as part of this push was the Employee Success Magazine, a physical magazine of interviews with the best in the industry, to hand out during the event. It is something I’ve been wanting to do in several different ways, for a while, and my teammates and I pulled it off in time. It was again one of the highlights of the year. We had a good partner, and this was again something I’m proud of having been able to do.
This was when something changed. As our product team spent a lot more time talking to prospects, we realised we had been talking to a different audience than the one we should have. Now, this wasn’t a surprise. This was an adjacent audience too, which we did we have an eye on. But then we realised that we should have been talking to this buyer persona, not the user persona.
And so we shifted gears. Honestly, this isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. Startups are by nature a venture into the unknown, so as new information comes in, we have to adapt, and quickly. This we did, and the content and campaigns moved to the new persona.
But this also meant that the investments we had made already could not be just stopped. We had to follow through. So we did go to the event we had planned, and presented the product. This was hard work, and sometimes it’s frustrating when you realise that this time could be spent doing something else, especially when you know that the target audience is different from the one you have planned for.
But something I’ve learnt through working in startups is to not complain. As I said, startups are by definition working with limited information, so you shouldn’t add to the leadership team’s list of things to think about: You should nod and keep moving ahead. I’m very proud of my team, they watched a year’s work become not worth much, and did not bat an eyelid. In fact, in the next month, we pivoted and delivered a large cache of content aimed at the new target audience. This included the State of AI in IT report, something we launched late this year, and will do a lot of promotion for next year.
All of this work, by the way, does not include what our Product Marketing team executed all year round. The website changed several times, the product itself (which is complex) needed a lot of copy, knowledge base articles, sales decks, and so on. There was compliance, there were app store integrations, the works. If I start adding on what they did, I’d need more than one post.
In all, it has been a full year of work, as you can see. Could I have done a few things better? No, I could have done a lot of things better. But that’s the best thing about being at a startup, the learning never stops. I’ve been doing this for more than a decade, and do not consider myself more than a beginner. I probably never will.
I usually collect whatever compliments I get for my work throughout the year (I recommend doing this), and I can’t help but add a few of them here, even if just to feel good about what was done.
Last week, before closing down for the year, I met a couple of my marketer friends at a bar in Bangalore. Both of them are heads of marketing of startups that now make tens of millions of dollars in revenue. When trading stories, both of them joked that they’d never do again what I did with Atomicwork: willingly jump into the 0 to 1 game again.
On the way back home that day, I kept thinking about that. It is tough, no question, and it is confusing at times, but it is also exhilarating. In the end, what you get is a chance at building a company, a legacy. The reward, when put that way, seems worth all of it.