Everyone Should Think Like A Startup: Do More With Less

I’ve been asked many times by other marketers how I’ve been able to run my programs and teams effectively and efficiently. I tell them: “It’s simple. I think like a startup… all the time.”

Marketing functions across verticals have changed. What once used to be about developing the most memorable commercials have since become understanding the customer and how you, as a brand, fit into their lives in the most authentic way. Senior marketers find their budgets stretched and departments under-resourced and yet still asked to deliver more results than ever.

When resources (time, budget, labor, technology) are crunched, marketing leaders must think creatively. Startups operate in such a manner all the time. This pressure forces them to pick paths wisely, iterate frequently, and learn quickly. 

Companies of all sizes—from corporate giants to solopreneurs—must learn this critical skill if they want to grow continuously. One of the reasons many big companies become stagnant is that they’re hamstrung by bureaucracy, processes and old-school thinking, while startups can be nimble and fast-acting. Companies that have built a startup mindset into their culture have continued to innovate in their industries and have even expanded into other categories (e.g. Amazon, Google, Apple).

Here are my top 3 tips for doing more with less (lovingly borrowed from startups):

1. Always be thinking about the Customer first.

I can’t stress this enough. Customers and their needs and wants should always be the FIRST and LAST thing you think about for every single initiative. When you have limited resources (e.g. time, budget, labor, technology), you need to be laser focused and selective about where you spend your resources. If you’re chasing after the newest coolest technology or copying your competitors, you’re going to overspend and still lose. 

However, if you have the customer in mind and understand their core needs/wants that your business helps address, then you will have a clear direction for your teams to execute the marketing, operations, etc. against serving those needs/wants.

If you do this well, your customers will be your biggest brand advocates. They will do the heavy lifting for you, just look at Apple, Crossfit, and White Claw. Consumers who love these brands will go out of their way to ensure others know just how much they love the brand. That’s earned media, meaning free advertising. It’s the hardest form of media to get and quite valuable because it’s the most organic and authentic way to reach your customers.

2. Understand the core levers you need to pull to drive the business.

Marketers tend to fall into the trap of doing initiatives that are loud and have fast payoff. However, businesses need consistent and layered marketing (just look at Disney marketing campaigns for Marvel and Star Wars movies). Stripping away all the bells and whistles of your business, what are levers that are highly critical to driving your business? Is it labor costs? Is it product/service awareness? Is it gaining trust with your customers? Knowing the really important pieces will help you determine how to measure your initiatives for impact. For example, if you find that your biggest driver is # of customers buying a monthly subscription from you, then the metrics you need to think about will be related to market penetration (e.g. how many customers do you have compared to the total number of customers who would be interested in your product/service). You’ll want to come up with additional metrics to link your initiatives, whether it be marketing campaigns or product enhancements, to the market penetration benchmark.

Don’t be shy about being creative too. Aside from standard metrics, are there other types of metrics you and your team should think about? Weird leading indicators, perhaps? With a robust data analytics team, you can build propensity models to help determine disparate customer actions that lead them down the path of purchase so you can go find similar customers in the market and guide them to your product/service. For instance, recently, I’ve been exploring the role of memes as canaries for shifting purchase trends. 

Also think about short-term vs. long-term levers. Sometimes, if you’re looking for a quick win, you might want to run short-term initiatives like pay-to-play scenarios where you spend $X to get Y # of customers, or you provide $X discount to increase customer size. Meanwhile, you might want to consider long-term rewards by dropping leads now, e.g. a marketing stunt that gets your name ingrained in prospective consumers who might not buy now but will consider your brand in the future. 

3. Take advantage of new technology and staffing models to iterate products/services fast and often. 

Startups have a lean model where they quickly produce a minimal viable product, put it in market, observe and measure what’s worked and what hasn’t, and then updates the product to reflect market demand before putting it out into market again. This continuous iteration allows them to match customer demand in a relatively real-time way.

Your business can do the same by taking advantage of technologies, tools, and staffing models created by others so you can iterate fast. Yes, you should have certain capabilities in-house like data and analytics, but you shouldn’t just build everything especially when you’re still testing ideas and assumptions. Leverage the know-how of other startups and companies who have been mulling over a piece of the puzzle so you can put your product/service into the market faster.

We live in a world where many new platforms have leveraged artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to solve business problems. These products and services oftentimes have a subscription model, but it will help you get to an answer faster than spending months to years building the technology in-house. That being said, if your business collects a ton of customer data, that first-party (1P) data  becomes very valuable. You will want to figure out ways to leverage outside technology while maintaining 1P data. 

Another place where we need to be more flexible is around the staffing model. Larger companies tend to staff full-time employees instead of contractors or in-house developers instead of away-teams. With brands becoming more cost conscience and tech-focused, another option is to supplement internal development work with “away-teams”. For example, Ubik Group, a staffing agency with expertise in helping large corporations build effective and efficient away-teams, saw their clients’ topline increase by upwards of 60% and a reduction in time to deployment by 35%.