Positioning by Al Ries is the best book that I’ve read on startup marketing.
The book states that the key to marketing is finding “an unoccupied space in your prospect’s mind.” If you can do that, then anyone else who comes after you (into that prospect’s mind) will have to spend 5-6x more money to displace you.
In Citus’ early days, we experimented quite a bit with messaging. We said “Scalable SQL”, but that ended up being too broad to claim for our non-existing marketing budget. So, we changed it to “Scalable SQL for Developers”, but nobody understood what that meant.
Fortunately, Umur Cubukcu concurrently brute-forced his way into selling Citus, and scheduled sales call with ~150 companies (basically anyone who would talk to us). Out of those conversations, we were able to close 6 of them. We then took a step back and reflected on why these companies bought from us. It was because they were using PostgreSQL and they needed it to scale. So, we flipped our message to “Scalable PostgreSQL” and it clicked (it turns out “SQL for Developers” = “PostgreSQL”).
Of course, we realized only later that we didn’t understand what this message meant. But that’s another story. Start-ups are all about learning.
If you’re looking to learn more about how to position your start-up, I’d highly recommend Positioning. It offers a solid framework to think about messaging and outside-in thinking.
