Marketing and hiring are far too often major failure points because they are started too late. The right time to start marketing is before you launch your product. Just as the right time to hire is before you feel the pain of needing the work to be done. It is never too soon to to proactively start your marketing or hiring process. The key to not failing is having the structure in place before you feel the pain!

Our guest today: Andrew Miller, CEO of GrowthExpertz 

Andrew is a Startup Marketer who's been traveling the world working with early-stage companies. After driving growth for 3 multimillion-dollar startup exits, including a 500startups project in San Francisco, he founded GrowthExpertz. 

Andrew's specialty lies in helping companies scale efficiently in the early-stages with both growth coaching and remote consultancy.  He’s written for INC magazine, StartupGrind, and StartupNation. Andrew is also a prolific #DigitalNomad who in the last decade has visited, lived, and worked from over 70 countries. 

Today we are discussing

• The right time to start marketing efforts
• How to kick off marketing for both product and people

When should a startup start marketing?

• Start marketing right now
• Pre launch, start building a strategy
• Landing pages, call to action
• Even still in stealth mode
• Coming soon, gathering prelaunch beta email list

Why is this important?

• Prioritize marketing too late
• Show investors that you have traction
• Do things that don't scale in the beginning
• Marketing drives your launch
• Launch with an email list 
• Bootstrap marketing- drive organic traffic during the early stage of the business. Before launch

Rick’s Nuggets

• Marketing directly leads into hiring

How do we implement marketing & when?

• Online presence- marketing foundation
• Create landing pages, website, 
• Social media pages
• Analytics

Start organic marketing 

• Organic marketing channels
• PR - start creating relationships with podcast, 
• Create content with call to action
• Build to 500 emails of beta testers & followers pre launch

Launch product 

• Create press release, go live

Scale the marketing strategies that work

• Go into launch with traffic
• Be able to go into investors with relevant data

Rick’s Nuggets

• With hiring:
• Identify target hires
• Have conversations, network
• Gain buy in to win the hire            

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritize foundational marketing early in the game 
• Greenlight your organic marketing before the product launch
• Know your kpi’s, analytics

Guest Contact:

• GrowthExpertz - For Funded Startups
• Andrewstartups.com or Instagram - For Bootstrapped Startups