Many young entrepreneurs are guilty of starting a Marketing campaign only after they have launched their product or their website has gone live. I have come to learn that it is a better idea starting much earlier, even before your prototype launches. Now this is a question that will certainly get varying answers from people but in my opinion, starting a marketing campaign pre-launch gives you more stature and improves your chances of getting funded when you go live. You don’t want to go ask for funds from VCs for your dating website when the only members of the site are you, your co-founders and some buddies from Math class. It’s not a good look!

The most popular complaints I hear from people about launching early are:

1.) They don’t want people knowing their ideas and stealing them, and

2.) They don’t have enough time to start a marketing campaign while working on the start-up and working a part-time job to bootstrap their efforts.

While these two points are valid complaints, I have reasonable counter-acts for each…and they suffice for me at least.

1.) When you are working behind the scenes, building your start-up and consider yourself to be in stealth-mode, it is understandable that you don’t want people knowing your idea and going to reproduce it. It’s too early along for competition and that kind of pressure, I get it. But from the time I have spent around other young entrepreneurs, I have come to realize that other people are too busy building their own ideas to throw it all out and do yours. Infact most people will think your idea is garbage when they first hear you pitch it, they will think ‘really? is that his idea? I think mine is much better’. Honestly think about it, how many times have you heard someone else’s idea and thought “wow, this is brilliant, I should do something like this”?  perhaps 5% of the time. Now of that 5%, how many times would you say “okay I am going to try my hands on this project and leave mine for a bit”. I think that drops it down to somewhere close to 0.5% at best. Everything in life is a risk. It is a risk becoming an entrepreneur, It is a risk putting your idea out there early but the rewards could be bountiful. Ask the guys at Viralogy. They started their marketing campaign early, no one stole their idea and they got loads of people sign up in the first week.

2.) I am not sure how you view marketing relative to your start-up, but in my opinion, it is an intrinsic part and not just an “add-on”. You need to pay just as much attention to your marketing as you do development. When people say they don’t have time to market because they are too busy developing, I find it hard to understand. I think their perception is misconstrued. You have to set aside the time to market, make it a part of the schedule. If you cannot afford to bring someone else on board whose sole task is to strategize and execute a marketing campaign, then cut back on the development time to market or simply work a few more hours. If you only have 7 hours/ day to work on your start-up, and you spend all of it on development, you need to re-distribute your time and start marketing atleast 2-3 hours a day. Get on twitter and tweet about it, create a blog where you write about what your start-up will offer once you launch, relate and interact with other bloggers e.t.c. Also make sure you create a splash page or a simple welcome page, say what your start-up is in a sentence or two, ask for their e-mails so you can update them on your progress and contact them when you finally launch. These are some great ways to rack up a customer base early on. Take for example Betterfly who have done a fantastic job marketing even before launching. They are prominent on twitter, have an informational web-page and have a dynamic blog going even before they launch fully. There is no way they won’t hit the ground running once they are fully launched.

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