product marketing

So You Took A Startup Job: Five Tips For Starting Out Strong

Mark Zuckerberg gives 5 startup tips

You just got a job a fast-growing startup. Congratulations! Your friends are jealous, your partner is nervous, and your parents don’t quite understand what your company does. No matter what happens to the company, you’re in for an excellent adventure.

But working at a startup is different from working anywhere else. These young companies don’t have the history of established organizations. Your colleagues haven’t worked together very long. The industry might not even be well defined. For these reasons many people struggle in startups, even though they are smart and skilled and have succeeded all their lives.

You want to be successful in your new job, of course. So how can you make sure you start out strong at a startup? The key is communication.

With that in mind, here are five tips for success.

  • Ask for information. You probably won’t be handed an instruction manual for your job (and if you are, it’s already out of date). You need to locate the resources you need, and your colleagues know how to find them. So ask: Where are the files of other people who have worked on this problem? What approaches have been tried already? Who else has worked in this area and might have details? There are no processes to share information, so you have to hustle for it. At a good startup people are happy to share what they know, and what they think.
  • Ask to join meetings. Ask to sit in on meetings, even if they aren’t about things you are directly concerned with. Sit quietly and absorb what you can about the products, the market, and how your company solves problems. Going to lots of meetings is also a good way to meet colleagues outside of your immediate team.
  • Write your job description. Tell your manager what you will be doing to move the company forward, and why it should be your responsibility. Don’t assume you will be doing the narrow task you were hired for – within three months you’ll likely be doing something different anyway. Every employee in a startup needs to be prepared to identify and tackle key problems, and unless you’re a new college graduate, you are expected to have the experience to do this independently. So take initiative and remember that “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
  • Have an opinion. Don’t wait to start inserting your good judgment into the company. You were hired for your expertise, and you need to contribute quickly – before you have a chance to learn everything about the company and its products. So when you observe something you would like to do, tell your colleagues why: “Here’s what I think I/we should be doing, and here’s how I/we can do it.” But since you are still new, follow up by asking, “I think this based on my current understanding of the situation. What don’t I know yet that might improve my idea?”
  • Check in regularly. Set up weekly check-in meetings with your immediate peers, each member of your team who reports to you, and your manager. Keep the meetings, and scale them back once you feel comfortable in your new job. Use these opportunities to ask more questions and learn more from the perspective of those who have been in the company already.

Fundamentally, all startups are trying to discover or create information that has never been found before. Your priorities and communications should flow from how your company approaches this basic goal.

What other tips do you have for someone starting a job at a startup? Share your advice in the comments.

 

A Tale of Two Positions

Positioning by Ries and Trout a strategy classicAl Ries and Jack Trout wrote Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind to show how companies can capture a unique position for their brands in the minds of their customers. Almost all of their ideas are now gospel – and almost all of their examples use brands, technologies, and companies that are no longer a part of our ever-changing economy.

If they were to write Positioning today, Ries and Trout would use examples from the startup world. Perhaps they would cite the positioning strategies of Jet and Gusto.

A Position Stuck on the Runway

Jet is an e-commerce site offering a wide range of products at low prices. Jet has garnered substantial press and lots of investment, raising more than $200 million before launch.

The company originally built a business model based on a $50 annual membership fee and low prices. The prices would be especially low compared to competitors if customers would follow the site’s prompts to ship multiple items together. “If we can educate them that, ‘Look, instead of buying one thing every week, come back every two weeks and buy two things and you will save a few percent,’ it’s actually a lot of money,” said CTO Mike Hanrahan in a January cover story in Bloomberg Businessweek.

Jet.com marketing But Jet is attacking a position firmly held by established companies. Amazon’s Prime membership program, offering low prices and fast shipping for $99 a year, already counts 44 million members in the U.S. Costco’s $55 membership offers low-priced goods in stores and online to 81 million members. Consumers already think of these companies if they want to pay a membership fee in return for low prices and other benefits.

Even if Jet offers the lowest prices, with only $200 million it cannot hope to attack companies that control hundreds of billions of dollars in resources. The position Jet seeks as a low-price member club is just not available.

And so, three months after launching, Jet announced it would eliminate its membership fee. New York Times commenter Mitch P. wrote: “I don’t need a new vision of shopping. In fact I think my soul would reject any new shopping paradigms. For better or for worse, I’m sticking with Costco and Amazon.” There is no room in consumers’ minds for a new entrant in this space: the existing companies are dominant.

Jet is still trying to attract customers in expensive ways. The company continues to demonstrate its ability to shave its prices a little lower if customers accept restricted shipping or payment options. Jet’s new position could be described as savings through inconvenience. But this is a challenging position because it is difficult to make attractive in a few words, and arguably it is also covered already by Jet’s goliath competitors.

Jet tried to build a company based on pricing and technology, and not on positioning. And now Jet may be in trouble.

Too Much Zen Is A Bad Thing

In September, I received an email from startup ZenPayroll to let me know the company was changing its name to Gusto. The company also announced a line extension, introducing benefits and worker’s comp to its original payroll-as-a-service offering.

The company explained that the new name expresses the enthusiasm its customers feel for its service. This is a true statement in my experience. I know several small business owners who use Gusto, and they have a tendency to tell me how much they love their payroll provider (even though we are talking about something else). Gusto has good reason to feel it can increase its share of wallet from its loyal customers.

But still I question both the new name and combining the rebranding with a new product announcement. This plan doesn’t meet the rules of positioning.

Zenpayroll marketingZenPayroll always was a problematic name, partly because the company got unlucky. Founded in 2011, the company led a wave of businesses using the “zen” branding concept. As of late 2015, I count a dozen “zen” startups in the Bay Area alone:

  • Zenboxx (accessory for Macs)
  • Zencoder (basically Pied Piper (link), only real)
  • Zendesk (customer service as a service)
  • Zendrive (vehicle analytics using smartphone sensors)
  • Zendure (portable chargers for devices)
  • Zenedge (military-grade virtual firewalls)
  • Zenefits (cloud HR service)
  • Zenfolio (websites for photographers)
  • Zengularity (web app programming consultants)
  • ZenPurchase (procurement software; changed name to Coupa)
  • Zenput (mobile data collection software)
  • Zenti (data mining platform)

Zenefits, a competitor founded in 2013, was the real killer. Zenefits grew much faster than Gusto and provided a full HR platform. The names and market spaces were too similar, and so Gusto was ejected from its original brand.

But if the “zen” part was an unlucky loss, the “payroll” part was a foreseeable problem. In Positioning, Ries and Trout use Eastern Airlines as an example of a restrictive brand name. Customers would not consider Eastern a national carrier because its very name denied what it was trying to be. In the same way, ZenPayroll restricted itself from the very beginning with too narrow a brand.

Gusto marketingThe company has now replaced this issue with another. Gusto may be too clever – existing customers can appreciate it, while new prospects won’t be able to understand or differentiate it. A Google search for “gusto” made from a San Francisco IP address finds a number of other products using this name:

  • At least 3 restaurants in California
  • Nescafe Dolce Gusto single-serve brewing systems
  • The Mahindra Gusto scooter
  • A Yu-Gi-Oh! character named Gusto
  • The Samsung Gusto, a flip phone
  • And numerous coffee shops, apps, and other products

Gusto is prominent in paid advertising and is mentioned in articles, but the company’s site is nowhere in the native search results. And notwithstanding the quality of service Gusto offers, many of the products that share its name could be considered inferior by its typical buyer, an American manager.

Clearly the ZenPayroll brand had to change, but now it is not unique or clearly positive. Moreover, the company is trying to associate it with new products: workers comp and benefits. The net effect is to eliminate any position its name maintained in the minds of target customers. Gusto describes the mindset of existing customers but may not appeal to new customers because it is too widely associated with other product categories.

Better would have been to change the company’s name at least a year ago, as soon as the competitive threat from Zenefits was clear. Applying the tenets of positioning, ZenPayroll/Gusto could see that Zenefits had the better name and would dominate the broader cloud HR services category as long as Gusto kept its original name. Only once a new name was established should Gusto have attempted to introduce new products.

Gusto could thrive despite its positioning challenge. Positioning is important, but cultivating evangelical customers also can be a winning strategy. A different series of positioning choices would have set Gusto on a more blissful path.

 

Company logos courtesy of Jet and Gusto.

Reading with Steve: Positioning by Ries and Trout

Reading with Steve is a regular feature at SteveFeyer.com. Read product marketing and content marketing book reviews.

Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind is comprehensively outdated. And it is singly essential.

The 1981 classic by Al Ries and Jack Trout proves that the most important ideas in marketing do not change, even if the examples illustrating them do.

Positioning by Ries and Trout a strategy classicRies and Trout define the tenets of positioning, the art of influencing how prospective customers perceive a product. As a marketer, you can position your own product, a competitor’s product, or a whole market category. Your successful strategy may include all three elements. The authors use many broadly accessible case studies to show how to position.

The key tenet of positioning is to find a hole in the market – which the authors call a creneau – and to exploit it. The first step in exploiting a hole is to know where you stand in the marketplace. If you are not the market leader, you cannot market like the leader: determine what makes you unique and shout it. Above all, don’t attack an entrenched position held by a competitor.

The authors say much more and say it much better than I can. Simply put, Positioning is the Principia Mathematica of marketing strategy. It is revolutionary, yet as time passes a few of its topics begin to need further elucidation. The authors admonish that no position is forever secure, as markets and tastes are constantly changing. Just so, the rules they lay out for positioning have shifted in at least one notable way.

What’s In A Name

The rules of product and company naming have evolved. The authors write that a descriptive name, such as Taster’s Choice coffee, is better than a coined name. A name without intrinsic meaning can only work “when you are first in the mind with an absolutely new product”, such as Coca-Cola.

In the past generation, descriptive names tend to get lost in the marketplace because they don’t have the memorability of a good coined name, particularly if the coined name can extend an existing product category with a new standard of service or quality.

Consider Starbucks, for example. It is a meaningless name in a crowded coffee market. But Starbucks established a new category of premium product and service, and so could position its nonsense name in the market. With the explosion of companies and brands, evocative-but-made-up names are often highly successful. And few consumers under age 30 would know what Taster’s Choice is.

Many failed dot-coms followed the logic of descriptive naming and failed. If a descriptive name held any intrinsic advantage, Books.com would have bested Amazon.com. In the digital age, it turns out, people have a more complicated mental model for the signals of desirability contained in a name. Ries and Trout’s advice on naming is not wrong, just too simplistic for the 21st century.

Some Things Can Never Change

The biggest change in business life since 1981 is the rise of startups, which now dominate the landscape of imagination as IBM once dominated computing. Ries and Trout almost exclusively draw their examples from large companies in established markets. They have little to say about how these brands came to become so dominant. If you are an entrepreneur, you may be tempted to conclude that these examples don’t apply – as many recent successes have claimed to part with past history.

The case studies are universally out of date, yet if anything this slim volume is more powerful for its archaic examples. Cited companies have folded and quoted ad campaigns are long over, forcing the modern reader to generalize the lessons.

Alcohol as a product marketing example
One possible inspiration for great writing.

I was struck that many of the examples use alcohol, beer, and wine. One imagines the authors, casting about for illustrative cases, opening a desk drawer to pour two fingers of inspiration. I found the constant booze examples surreal, but they in no way detract from the value of the case studies. What once worked for scotch and Schlitz can also work for websites.

You would ignore the rules of Positioning at your peril. In my next post, I’ll discuss two startups that failed to consider positioning first and may pay for it later.

Buy Positioning.