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7 min read Product Management

The Signal & the Noise

In this essay, I shared some insights on working with users, media engagement and crisis management.

In the customer discovery phase of a startup, the startup team typically encounter a phenomenon called the signal and the noise. The signal answers the question whether your startup is genuinely gaining traction and generating viral user growth. The noise shrouds your vision with all the drums banging about the promise of your startup. Both signal and noise constituted both marketing and public relations (PR) portion of a startup. How do you build a proper marketing and PR plan while relentlessly focused on delivering the minimum viable product?

The first step: Build a media plan that is integrated with product development & customer discovery

Always start with a plan. Every startup typically starts with a group of founders building a minimum viable product with a set of features that are tested against a set of hypotheses requiring customer validation. In the majority of my encounters with startups, they are either too obsessed with product development or getting media attention. Either extreme is not appealing because it does not achieve the objective of what they really want: solving the pain point for the customers who will pay for your product/service.

As a former media outlet owner (SGE.io), here are the two types of messages which I have often received from entrepreneurs:

Only a few entrepreneurs have heeded my advice in how they should engage the media for press coverage, for example, the founders of RedMart. The first question I often asked them, “What is your story?”. The variant of that question is, “what is the angle that you want the media outlet to cover you?”. I am going to share the secret sauce here as I have done with all the entrepreneurs who I have met. The way to do this is to plan your media coverage way ahead in time. Typically, I tell the entrepreneur to create a spreadsheet with the following fields:

Only a few entrepreneurs have heeded my advice in how they should engage the media for press coverage, for example, the founders of RedMart. The first question I often asked them, “What is your story?”. The variant of that question is, “what is the angle that you want the media outlet to cover you?”. I am going to share the secret sauce here as I have done with all the entrepreneurs who I have met. The way to do this is to plan your media coverage way ahead in time. Typically, I tell the entrepreneur to create a spreadsheet with the following fields:

Day Number/Date/Time: Starting from the first day of your startup all the way to the 100th day and the first year. This is to set your timeline and milestones for product development, customer discovery and media engagement.

Product Development: Note down which day on this column when you will launch product X, feature Y, a strategic partnership. Make sure that you tie your team to delivering on the dates with each milestone.

Team addition or important milestone: Note down an important hire who would be joining your company. Make sure that you have at least one week before letting the world that you have joined.

Customer Discovery: You should make sure that the product development sync with your customer discovery work. Ensuring the hypotheses for customer validation are also implemented in the same stage.

Media Engagement: Making sure when you are ready to get media to promote the story.

Once you have that spreadsheet built up, the first thing you want to do is to write the next press release documenting the story you want to tell. This press release should only be known to your team who has to deliver the product to the story you want to build. Of course, there will be changes to the product and the story, but the media plan helps the team to stay focused to their goals and objectives.

The last tip I want to offer is to engage the journalists early and not late. At least, get to know them before you engage them for a story. Their work schedule are pretty hectic and often they have to visit a couple of leads per day. Like any endeavours in a startup such as fundraising, you should make sure that the journalists are in your network fund and you are constantly checking in with them such that when you pitch the real story, they are ready for you.

The Noise

Generating awareness for your startup is not an exercise for customer discovery or validation. It’s easier to call it “noise” and I do not mean it in a bad way. Although it does not generate real bumps for the business objective, it is a process to get your startup “show-roomed” by investors or people who are looking for technology ideas to clone. The common misconception is to lump PR and marketing in the same bundle during the startup phase, but they are actually different things.

Here are some rules to help you with engaging the press to generate “noise”:

The Signal

The signal is important to your startup because it creates the blood flow (in the form of revenues) that will keep it going. While you can read up everything on customer discovery, learning how to market your startup to customers is extremely important. With these three rules of thumb, it is important to focus on the signal, which is to map the marketing plan to discover, gather and convert customers to paying customers:

Marketing as Signal & PR as Noise

Bringing it all back to you, the signal and the noise are synonymously linked to two functions for the startup: marketing and PR respectively. Learn to focus on the signal and be less reliant to noise is how you can navigate the terrain out there to make your startup successful.