The success-killer for most startups is not running out of cash. It’s running out of time.
One could argue that “time is money” and that is true, but startup businesses more frequently run out of time than money. In today’s cash-flush and credit-rich society, coming up with extra coin—especially for a promising startup—is easier than coming up with a few extra months of runway to get a product released or a customer order fulfilled.
No, the greatest enemy to any fledgling startup is running out of time to deliver. As some of the most successful digital startups have shown, if you are hitting milestones, onboarding new customers and bringing in some semblance of revenue (with a clear path toward profits), the money can be procured. Unfortunately, you can’t simply raise more capital and then buy yourself extra months of runway. It simply doesn’t work that way.
Innovation is Your Saving Grace
To succeed as a newly-minted startup with little to no revenue, there needs to be an answer to the question of “why?”
“Why your company over someone else?”
“What do you have to offer that is not already serviced by the existing market?”
In other words, “what is your innovation? Your competitive advantage?”
The most successful startups never fall into the pattern of creating “me too” products. They innovate in blue oceans where products and services don’t yet exist. They (typically) avoid the competitive red oceans fraught with competition—the proverbial business bloodbath.
On the other hand, while innovation may help startups avoid competitors, it doesn’t stop the clock from ticking or guarantee a steady flow of revenue.
It’s speedy innovation (that’s backed by addressable market demand), coupled with the right sales and marketing mix that makes startups truly successful.
SEO Takes Too Long for Most Startups to Be Successful
Building up a website to the point where it receives hoards of organic visitors is measured in months, years and decades, not days and weeks. SEO is the very definition of the “long game.”
As such, startups looking to make quick wins will need to opt for paid media, not a strategy that involves organic SEO, content marketing and link building.
An SEO-only strategy, especially for inbound marketing, would simply take too long. And time is not something most startups have.
This is where blue ocean innovators truly have the upper hand. When demand can be created by waging a war of attrition on your own terms, you don’t need to fight for ground that is already hotly contested by would-be competitors. While you may compete in online search for similar keywords, a truly innovative company can stay above the fray, taking more of a PR angle, than one steeped in shady manual link building tactics.
Believe me, there are no strategy shortages in this regard.
A Greater Focus on Revenue
Instead of focusing on marketing, new(er) businesses that have a working product to sell should instead focus on sales. This outbound over inbound approach will create the quick wins needed to take the business out of early-stage territory.
When I founded my first startup, we did not have an innovative product, but we did have salesmanship and that is what we used. The business: a Dish Network retailer, selling and installing satellite dishes for local television service in the Seattle area. I was 22. We housed the hundreds of dishes and satellite receivers out of my parents’ garage and sold satellites door-to-door while we worked to finish college. We had no website. Only a business license and a bunch of equipment we had purchased on credit.
From the outset, we immediately hired some 20+ contract salespeople to help push the product to our target customer: watchers of TV.
It worked.
In the first year, we had acquired over 1,000 customers and reached over $1M in sales. If we had relied on inbound traffic from a search engine, we would have never made a single sale—not a one.
But, by focusing our efforts on things we could immediately control, we were—in my estimation for a first-time startup—greatly successful.
A similar focus on outbound instead of inbound can help shelter any business against the ups and downs inherent in ranking changes in online search. Any business—startup or otherwise—that bases their entire sales strategy on Google search traffic and an inbound approach is more likely to see revenue move in delayed lockstep to traffic peaks and troughs.
The better plan is to create an internal sales system that insulates the business against the wiles of search gods.
Local Business Exceptions to the Rule
Succeeding in online marketing as a startup is more relevant the most localized your audience is. For local businesses, particularly local retail and services businesses, there are possibilities for faster gains and quicker turnarounds in procuring your clients from organic inbound search.
In such scenarios, local businesses are competing for longer-tail keywords that are less likely to have masses of competing companies vying for top positions in search. Examples could include:
“dog walker in Cincinnati, Ohio”
“pizza in Boise, Idaho”
When competing for these types of turns, something as simple as a Google My Business listing may hold the cards to a quick and immediate win to the top of the results for companies looking to get immediate local exposure.
Where demand is low, quality SEO can have more of an immediate impact for procuring inbound results.
The Caveat
Admittedly, the arguments here are somewhat “tongue in cheek.” Any startup that needs and wants to compete certainly should not ignore the need for SEO and content marketing. It’s one critical leg of a multi-leg stool. Any startup looking to succeed with true staying power would ignore content marketing at its ultimate peril, especially in today’s digitally connected world.
Things like on-site content quality, site speed, SSL, sitemaps, crawl errors, link building, public relations and similar strategies would all be included in the holistic approach that has come to be table stakes for today’s digital marketers.
Even established companies experience the natural ebbs and flows inherent in organic search, including the spikes and troughs of algorithm updates. Focusing efforts on an innovation and revenue-first approach toward the business will ensure staying power and, better still, alleviate the stress that can be inherent in website rankings.