The $0 marketing budget generation
As an entrepreneur and a mentor here at Mind The Bridge (this is me), there is one thing that I find particularly thought-provoking about the WhatsApp success story: the $0 marketing budget with which they reached half-a-billion users.
Indeed, there is much to learn from their success, and many have written good reads on that (e.g. here, here, and here). Among the big lessons:
- being an innovator in a big, mature industry ready for disruption (text messaging);
- staying laser-focused on a product that does one and only one thing (or at least, I’ve only used WhatsApp to send text and don’t even know — or care — if it contains other features);
- looking at the world — not the geographical area where you live and operate — as your target market, from the get-go;
- moving on after being rejected (WhatsApp founder Brian Acton was turned down by both Twitter and Facebook before starting the company);
- … much more.
The biggest lesson from the WhatsApp story
And yet, there is one fact that makes you humble to the core: WhatsApp spent zero money on advertising and customer acquisition. Yes, their marketing budget was a big doughnut. Which I translate into the following:
If you are selling a consumer product (or service), the speed and reach of today’s word-of-mouth tools will create traction. If there is none, your product is simply not good enough.
Or, in a shorter version:
product is marketing
Yes, your product is your marketing. Today a great product markets itself, and it does so at unprecedented speed. It finds ways to do so through its users’ talking, emailing, blogging, tweeting, posting, writing, … you name it. We become a living, multimedia billboard for the products we love.
Being a communication tool — where each user helps acquire new users by getting friends and family looped in — certainly helped WhatsApp accelerate customer acquisition exponentially. But the reason why 320 million people use the product every day (as of this writing), is that they find value in it. And that’s the real fuel in the growth engine.
And it can certainly be true in B2B products and services too, although there the adoption of something new — at the enterprise level — can be slowed down by potentially lengthy purchasing processes, thus creating some friction.
In B2C (and B2B for SMBs), there are no excuses. Like it or not, my fellow entrepreneurs, it’s all about our products. They speak for themselves, creating far-reaching and crazy-fast viral effects when they hit the spot. And speaking loudly when they don’t: they’re just not quite good enough.
I’ve been learning this on my own skin for 15 years now… and counting 🙂
Brutally humbling… and exciting
It’s a really hard truth to swallow because it’s a lot easier to blame a lack of traction on a lack of marketing dollars, rather than a lack of true value in what we have built.
It’s a brutal lesson because it leaves no doubt as to why we’re not hitting it out of the park when we don’t. But it’s also a really exciting reality. A $0 marketing budget completely levels the playing field!
Entrepreneurs of the world: your customer acquisition cost to get to 450,000,000 users could well be $0. How cool is that? That’s a staggering and truly exciting thought.
Don’t get me wrong: there are certain scenarios when a marketing budget is well spent on customer acquisition. Among them:
- to acquire early adopters;
- to further accelerate growth;
- to buy time while the product is not good enough to market itself;
- to win market share in a commoditized industry (until some startup with $0 marketing budget comes along and disrupts it!)
There are others — and I’m certainly simplifying things — but the main lesson remains: in this age of lighting-fast social media, the product itself can and must be your best marketing tool.
Product is marketing.
Let’s just build awesome products.
Massimo Arrigoni