Required Reading for Early Business Hires

• Customers don’t care about buying products. They care about making progress in their lives. They buy products to assist them in making progress.
• Business customers have different priorities than consumers.
• Customers hire products both to cure pains and to experience gains.
• To create happy customers you must understand their goals and struggles in life. Learning consumer psychology will help you become an effective and empathic communicator.

• If you create a generalized message aimed at everyone, you won’t resonate with anyone. To craft an influential message you’ll need to focus on a specific customer segment.
• To master messaging it helps to know psychological triggers that influence customers.
• If your messaging doesn’t reflect what they care about they won’t listen.

• Metrics track what matters to a startup. To speak the language of business you’ll need to be able to know what they mean.
• How much a startup can spend on distribution depends on what the company expects to make back in revenue.
• The more complex your sales process is the higher your cost of customer acquisition will be.
• You can spend a lot of time and effort winning deals but still lose the market if you can’t keep your customers.

• Getting your first customers is hard. To convince people to take a chance on an unproven product you’ll need to do things that may not scale. The same goes true for keeping those customers happy. 
• Before your company finds product market fit, trying to grow too quickly can be a dangerous waste of money. Your job is to bring in enough customers to meet investor expectations and keep the business afloat.
• Finding a channel that works for your business requires deliberate testing.
• Without a product that meets the needs of your customers, any efforts to grow will be a waste of time and money.

In order to help your company achieve meaningful traction you’ll need an arsenal of tactics including: 

• Content Marketing & SEO 
• Paid Advertising 
• Landing Page Creation 
• Prospecting 
• Lead Nurturing 
• Qualifying and Closing 
• Onboarding and Customer Success 
• Pricing 
• Copywriting 
• Customer Development