Most of start-ups fail. To be more precise, most of tech start-ups with killer products fail. Why? One of the reasons is they have overlooked the importance of marketing their products.
A lot of tech start-up founders are super talented and committed to designing and developing their dream products (App/software/platform/chain). Sometimes, they may enjoy this process too much and do not put enough attention on the customer needs and how to market their products.
If you have 10 million funding initially, you may spend 9.5 millions on designing and developing the best product. Then you find out there are only $500,000 left, the company probably cannot pay the bill of the ads. You should at least reserve half of the money (I would say 80% up) to burn on marketing your products initially. Superb marketing almost always beats superb products. Without getting known, perfect products cannot get popular and your companies would run out of money. And in reality, a lot of dominant products in some industries have unpleasant design and user experience, they dominate their market just because they took the first mover advantage.
Also, feedback from users are important and, most of the time, they are quite different from what the founders think. Therefore, we should not wait for the perfect products to launch. Instead, we should launch the product when just the basics are ready. It is hard for some perfectionists to overcome this challenge. Then, do some pilot launch or small scale marketing to gather the user behavior and feedback. Sometimes, we may find there is no need for a product we think is great. These are critical for us to re-design or enhance our products. Then we can launch the next versions of the products. Massive scale of marketing is better to do when the product is stable.
Some corporations launched the products (less-happening in start-ups) and think they have finished their jobs. Actually, they should keep tracking the behavior of the users and see which parts can be enhanced to improve customer experience.
