The #1 Fail Factor Plaguing Startups Today Has Nothing to Do With Sales
99.9% of business gurus today are omitting the most crucial factor in your startup’s success — and it’s causing massive failure.
My eyes widened and my ears perked up as a well-known “business guru” quickly glossed over the most valuable topic that didn’t quite make his bullet list for this founder mastermind. That’s when I realized — despite this person’s financial success, his growing cult of devout followers, and his digital fan base, he was unknowingly — or inadvertently — leading them astray. This wasn’t a room full of future founders; it was a room full of future failures…and that was my cue to get up and leave.
Before you spend thousands of dollars on guru courses, attending live “masterminds”, or binge hundreds of hours of entrepreneurial podcasts, let me just burst your bubble and spoil the ending: Marketing isn’t your biggest problem, and it surely shouldn’t be your primary focus if you intend to attain lasting startup success.
In fact — here’s my “hot take” controversial opinion: Marketing will only accelerate and augment your impending failure, and it will take your entire reputation down with it if you do everything right.
Think about it: As more business coaches, trainings, gurus, and education — free and paid — have popped up over the past two, five, and 10+ years the rates of entrepreneurial failure have remained largely unchanged. Why are 90% of founders still failing if we all have access to the silver bullet secrets at the click of a mouse or tap of a screen? Here’s why — and once you see the truth, you simply can’t unsee it…but you might rush back to the drawing board before your own startup’s inevitable (and very public) demise.
Good Marketing Is Accelerating Failure (and Trashing Your Reputation)
Let’s all agree on one thing: Good marketing is marketing that spreads the word about your company, product, or service efficiently and effectively enough to turn strangers into customers. That’s not really up for debate. What happens next, however, is.
Does anyone remember the infamous Fyre Festival? Billy McFarland’s brainchild may have gone down in headline-worthy tabloid-loving flames, but would you fault his marketing team for that failure? No, not at all. Oh, by the way, the Fyre team outsourced most of that marketing effort, so that wasn’t really their role to fulfill. You could argue the Fyre Team — having outsourced the marketing to world-class teams who knew how to build buzz and generate sales — only had one key responsibility: To deliver on their promised offer, also known as a kick-you-know-what festival.
Were the outsourced marketing teams the ones to wind up with SEC fines and jail sentences? Nope. Nonetheless, the grand scale of Fyre’s demise and the ruin of Billy’s reputation at the time were testaments to the success of the marketing.
Sadly, that’s exactly what effective marketing — and founders with bottomless pockets of financial resources allocated to marketing — can create if the marketing itself is the founder’s sole focus.
That tiny blip on the radar of the guru’s speech at the mastermind I referenced had nothing to do with team, branding, marketing, or sales; instead, it had to do with the one element of entrepreneurship he didn’t dare teach: Product. Let’s unpack why…
Why Gurus Avoid the Only Elephant That Matters
“Of course, you need to have a great product — that’s a given”…that’s the gist of what he said. But here’s the thing: It’s NOT a given! Conversely, it’s arguably the hardest piece of the entrepreneurship puzzle to crack, yet the one afforded the least attention in every facet of today’s most popular and widely binged educational startup porn.
Why won’t gurus touch the “product” conversation? It isn’t because they have no clue how to build a successful product or service that customers love, repurchase, and refer to all their friends. If that were the case, these gurus wouldn’t likely have a leg to stand on or a history of prior startup successes. If they do, there’s clearly something they know (that you may not) that they’re for some reason unwilling to share.
These gurus aren’t maliciously guarding their founder secrets or keeping the lid on the silver bullet that guarantees a successful product or service. They simply know that message can’t effectively be shared with the masses.
That’s the real problem here: The most actionable and effective product- or service-specific entrepreneurial advice can’t be generic, blanket, one-size-fits-all, which is exactly why most gurus avoid it altogether.
The consequence? Aspiring founders who take these gurus’ words as entrepreneurial gospel believe that they, too, can glaze over the most crucial factor determining their startup’s long-term success or failure.
Thus, they fully immerse themselves in all the marketing-related, digital, team-building, branding, and social media advice, while overlooking the one problem they neglected to solve: How do we build an awesome product that over-delivers, solves a customer problem, brings a new solution or innovation to our industry, and is so well-loved and effective customers can’t help but to shout it from the rooftops and share it will all their peers?
If answering that question didn’t precede your marketing planning or your social media branding and salesmanship immersion, then you just may be building yourself a very embarrassing failure (assuming your marketing strategy does pan out).
What you’re probably doing wrong
The issue here surrounding founders and subpar products isn’t necessarily one of ignorance. It’s often — especially in today’s money-driven culture — a result of putting profits over products.
Are there founders out there trying to pass off a pile of dropshipped dog poo as the latest innovation in health and wellness, hoping customers will buy into all their marketing mumbo jumbo without looking too closely? Yes, without a doubt. Certain industries are rife with examples, like the unregulated supplement space, though it’s just one of many.
Those founders peddling such vaporware-esque products aren’t necessarily lazy. They may have forgotten that their number one goal, and the oath all founders ought to take before accepting a penny from customers, is to delight, surprise, solve problems, and deliver value by making the customer’s life better than it was before. Business shouldn’t be about pulling the wool over a customer’s eyes and hoping they don’t poke, prod, or look under the hood at what’s really in that “sausage” you cooked up.
A great founder with integrity and their customers’ best interest in mind would have no issue gladly opening up that sausage right there in person, on a stage, and walking buyers and prospects through every ingredient and process involved in its creation. However, far more founders are secretive, ashamed, or feel that it’s their job to overhype a product, regardless of its quality, value, and effectiveness.
This is the beginning of the end when it comes to startup morality. This is, in fact, the very reason many consumers don’t trust “big businesses”. This is also the very thing founders, solopreneurs, and small businesses were supposed to fight against with their higher-quality, more effective, innovative products. But today, that’s a rarity, since a different criteria has taken priority.
Money-hungry founders today don’t care most about “product”; they care most about profits (and growth). But can you even blame them? Perhaps you can, but I know exactly why their priorities are as such. That lack of morality around improving customers’ lives and serving up the best product or service possible didn’t originate with founders; it was a trickle-down effect from the investors who made their priorities clear as day.
I could spill the beans on countless founders who’ve been advised by investors to lower the quality of their products to boost margins if they hoped to get a deal. When a multi-million (or multi-hundred-million) dollar carrot is dangled in front of you and it hinges upon making a few “innocuous” changes that customers may or may not notice or mind, profits trump product quality more times than not.
Here’s the problem: Alternating the order of those two priorities may bring you the funding today or the quick buck now, but in the long run, once you have the budget to pump into a massive marketing campaign, it may all come crumbling down.
Once customers catch a whiff of your product quality’s downhill trajectory, the word-of-mouth sales may slow, but the reputational damage accelerates. It’s human psychology: People love to watch a train wreck more than a happy ending, and if your marketing is effective, you just may have produced your very own train wreck of a startup demise.
Marketing is a dangerous weapon; here’s the fix.
You know all the motivational gurus out there who say “Ignore permission; just ask forgiveness later”? These are the people who encourage the likes of a Theranos or Fyre Festival scandal by brainwashing founders to believe marketing is paramount to building a great product or service. Whether malicious or involuntary, selling the public a severely subpar product can toe the line of unethical…and in some cases (and industries) illegal.
If you believe marketing and sales comprise 99% of successful entrepreneurship, leaving a measly 1% for product creation, iteration, and everything else, then I’d posit that perhaps you shouldn’t be the solo-founder or CEO of your venture. You’re welcome to devote 99% of your time, resources, and effort to promoting a product or service so long as your co-founder first ensured product-market fit, solicited beta tester feedback, and affirmed that the product you’re peddling actually holds a candle to the laundry list of features and benefits you’re likely rattling off.
If you don’t have or want to find (and wait for) that co-founder or CEO to take that crucial first step — without cutting corners, no matter how long it takes or what it costs your startup’s profit margin potential — then you may be better served hopping on a train that’s already going. There’s no shame in offering up your marketing and sales acumen to another startup that’s already got a great product underway. Sure, you may lack the glory and title of being the solopreneur, inventor, and CEO, but you may also avoid the devastating demise you were otherwise speeding toward.