Guides
You can build it.
Now work out who wants it.
Distribution is the bottleneck for most new software, and almost nobody arrives at it by a route that taught them how. These are the things we’d tell a founder who’s shipped something good and can’t work out why nobody is using it.
Where you are
Launched, and nobody came
Two completely different problems look identical from where you are sitting: nobody is arriving, or people arrive and leave. Find out which one you have before you do anything else.
5 min read
Some users, and no growth
Forty users and a flat line is the most information-rich position in early startup life, and almost nobody reads it. How to work out whether you have an acquisition problem, a retention problem or a repeatability problem.
6 min read
Getting customers
How to get your first SaaS customers
Not a growth strategy. A list of things you can do this week. How the first ten paying customers actually get found when nobody has heard of you.
6 min read
How to get first users for your app
Users and customers are different problems with different playbooks. How to get the first hundred people actually using your app, and how to tell whether that number means anything.
6 min read
How to market an app
You built the app. Nothing is happening. A practical sequence for developers marketing their own product, starting with the page rather than the channel.
7 min read
Marketing for SaaS founders
Early-stage SaaS marketing has a different sequence to everything else: your first customers are found by hand, your positioning comes from their words, and most channels are wrong until you know what converts.
6 min read
How to market a developer tool
Developers detect and reject marketing faster than any other audience, which inverts most of the usual advice. What works instead: docs as the landing page, the honest README, and the difference between stars and customers.
4 min read
Instead of
Using ChatGPT for startup marketing
An honest account of what a general-purpose chatbot does well for early-stage marketing, the four jobs it cannot do at all, and how to get more out of it if it is what you have.
5 min read
AI CMO tools for early-stage startups
The AI CMO category reads your site and produces a continuous feed of drafted marketing work. Here is what that solves, what it does not, and how to tell which problem you actually have.
4 min read
Alternatives to a marketing agency
Agencies, fractional CMOs, freelancers and doing it yourself, compared honestly for a founder with a working product, few users and no marketing budget. Including when hiring someone really is the right answer.
4 min read
AI SEO tools for startups
Automated content tools work. The question is whether search is your channel yet. An honest look at payback periods, when programmatic content is the right call, and what to do in the nine months before it pays.
4 min read