How A Startup Founder Generates Leads

Launching a new business? Whether you’re newly self-employed or planning to be the next Amazon, the principles for a startup founder are the same.

1. Direct Networking

Startup founders must engage in direct and regular prospecting for their business. There is no other way around it. This can be difficult for some founders, especially those who have not participated in sales before.

Some think they can hire a sales person to do it for them. But, in the early days, no one will be as strong on the message or as committed to the business’ success as the founder.

Moreover, the process of finding prospective customers, convincing them to agree to meet with you, talking to them about their problems and your solution, convincing them to give you a try — is the difficult rite of passage that a founder must go through to find product-market fit. It’s only by having dozens and eventually hundreds of conversations that you start to understand what part of the message really sticks with customers, and what is really motivating them to buy. And it’s never exactly what you thought it would be when you started out.

What about using marketing as the primary way of generating business? A seasoned marketing leader will tell you that it’s no substitute for direct human conversation. Marketing strategy can help find which prospects to reach out to. Marketing demand-gen can help set up conversations. A great website and collateral can lend credibility to your message. But the founder needs to be the one to have the conversation.

Simply put, if you’re not able to generate business by simply talking to people, you won’t be able to generate leads with marketing.

Y-combinator founder Paul Graham discusses this further in his seminal article:

The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

Airbnb is a classic example of this technique. Marketplaces are so hard to get rolling that you should expect to take heroic measures at first. In Airbnb’s case, these consisted of going door to door in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings. Stripe is one of the most successful startups we’ve funded, and the problem they solved was an urgent one. If anyone could have sat back and waited for users, it was Stripe. But in fact they’re famous within YC for similarly aggressive early user acquisition.

There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They’d rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing.

The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. This can’t be how the big, famous startups got started, they think. The mistake they make is to underestimate the power of compound growth. We encourage every startup to measure their progress by weekly growth rate. If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week. And while 110 may not seem much better than 100, if you keep growing at 10% a week you’ll be surprised how big the numbers get. After a year you’ll have 14,000 users, and after 2 years you’ll have 2 million.

You’ll be doing different things when you’re acquiring users a thousand at a time, and growth has to slow down eventually. But if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users manually and then gradually switch to less manual methods.”

So get cracking on direct outreach! Start by aiming for 1 prospective meeting per day.

Here are some ways to land those meetings:

• Direct outreach via e-mail (a personalized e-mail from the founder, not an e-mail ad)
• LinkedIn InMail and other social media
• Referrals through your network
• Speak at a conference and talk to the audience afterwards
• Attend a conference and talk to the speakers
• Online forums
• Partner referrals
• Former colleagues, employers, partners
• Past customers
• Competitors’ customers

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When I was doing business development in the healthcare space, I would book a ticket to every major conference where my prospective customers were exhibiting and spend the day going from booth to booth striking up cold conversations with each exhibitor. By the end of the day you’ve had 100 customer conversations!

​2. Establish a Web Presence

A business needs a website, but how can you ensure your website is maximizing the amount of traffic and converting that traffic into customer conversations?

You need to give customers a reason to visit your website and keep coming back to it. If all your website does is talk about the service you offer and background about your company, it’s not going to pull in a lot of traffic.

Think about websites that you have visited, especially those you visit regularly — what is it that brings you back? Probably you go to a website to read useful information, engage socially, or get a free product trial. So your website needs to offer one of these.

The easiest to get started with is useful information. Some call this “thought leadership” but that implies you have to be somehow producing visionary content and manifestos, and actually, most readers don’t want that. They just want practical information that answers their questions. That’s why Google’s algorthim now ranks websites higher when they directly answer frequently searched questions.

Start writing a few good articles or blog posts. Quality over quantity. One very practical, helpful article that provides worthwhile advice is worth 10 blog posts that don’t actually answer anyone’s question. If you can get a few really helpful articles, you can:

• optimize the keywords and format of the article to rank higher in Google searches
• increase the article’s Page Authority (and thus Google ranking) by getting it linked from high authority websites such as partners, universities, etc.
• comment on relevant sites, forums and social media, linking back to your article
• promote the article with the help of partners, using joint marketing
• optimize your website speed, stability, mobile layout following Google PageSpeed insights, further increasing rankings for searches

Some specific things that Google prioritizes about your page:

• if it sees users spending time on the page (a sign that readers are actually reading) — so make sure what you write is engaging. It also helps to write in short paragraphs, spacing out each paragraph to make it very easy to follow.
• if it sees users clicking forward from your page to another page, rather than clicking to go back (a further sign of engagement) — so make sure to include useful links in your article for those that want to read more and learn more
• if it sees embedded video content — so if relevant, try embedding a video in your article, even if that video is just reading out the article itself
• fill in useful meta-information within the page, such as information contained in your <h1> and <h2> headers
• establish authority within your article, e.g. state clearly the author’s credentials and why they are uniquely positioned to write on the topic
• avoid large images, if any images at all, as images can slow down page loading (and Google de-prioritizes slow pages)
• ensure the page looks right on mobile phones, as Google prioritizes a mobile-first experience.

Although I’m referring to Google’s algorithm, these best practices are largely true for most other search engines as well.

Of course, you can also boost traffic to your website through paid advertisements although organic is usually best because it is validation that you are truly connecting with an audience and not just artificially. Paid advertisements also tend to be expensive for the amount of well-targeted traffic they can yield.

3. Participate in Social Media

Apart from a very small number of startups that get lucky with a viral social media campaign, for the vast majority of startups social media is typically not a lead generator in the early days. Especially not compared to direct outreach and your website. But it is useful to expand your company’s reach, to set up meetings with prospective customers not in your immediate network, and to explore and uncover secondary markets.

First decide what social media “channel” makes most sense for your business. It’s a waste of time to try to be on multiple platforms, so instead try specializing in just one. Facebook is typically better for promoting consumer products as Facebook allows business owners to target large numbers of people by demographic. LinkedIn posts are typically better when you’re in B2B or professional services. Instagram if you’re a creator and trying to be part of a particular community of creators, or showcase a particularly visual aspect of your work (art, crafts, fashion, etc.). If you’re targeting other geographic markets, choose social media that is popular in the countries you are selling to. This should all be common sense.

Just as Google ranks web pages based on an algorithm that looks for ‘engagement’, social media platforms are also discerning in terms of the posts they will make visible to other members. For example what I have found for LinkedIn:

• The first line of the post has to be intriguing enough that readers will click “Read More” to see the whole post, a sign of engagement. Consider a surprising question to lead off your post.
• The post has to be fairly long, as LinkedIn is checking how much time the post occupies real estate on your screen as you scroll (another sign of engagement). You will see many posters putting a space in between each sentence in order to lengthen the overall post.
• The post needs to have readers, ‘likes’ and clicks early on as it’s posted, therefore the timing of when you post is critical (hint: around 7–8am just as people are checking into their social media over their morning coffee)
• The post should make use of emojis (although they can be annoying!)
• The post ideally doesn’t link to your website or a 3rd party website, as LinkedIn wants readers to stay on their platform. Some will put the link to their website in the comments section rather than in the main body of the post.
• And of course, the number of total ‘likes’, comments and readers of the post is a major influencer as well

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Earlier this year I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post to illustrate all of these techniques. It took me 2 minutes to write, and I got over 2,000 views in a day. Image what you can do if you follow these same techniques but with helpful relevant content!

​For an effective social media campaign, you’ll have to plan your messaging, content, frequency, audiences, etc. Social media can be a major time suck, so check in frequently and be ruthless about cutting things out if they are not generating the engagement with your business that you’re hoping for.

Also, business owners tend to think of “social media” as posting on Facebook and LinkedIn, but consider other forms of social media such as answering questions on Reddit and Quora where you might actually be adding more value.

Originally published at https://www.stellexgroup.com.