The Tough Love You Need to Hear When Marketing Your Startup

The world of female-founded startups is fascinating. Coming from a cut-throat corporate background working for some of the largest fast-moving consumer goods brands (Kraft, BIC, L’Oreal), it has definitely taken some adjustment for me.

While I’m all for female empowerment, #womensupportingwomen and artsy affirmations that you can stick up on the wall, if you really want to succeed, you also need to hear some tough love and real talk.

Sometimes it is our limiting beliefs that hold us back, other times it's just that our marketing sucks.

Our ideas get better through opposition, not from people telling us how much they #fangirl over us, but who never buy from us.

So, in this spirit, I’m dishing out some tough love to female-founded small business owners but wrapping it in a warm hug.

Truth 1: Launching an online course or a digital product is not going to make you money in your sleep.

Not anytime soon, lovely. Despite what the celebrity CEOs and online marketing gurus tell you, launching an online course and evergreen product is by no means a walk in the park.

Online courses and digital products are now a saturated market, and the people who have achieved success with this business model have slogged it out for years to build their personal brands, email lists, podcast subscribers and social media followings to be able to now reap the benefits.

I know because I have an online course that I’ve been offering for 18 months and while I do sell out every time, there is absolutely nothing flipping passive about the effort that I put in. And by the way, I’m a professional marketer, with 20 years of experience running marketing campaigns, teaching female founders how to do what I’ve been doing my entire career at a professional level. Good luck if you’ve been doing something for only a few years, know a topic moderately well, and now think you can teach others.

Truth 2: If you are copying someone else, they know.

We always know. The jig is up. The thing is, we don’t really care, because if this is the path you take, you will always be two steps behind.

There’s a competitor who has used my tagline, twice. I change mine, I wait a few weeks, and now she is using it. I offer a 6-week marketing course, and now she is offering a 6-week marketing course and she is even going after the same guest strategists that I offer on my program.

It’s fascinating that someone who works in marketing thinks this is a winning strategy. It’s not.

Truth 3: The reason you have nothing to post is that you aren’t doing anything interesting.

If you partnered with a like-minded brand for an exciting collaboration or had a cool event planned, or you got a juicy article published or recently appeared on someone’s podcast, you would have no shortage of content to post about. The reason why you don’t is that your marketing starts and ends with your social media. Go do something else, and you will never have to worry about what you will post again. Promise.

Truth 4: The algorithm is not to blame for your content not performing.

It’s because you use the same Canva design template as everyone else, the same Brené Brown quote, and the same Unsplash image that has been downloaded 554,000 times. Your content isn’t original, and original ideas win, my friends.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

Truth 5: Think you’re ready to scale? Think again.

The biggest cause of startup failure is premature scaling so please be very mindful of all the gurus telling you that you should be scaling your business NOW.

Scaling is risky, and we are not talking about that anywhere near enough.

Not everyone is ready to scale. Servicing 20 customers is very different to servicing 200, let alone 2000. Scaling often requires a hefty financial investment in systems, people or marketing (or all three), meaning a huge outlay with no real idea of when, or if, you’ll get a return.

You have to ask yourself, is it the right time in your life to be ALL IN with your business?

Truth 6: Sorry, there ain’t no secret sauce

I get it, I’m a bootstrapped startup founder too and it’s so damn tantalising to hear that there’s a secret recipe, tried and tested formula or plug and play template that is going to “skyrocket my business”. So, we attend all the free webinars, and buy a stack of $47 bundles and accumulate a pile of unfinished courses. And most of it was a waste of time and money.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. There is no secret sauce, and if there was, we’d all be killing it. You’re in complete control of who you do and don’t listen to, and where you invest your precious funds, and when it comes down to it, we all get the gurus we deserve.

The closest thing you can get to a sure thing is good marketing foundations. A product or service that solves a qualified customer need, a brand strategy, running integrated marketing campaigns, and showing up consistently with your marketing.

And now for the warm hug.

At the end of the day, you most probably started your business because you wanted to do things your way, not answer to a shit boss and deal with office politics.

So do that.

Sure, you should absolutely be inspired by others, and be open to learning from genuine experts. But march to the beat of your own drum, and don’t play by anyone else’s rules. You do you, boo.

This article was originally published in Entrepreneur's Handbook on Medium.

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