From downtown San Francisco you can throw a stone and hit a few dozen tech companies within a block or two, the majority of which will be out of business in five months.
Funding and revenue, they'll soon come to grimly realize, are just as important as product - if not more so.
Everyone has a great idea. And a few of those people even have the tools to bring the idea to life. However, simply having a creative idea and turning it into a useful or innovative product is insufficient for growing a successful company. This happens to be why Silicon Valley is famous for birthing companies that shoot up like hot springs - and fall down just as quickly.
With recent Stanford MBA grads building robotics tools and Apple dropouts using machine learning to create artificial intelligence applications, there is no shortage of software engineers in Silicon Valley. And there is certainly no shortage of ideas.
Why then do we see these same entrepreneurs scrambling to write a paycheck four months after their product launches?
Building a product is one thing. Making money is another.
To succeed in the long run, startups needs investments from Angel investors and Venture Capitalists to pay for development costs, salaries, a working space, etc. At the end of the day, many of these tech-oriented entrepreneurs lack a business mindset and consequently suffer when it comes to raising money.
On the other hand, company who do have a business focus don't suffer from this same consequence. Companies who have demonstrated success in raising funds excel with public relations, marketing, client acquisition, press, and public image. This is how you get popularity, and this is how you get money.
For many companies, raising money before getting users feels like a Chicken-or-the-Egg scenario: how do you raise money before you have progress to talk about? Or rather - how can you create progress to talk about without the money?
The answer is simple: fake it till you make it.
For a company to be successful at acquiring new clients and getting users, it needs press and marketing. However, as many people would argue, you can't get press and marketing without first getting clients and users. This brings us into a Catch-22.
Successful startups have defeated this apparent paradox and got initial traction by creating the appearance of success to attract press, and then use that press to grow their company. A company that fuels its own press.
The idea is to focus on the positives. If you can illustrate to the press the measurable success that your company has experienced thus far, focusing on any small or big milestones, you can turn that into a news story.
In this sense, your CEO must be your CMO. If you wish succeed, your startup needs to put a heavy emphasis on sales and marketing. You need to grow, and let it be known that you are growing.
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