If you’re in stealth and don’t have your messaging out yet, you have two needs:
- You need to get something up. There has to be somewhere your company’s identity lives.
- You need to use this as an opportunity to figure out how you’re going to explain what you’re building.
This is actually an easy win.
Start with something small: a simple website, a product overview, a demo, or a few pieces of technical content.
Doing that forces you to answer some pretty important questions:
- What exactly does our product do?
- Who are we explaining it to?
- What makes us different?
- How technical does our messaging need to be?
- What do we want people to remember about us?
And this is where bringing in someone from outside can be surprisingly useful.
The person helping you with that first content doesn’t have to become your future full-time marketer. But they do have to understand complicated technology well enough to ask the right questions, and then translate the answers into something your customers can understand.
You’re not just filling up an empty website.
You’re building the infrastructure for your messaging, documentation, demos, sales enablement, and future content.
I’ve done this from a few different directions now: technical content, documentation, product marketing, sales enablement, and demos.
And I’ve become increasingly convinced that for early-stage technical companies, these aren’t really separate problems.
They all start with the same question:
Can you explain what you’ve built?