Founders guide to marketing on a shoestring budget

Lemonade Stand Mindset

‍

One of the hard lessons all founders have to learn is that building a product is just one piece of the puzzle required to build a great business. Most founders who can build a solid product struggle in the marketing department. Things get even tricker when you have a small budget of $500 or less. But you can still get great early traction and find your first customers with the Lemonade Stand Mindset.

The internet is chock full of information on how to market your product, but much of it is expensive, somewhat mysterious or is just a funnel for some guru who is trying to sell you an overpriced course. So, where do you start in this great unknown, and how do you ensure that your first $500 goes to good use?

Lets imagine you are building a lemonade stand. You put the stand together for $50 and the ingredients for $20. You juice everything by hand or borrow your Aunties electric juicer. But you don't have much money left to find your first customers. You don't go buy radio ads or billboards advertising your stand. But what you might do is text your friends, share a photo on social media, post in your school's newsletter, call your local radio station or try and get a reporter to come and write a free article on your new business venture. All of this helps bring traffic to your stand, but you will soon figure out that its best to go to where the traffic already is; the park, the beach, or maybe outside of the pool. The lemonade mindset is all about doing small, non scalable things that get initial word of mouth out, and hunting for free media. Its about setting your stand up where your customers already are.
‍

Forums and Facebook groups

‍

Forums, product communities, Reddit channels and Facebook groups are the best place to start when it come to getting word out about your product. Go and find all of the groups or subreddits in your niche and share your tool with the community. Commenting on other peoples posts who are posting about the problem you solve is also a great way to gain exposure with your target customer. Stay away from paid communities if they want to charge you $$ for access, there are usually enough free communities available.

Our #1 tip: Don't be spammy, don't write a huge sales pitch and be helpful to others. Explain the problem you faced, why you decided to solve it and how it can help them.

‍

Product Launch Sites

‍

Sites like ProductHunt, Indie Makers, BetaList and HackerNews are built just for founders to share their new creation. Where you can take this a step further is posting in the showcase section of the tools you built with (Webflow, Softr, Bubble, WeWeb), or if you are a designer share these on Dribble.

‍

‍

Podcasts and Newsletters

‍

Whilst you probably can't afford to buy ads in a newsletter or podcast, the creators of these podcasts and newsletters are always on the lookout for new, relevant content. This can be a great way to get in front of their audience and share your story in an authentic way.

‍

Start Writing Content

‍

Every SEO guru will tell you that you need content in order to rank. This might be the one thing that they agree on! Some niches only need 30 articles to rank well, and others need thousands of articles. So you may as well get started now. Breaking your SEO strategy up into topics and keyword clusters is important. Interlinking between pages and topics is also important. Writing clear and knowledge content that solves your readers paint points is also key to ranking. Understanding the entire user research journey and writing content for various stages is also critical.

‍
For example, a Dentist might have 3 content topics: How to care for your teeth, Emergency dental care, and different dental issues you might be googling for. The customer will start by googling their symptoms, and may end up reading about tooth care or emergency dental.

Writing content is free, and whilst you won't see results for many months, having a library of content will give you a leg up when it comes time to focus on SEO (which is later down the road). This is a long term play with all upside.

‍

Buying Ads Online

‍

The thing is, $500 won't get you far in the world of marketing. You can blow that in a day on Facebook trying to drive clicks to your site. There are always going to be competitors with more cash and experience than you, so don't try to spend it on an google or facebook ads.

Typically, buying ads is the one thing we would recommend avoiding if your budget is under $500. Your money won't stretch far enough to have a decent return.

The only exception to buying ads at an early stage is if its your way of validating an idea or testing multiple ideas simultaneously. This is usual in the situation where building a prototype is very expensive or you need to choose a niche and have several ideas. In this situation you would build a landing page for the product (or one for each idea) and drive traffic to that page. The page should have several CTAs to a wait list, and the goal is to get a good number of signups (this might be $50 or $5,000, it depends on the marketing spend and size of the idea). This gives you an email list of potential early customers, and something to show to investors.