Marketing and Tracking of Startup Business

 Instructor gave us two materials to read on, namely "Launching and Marketing" and "Traction and Metrics".

Lesson about Launching and Marketing

What I learned about Launching and Marketing is about the beginning of idea into growth of startup, what to consider on your startup product or service, how to get and keep customers, the definition of value, business impact, customer convenience and understanding, and how to improve.

When you start a business, you must begin with an idea of what your target customer's needs, what they do in their daily life, the advantages and disadvantages of doing such activities, their concerns, and others. You must listen to your customers to know what they want, and to be able to generate an idea of a product or a service you are willing to share and gain money from. This also creates awareness that people need such a product or business to make the daily lives of target customers easily, attracting more target customers and retaining them.

Of course you wouldn't want to see your startup business' product or service "flop" badly because the product or service already existed anywhere, therefore you must know what your customers are using, research that business on how they do their things, make income by providing your target customer's needs, and do a better one. Competition always exist, you gotta remember that, and one of your objectives is to be able to do better than your competitors to sell better.

After you learn what your customer wants and plan on how to do better than your competitors, you should be able to consider the product, the place, the price and the promotion to attract customers. By product, advertising how they work, how convenient they are, and how they do better than your competitors must be presented. By place, you consider where you sell your product or service, its relevance to the area in terms of need or want of the customer. By price, you should consider how reasonable the pricing of your product or service is, attracting them into lower prices than expected is a thing, or making them access into freemium probably needs to be done and attracting them into buying a pro version of that service. By promotion, it's basically advertising to other people, either by posting papers, and letting people share its positive benefits to other people to attract even more customers. 

You should also consider that customers are recipient entities that give you money in exchange for the product or service that you offer, therefore you must clearly state what kind of customers you are looking for.

Presentor showed us several ideas of products or services offered, and asks its viewers if the product or service shown are cool or crazy ideas; while some of the ideas are reasonable like cool bandage design and merchandise van, there are some ideas that are classified unreasonable like making a baby wear a rug to clean the floor as they move a lot, and an equipment that allows you to sleep while standing inside a train. The presentor then defines that if you want to sell your product better, you should go with people who find the product reasonable or people who said that the product is cool, rather than selling to people who find it crazy and unreasonable to use, as they value on who are using; for themselves and others who benefit. You must learn what your target market is, for better profit and better advertising. They find your idea cool because it's useful? Are they many people who find this idea cool? What makes this idea crazy but cool? The answers will be dependent on the customers in the end, gathering customers with the same thoughts of your product or service is the coolest in my thought if I'm a seller.

Value, in technical definition, is something that represents the importance of a product or service that you will provide to your customers. Is it important? How useful is it? How long can they use it? That depends on your target market's value of what you're selling. E.g. you sell clothes, some customers will go to ukay-ukay if they are only looking for something to wear, as they are cheap, probably recycled, and second-hand; while other customers go to clothing displays and costume makers if any, if they're looking for a specific clothing to wear for certain events, some even went to printing press to make custom shirts. There are some other considerations like end of life use, e.g. overly used clothing for I don't know years, is heavily damaged, and then it is recycled by turning it into a stylish rug and sell it again, which still has value in different sense. In any way, you sell the product to customers that is important and has use to them in terms of basic needs like ukay-ukay clothing, to raising self esteem by buying stylish clothing.

    I'm actually not sure if I presented the examples right, sorry.

Now, to discuss why buy branded items over others? Well, mostly because they already sold what is reliable for everyone. Setting the example of shoes of different occasions by presenting the parable of the shoemaker; the shoemaker keeps looking at his feet, he wears worn out shoes that are easily broken, not comfortable, and not presentable to everyone, getting the ideas into his mind, he made durable, comfortable, and stylish looking shoes on different occasions. Durable shoes are to be used by miners who work underground and walk a lot in different terrain; Comfortable shoes are worn by families and children so that they feel comfortable while walking; Stylish shoes are to be worn by people who are presenting themselves into an event. Unfortunately my brain didn't really absorb everything so I thought that in the end he made a pair of shoes that has all three of them, making them versatile and usable by everyone, potentially wrecking shoemaking competitors that make shoes specified for certain uses. It is also discussed that needs beget wants; like thinking that it must be nice to have fancy shoes, but you are a miner and thus that kind of stylish shoes will just get rugged so you tend to buy a pair that has more durability than charisma stat, presenting the needs of why people buy, and the wants of why they buy branded ones; why everyone buys generic shoes while certain people buys certain shoes for certain occasions; why the need is always a need by everybody, and why a want changes on different occasions; and why people use school shoes to be presentable, why use sneakers for casual dates, and why use rubber shoes when the wearer does sports. This is one of the reasons why value proposition canvas is created.

Differentiation, what makes you product or service unique compared to your competitors? How are they doing better? Example given this time is a carwash, everyone needs to wash their car from time to time, but can they be efficient? GreenRides carwash states that their service is "more than just a carwash." and that reason is that they use no water and is environmentally friendly. Another example is like, Mang Inasal; every shop definitely sells good tasting food, and what makes them unique is their unli rice feature where they can buy a plate that serves unlimited rice, just raise your hand and a service crew gives rice.

How do you advertise your product? Well, make your presentation simple, translate your pitch into a short message. "GreenRides, more than just a carwash!" presenting how it is more than just a carwash, this one literally attracts customers; show them the meaning of your product or service that you sell and how you will be able to make it usable to customers.

Now, where do you sell them? Should it be the place that is convenient? Will it reach a lot of target customers? Let's go back to selling clothes again, they're usually sold in the malls or sorts of buildings with large glass if they're fashioned, as they can style their presentation and show it at the glass window for everyone to use; some clothes are just sold beside the street as they're more convenient, even at the garage doors or gates in front of the house if it's something like second hand; branded clothing like playboy are literally in the malls and are stored properly but I still don't know how they're advertised aside from hanging it at the column, sorry. Depending on the type of product you are selling and the customers you are trying to attract, make sure to pick a place that's more convenient for them to approach. In malls if you're trying to sell brand-new items, or just outside to sell second-hand items to common people for a cheaper price of 50; and if you plan to advertise it online, choose the right communication channel, e.g. mobile games, advertise them into apps that allow game advertisings, and even in events that grant mass advertising like game conventions, get your message across the parts of the world if you must, and once they know just let them try!

Remember that your product or service must be adaptive to changes of your target customer's wants or needs, find the right problem and match it with right solution to make the right customer use it, clearly define your value proposition for everyone to know what you're aiming for. Understand customer behavior; needs beget wants; the greater fit, the greater value; and focus on a specific target market.

Writer: "The lesson is too long and it's quite too much information for me to handle, which is why I prefer watching straightforward videos with definitive examples so that I can write and review what I'm missing. To be fair, while online classes definitely record their lessons, I don't know where they post them, giving the viewer difficulty by making their own recording using OBS. I wonder if there's a student that takes this as an idea, I'd be willing to be your target customer."

Lesson about Traction and Metrics

It is presented that traction is the evidence that somebody wants your product, while metrics are measurables like revenue and profit that help you keep track of your startup relevance. 

Defining different metrics: The revenue refers to company turnover, concerned about potential investors and founders; The profitability presents how much your business is performing by counting how much you earned minus how much you lost by buying stuff important to business; The engagement presents the number of people using your product or service, how often they use it, and probably how widespread it is.

How to gain traction? Start by researching of course your target market and customers, and your competitors; creating business plan by studying what they need, how are they doing it, what they use, and what's lacking of the thing they use; and then finally refine your product by your customer's needs while you keep researching on how your competitors improve. It's not exactly a race against your competitors, but a contest of providing your target customers.

Things like EBITDA margin is presented, which is a measurement of startups operating profitability as a percentage of its total revenue. Some of the equations are also presented as follows:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) = number of monthly subscribers multiplied by average revenue per user.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) = Total cost sales and marketing divided by number of customers acquired.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) = customer value multiplied by average customer lifespan. Customer value is equal to average value of sale multiplied by average number of transactions, and getting customer value multiplied by average customer lifespan will give you CLTV.
• Month-over-Month Growth (MoM) = ending month value divided by beginning month value, then subtract it to 1 and multiply it to 100. ((Mend/Mstart)-1)*100=MoM

Writer: This one's short, but so many questions I even forgot to write them. I guess it's time for me to utilize that app that gives me a summary of the entire video or summarize by parts I divide... which is unfortunately unsupported because of the language comprehension limits.