How do you do marketing with no money?
Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.
Happy Friday!
This week’s question is:
How would your marketing strategy change if you had no money? What if you had unlimited money?
This is the exact question that we asked Hiten Shah—because we were curious—in our interview with him a couple of years ago.
I loved his answer then, and I think it still works perfectly now:
It’s all about finding opportunities and figuring out whether you have time or money.
If you have time, spend your time on the highest leverage things you can do for your business right now. If you have money, figure out how to spend your money as efficiently as possible by running as many simultaneous small experiments that you can.
With Crazy Egg we had money that we were making from our consulting business so we found a high leverage (cheap and targeted) traffic source in all the CSS galleries that were popular at the time. So we spent a bit of money to buy ads on these CSS galleries websites that directed people to the Crazy Egg early access homepage. It worked and resulted in over 23k email sign ups before we publicly released the product.
With KISSmetrics we had raised money for the business so we had more time to work on the product and iterate it. So in that case we decided to invest our time into creating a popular Twitter account (we have never spent much money trying to grow the following, it was all our time). This early investment of time in our twitter account led to the initial readership for our blog.
Read the full interview here.
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