Speaker 1: You have probably heard of Mint.com. It is the number one personal finance tracker out there that sold into it for almost $200 million in 2009. When I joined the company as employee number four, we had no product and zero customers. I put together a marketing plan with the goal of getting 800,000 users within six months of launch. We ended up getting a million. In this video, I'm going to tell you the story of how we did that, as well as share the exact marketing plan that we used so that you can copy it for your business. By the way, stick to the end where I show you exactly how to create your own marketing plan. Let's dive in. After getting fired from Facebook, which is a story from another time, I did a bunch of random gigs. I worked in Korea. I did consulting for scanner.com, but Dave McClure, the founder of 500 Startups, invited me to come check out this product of an unknown company called MyMint. Aaron Patzer wanted to build a tool to help people manage their finances, and he actually built a prototype by himself for the past six months. I saw the product, and I was blown away. At the time, I was blogging on OkDork about personal finance, and I immediately saw that this could be huge. Think about it. Do you want more money? Yeah. Guess who else wants more money? Everybody. I was excited to also use it myself because it's something I was actively doing. I said, I want to be your director of marketing, Aaron. He said, you don't even know how to do marketing. Fair, but I still wanted the job, so instead of giving up, I actually put together this marketing plan that we're going to be going through today. You can see the original version hopefully on screen somewhere up here, and I pitched it to Aaron. He was impressed. I was hired on the spot, and the rest is what you're seeing in this video. When Aaron Patzer hired me, we were still a super early stage startup. Number one, we didn't know exactly who our customer was. Number two, we didn't have a product, only a buggy prototype that Aaron built by himself. Challenge number one is figuring out who your or our customer was. Having a marketing plan is great. I can tell you exactly what to do, but if you're marketing it to the wrong person, no one's going to be interested. People interested in personal finance might sound pretty specific, but it's extremely broad. Males treat money differently than females. Families treat it differently than someone that has student debt. Actually, who the product could be for was really broad. To figure it out, we interviewed a lot of different people. We met people at coffee shops. We interviewed friends. We interviewed people that we thought would be good fits. Here are some of the questions that we asked to figure out who our customer would be. What's your current financial strategy? What do you need the most help with when it comes to personal finance? How would your ideal personal finance tool work? Very exciting, very stimulating. Some really fascinating things came out of this that helped direct how our marketing and product was targeted at. First off, most people don't do anything with their personal finances. I don't know what you do, but this actually shocked me. Second thing was that the people who did care about their finances were really young, ambitious people who are already reading personal finance blogs. They were already at the gym saying, hey, I want to be doing this up in personal finance. Teach me more. I think what a lot of people do in marketing and doing correctly is that they're trying to change behavior. Hey, come to the gym, come to the gym. No, it's much easier to help people when they're already at the places you want. Doing all these customer interviews allowed us to build our product and create a marketing message targeting specifically these people. Who are you targeting in your current business? The more narrow you're targeting, the better. Think about any of the most gigantic companies, Facebook, Harvard students, Microsoft, super targeted developers. A lot of these companies were super niche, but for somehow every other person who's starting a business out there was like, I'm going to go extremely broad. Good luck. Don't forget to like this video and subscribe to the channel if you want more videos from Uncle Noah. So the specific takeaway from this marketing was two key things. One, we were going to target Yopo's or young professionals, we were calling them at the time, as well as people hyper interested in personal finance. What we realized from that is that the messaging is going to be targeting to these two groups of people, as well as the marketing. All marketing is at the end of the day is who and where. And so now we're like, all right, we know it's going to be personal finance and young tech geeks. Let's go after those people. Challenge number dos. We didn't even have a product. One of the huge challenges for me as a marketer is for about a year, there was nothing to even tell people to go use. So what do you do when you don't have a product that exists? And this is a common thing I've seen in a lot of companies. My engineers are taking too long. I have to sell a prototype. Elon Musk sold a model three, a billion dollars worth without a car, anyone actually even touched. So what did I do to actually fix that problem? My plan was to build a lot of hype and collect a lot of emails and relationships around people specifically targeted in the demographics I was talking about. So here are some examples of what we did. Number one, a newsletter. And I'm still doing this today with AppSumo.com. We didn't have a product people could sign up for, so we needed a way to start building the community and interactions. So monthly newsletter was amazing. There's a lot of services like SendFox.com, maybe MailChimp.com. And the ways that we're actually able to get that is we had a blog, we did ads, we did website. I'm going to talk about that in a little bit more. We also sent a monthly financial tips newsletter to add value and stay in touch with people. By the time we launched, I believe we had over 100,000 people on our newsletter excited for when we finally came out. I think a lot of times when you guys are building your businesses and trying to do marketing, it's like, let me code, code, code, make, make, make, make, make. Is there any customers out here? Anybody? Anybody? Do a reverse. Get customers first. And if you don't have a product, start building relationships with either influencers or people you want to help promote, or people you've eventually want to be buying your product or service. Second way that we built up an audience without having a product is content marketing. So Mint was one of the pioneers of content marketing, aka blogging, before this was even a thing. So we knew who our target customers were, and we knew that they were on personal finance blogs. So we figured why not build the number one place online for them to learn about personal finance real advice. And that's what we set out to do. So I put together a content schedule with a bunch of articles I knew our target demographic would love. So you can actually see our content calendar probably up here somewhere on the screen. Yeah. So this is awesome. So we knew exactly, if you look at the categories on this thing, you could see we're targeting money hacks and young professionals. And we got through most of the articles that we thought would do really well at this to target that demographic. There wasn't as much SEO. This is like a little bit over 10 years ago. But the idea here is that once you know who your target customer is, now you can start writing content specifically tailored for them. One thing that I've used definitely over the years is look at the questions that these people email you or when you're talking to them, they'll ask you a question, write that down. And that becomes content you can use on social media, blogging, or on YouTube. Two pieces I want to highlight with the content marketing is number one is consistency. And this is the part I always have to say it out loud for myself is that we posted two blog posts every single week until we launched. One thing I was thinking about today with my friend Andy Beal was that success is hard work compounded by long time. And it's yes, do something for a very long period of time and ideally keep improving and you will have success. So focus on consistency in your marketing. Another thing that was really great, aka I did less work is collaborations. So I would go out to people and say, hey, we have a little bit of an audience, we have a blog, can I interview you? Or do you want to do a guest post for our blog, they would give me all the information, we would promote it, they get some attention, and then we would be able to build our audience from that. So some of the results from this is that our blog became a huge driver, if not the key driver of free traffic that was able to grow mint to the size that we were able to sell for almost $200 million. Third thing we did before we even had a product is we sponsored super niche sites. And this is something you could still do today in different mediums. So one of the best powerful things to do as a marketer is to find underutilized or undervalued marketing channels, Facebook ads, you ever heard of them? Yeah, so is everyone else YouTube ads. Oh, wow, guess what everyone knows about that at the time with mint, I noticed that a lot of these blogs didn't have a lot of ads, they didn't have a lot of sponsors. So I would email them and my subject line was can I pay you $1,000 I ended up being able to meet and sponsor almost every single blog and personal finance. Now, most of these people wouldn't even respond to me for $1,000. The results for this is we got a ton of micro sponsorships that paid out a huge ROI because they drove a lot of email signups. And the other thing that's really interesting is that they built relationships. So when you send someone money, or you want to sponsor someone, they'll probably take your calls and be your friend or be able to work with you in the future. It also had a nice side effect of this build up our credibility because we're associated with the personal finance blogger, which is our targeted demographic. Guess what they're like, oh, that guy's legit or woman's legit mint.com is also legit to the thing about this is that it doesn't scale as well as Facebook ads like Facebook ads, you just put in the money and then it goes up if you keep spending with this, it's harder to do that. But the ROI meaning the amount you spend is way higher. So one key thing that still applies today about this is sponsoring super targeted people that are not mainstream yet, you get the best deals on this goes for tiktokers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, Twitterers, even bloggers this day, which is not as popular. But the point I'm trying to make is that going on sponsoring super giant ones, you get a lot of attention might be good. But if you've got actually some of the up and comers, you're going to get amazing deals. And you'll get the best ROI that I've ever seen. So as you can imagine, we tried a lot of other marketing strategies. But these are some of the top three that were the most effective. So copy them, start a newsletter and engage with your audience on a regular basis, do content marketing, it doesn't have to be on blogs, it could be on different types of mediums, YouTube, podcasts, ish, Instagram, whatever that is. And three, go and actually find people to sponsor that are not as going to be expensive as some of these mainstreamers. One other kind of tiny quick tidbit that we did that I thought was really cool was we did this powered by mint badge. So people could go sign up for me and say, hey, I want to find out about this product when it launches. And if you wanted priority access, you got a badge called powered by men or I want mint that you'd put on your site. The cool thing is that people would start seeing it and they would want the mint badge as well as it gave us a lot of SEO juice. So these are the things that worked for us. Let me talk to you a little bit more. And we'll break down a little bit more of the marketing and act three, which is when we did the launch. So in terms of the launch, the success, we finally took all this audience we built all this traffic we built, we launched a tech crunch 40 and we had over a million users within six months, which is pretty much bonkers in terms of Florence, especially we did a lot of marketing before we ever had a product. So one key thing to think about is whatever business you're in right now, how can you start planting seeds for relationships and marketing even before you have the product? It's way, way better than trying to do it after the fact. So act for it. How do you actually create your own marketing plan? Most importantly, if you're watching this, you probably have a business or you want to start a business. Leave a comment what that is below. I'm going to break down briefly how you can use the same strategies that I did to grow men in your own business. Number one, pick a specific goal and a timeframe. I learned this from Mark Zuckerberg. I use it at mint. I've used it at app sumo. It works. The reason mint marketing plan was successful is that when I was hired, Aaron said, I need a hundred thousand signups within six months of launching. Very, very specific timeframe, very specific objective. So for you, if you don't have a timeframe, there's no sense of urgency and there's no clear thing you're trying to accomplish. So let's say you have a business and you're making a hundred dollars a month. All you have to do is say, Hey, by December 31st, I want to make a thousand dollars a month. Now you can work backwards and say, all right, well each month I need to make this much money and break down. How do I plan on getting it? I would say that's probably the key thing to take away from the mint marketing plan. Number two, go talk to your customers. Call me. I miss you. Who is your customer? What actual problem are you really solving for them? What messaging should you use in your marketing? Use their language, not yours. And where are they hanging out online? Number three, pick your marketing channels. So now you have a goal. You know who you're trying to target. What are the different marketing channels you could think you could reach these people? Is it partnerships? Is it PR? Is it YouTube? Is it podcasts? Figure out where your customers hang out and you can just ask them. This is exactly then you have to go market in their parties. So it meant we were really successful because we identified two key customers and then we went to their marketing channels, to their personal finance blogs, to the ads that specifically targeted them. Number four, map out and track your marketing plan. So I know that sounds super generic, but a lot of this time we overcomplicate these things. Or a lot of you, what I've noticed is that you don't actually do any of the tracking. You just kind of were like, yeah, I'm just going to wing it. See how it goes. I know Mexico South. I'll just drive down. So map out, Hey, if I want to get to this target, here are my expectations from these marketing channels. And when you start implementing it, one of the key things that again, marketers, as well as ourselves at AppSumo don't do always perfectly is what channels are working that I can 10 X and what channels are not working. I have to kill. If you're not killing some of your marketing activities, you're probably doing too many things. If you want to download the template of this marketing sheet I use for men, I'll put that below in the description. If you like this video, check out the video where I walk you through exactly how we built and launched our own latest product, tidycal.com within 20 days. And don't forget to subscribe to the channel. I'll see you out there. And I love you.