#9: Early Marketing Mistakes

Arielle Jackson has helped shape hundreds of startup brands, and she worked with 71 companies in 2021. In this interview post, she shared seven of the most common early marketing mistakes made by startups. The one mistake that stood out to me is emphasizing emotional instead of functional benefits in early messaging. I also want to write headers like 'Just Do It' or 'Think Different', but I'm not Nike and Apple. I don't have brand awareness like them. So, at the early stage, I should highlight the functional benefits. I should write exactly what I do. Following examples from Loom and Rupa Health do precisely that.

Recently I rewrote the header and description of my podcast. This advice is the one I always kept in the back of my mind. The new header I wrote is 'Conversations With Successful Founders In Japan', which is exactly what I'm doing on the podcast.

🖼 Royalty-Free Images

I use Unsplash to find royalty-free images for my blogs and slides. But I don't always find what I'm looking for. From the latest IndieHackers newsletter, I found a few more websites that host royalty-free images. Try out Pexels, Kaboompics, and unDraw next time you are looking for images to use in your blog.

🗓 Last Week, Next Week

I started watching the new season of Ozark. I've seen only episode 1, but so far, it looks good. I also watched the 5th episode of The Book of Boba Fett. I wasn't watching this show due to bad reviews. I jumped directly into the 5th episode because I heard that it is basically The Mandalorian season 3 episode 1. Boba Fett is not present in the episode, and the plot has no connection to the prior four episodes. So, if you like The Mandalorian, I'd recommend directly watching this episode.
Last week, I gave a short talk about leveraging AI in customer support operations at Mercari ML & Search Talk #2: Customer Understanding. The event was recorded, but it hasn't been uploaded on YouTube yet. I will share the video once it's available. I also had a great conversation with Iqbal Abdullah, founder of LaLoka Labs and Xoxzo Inc, for my next podcast episode. I'm working on post-production as I write this. I'm targeting to publish the episode by the end of this week.

Next week, a new intern is joining my team. I'll be their mentor and help them in the onboarding and in achieving their goals for the internship.
I'm organizing a book club in Mercari. The January event is on Monday. I started this so that people can read one book every month and share their takeaways and what they found interesting. I've been reading On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser. I will share my notes from the book in a separate post later.

Cheers! Have a productive day.
Prashant Anand (@primaprashant)