Learning#1: Having no Marketingbudget isn't necessarily bad.

Right now we are just at the start of tapping into the market with our project jagdreisencheck. But what Bezos is referring to in the text snipped above (form the book unconscious branding) is something that we first had to deal with out of lack of resources. We simply can’t afford to do big dollar marketing campaigns - we are self-funded (and hope to stay that way). But after doing some reading, attending one or the other marketing course online or at the WFI and starting to build our marketing strategy for the launch of our website we quite by accident discovered exactly that. If you have a remarkable product combined with a fitting and “why giving” brand (take a look here if you don’t know what I am referring to) it can lead people to even helping you without having an advantage from it (as long as you are not bullshitting them and really mean what you say). In our case, we got to work with very smart brains in the scientific world of wildlife management, were already asked to speak at a hunting-related event and even got kind of the opportunity to be part of a documentary about hunting trips (I really pray that this is going to take place!).

What Bezos hypothesizes next is that there will be a shift in budget allocation. He says that right now 70% of resources are put into shouting out that you are here and 30% in making the product great. He thinks that will be inverted in the next 20 years. I don't know if that's true, but here is what we learned on how to improve a product:

When Herbert and I started that project we were undergraduates and wanted to build a website. At the point, we met in a bar and decided to startup no one of us had even heard about WordPress. Imagine this: Two guys (business students) wanted to do something with the internet and did just know that “python” is a name for an animal, “Django” a movie and to the question “Which stack you gonna use?” we would have probably said something like:” Sorry man, we are not into drugs.” At the start, we did not even know what to google for…

A little later we were pinpointed into the WordPress direction. Downloaded a template, learned CSS and HTML and tried to “code” the page we wanted to have. No clue what we were doing, so we chose the “Yeah, that looks good”- approach. I don’t even remember how many times we started from scratch with that WordPress stuff…

Thank God there was the exchange semester coming. And Herbert (who is way more programming talented than me) went to South Africa and learned to code with python (yeah, everybody who did not get the joke above, it’s a programming language) and how to use the Django-Framework.

But our main flaw wasn’t solved. We did start over (like the 20ishs time) and still directly hardcoded what we wanted the page to look like (if I say “we” in that case I mean “Herbert”. I couldn’t/ kind of had no real fun in catching up on the programming skills) and which functions we wanted it to have.

But eventually, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. And we discovered the magical concept of “Prototyping”. Honestly, I was pretty blown away… Even a dump business student like me could design an App/Webpage and go out and test it with actual and real-live users. We started out with the MVP of Adobe XD, but there are several others on the market. The beauty of that is:

• It is way fucking faster than hardcode a webpage and thus way cheaper
• It normally does not have bugs you need to debug, so catching up with deadlines is way easier
• Since it has no bugs it is 100% less frustrating and annoying
• Changing the whole project is not a problem at all if you find out that potential customers or users would not use your solution the way you have imagined

Just a quick sidenote: These are already “high fidelity-prototypes”, if you are starting out with a project the first thing you should do in my opinion is to take a pen and paper, start drawing and exchange ideas with a friend or at best: potential users of your solution. Don’t think that somebody is going to steal your ideas. In my opinion, the risk is way lower than the potential benefits you will earn. And I am saying that after it already happened to us...

To just put it into perspective… Would we have known that stuff beforehand, I think we would have been at least one year earlier to the market.

If you finally have your prototype or (like in our case) the 90% finished product you go out and search for people giving you feedback. And one thing we experienced on the way is the following:

Come up with a story for the different “jobs to get done” for your product.

By that, I mean don’t ask somebody to register on your webpage if you want to test the registration process. Nobody, ever, anywhere will enter your webpage with the goal in his or her mind that he would like to sign- up because… I even can’t come up with a good reason why somebody just wants to sign up, there is always a purpose behind it.

To give a specific example. To do anything more than just watching and searching for information on our platform you need to have a profile. For example, I gave participants the task to rate their last hunting trip (therefore they had to register, so we could test the process). This puts the person in an actual situation where they want to interact with the service you offer.

In the following example, the benefit may get a bit clearer: I noticed that I often told people to ?add a journey”. It was never (except for the first two test participants, which revealed a User Interface error from our way of thinking) a problem. Till I figured: That’s the wrong question. None of the private hunters will enter the webpage with the need in his mind to upload a journey. They are either searching for a new one or they want to rate one. At the next test, I asked the participant to rate a trip, which was not yet available on our platform. We had the exact same UI like at the tests before but he couldn’t finish the task. He did not suggest that the button “add a journey” in our navigation was supposed to be used by him since he is not a company, so he simply quit. Lucky us, because we knew we definitely had to fix that.

But I think Bezos not just referrers to making existing features of a product better but also to find creative ideas for new ones.

At the beginning of March, we went online and I scheduled calls to show our website to 40+ companies (and still am…). These were rather supposed to be sales calls by motivating them to get on the platform and share our site with their customers to get ratings before we start our marketing. In case of the companies we are now pretty close to the “Early majority” in Germany (since there are under 100), which is good, but we hoped for way more grip. But as I found out in a call with Florian (CEO of jameda), these attempts did not work very well for them either. But what was really awesome about these talks is that we ended up with a list of 38 further improvements (even though we did usability tests with companies as well). Furthermore, we even found potential media partners.

So even if you did your testing and even if it takes a bunch of time and even if you do not like to call people I think adding these phone calls to your soft-launch strategy can add value and ideas. And this is exactly what Bezos talks about.

Is that the best it can get? No. There is a pretty interesting combination starting to emerge, where Neuroscience is not just getting into Marketing (Neuromarketing), but also into Entrepreneurship or New Product Development. In that case, I am referring to “Neuroprototyping”. You not just film and talk to participants you put in front of your prototype, but you measure different body reactions. For example with an EEG or Eye Tracking glasses. In the Podcast Brainfluence by Roger Dooley Thomas Rams?y (Founder of Neurons Inc and the Center of Decision Science at the University of Copenhagen) talks about this. We actually tried to incorporate Webcam Eye- Tracking to our tests but couldn’t manage to find and use an appropriate (in our case that means free of charge) tool to do so.

To wrap it up: Have a "remarkable" product, by having a purpose beyond making money, to get easier cooperations. Be customer centric, know your target groups and apply the build-measure-learn (Lean-Startup) approach to lower the risk of failing. Elimination of that risk won’t be possible, but that’s what makes it so exciting ??.