StartUp Founders: Awareness
Dear Reader,
You can’t win a deal you’re not in – so everything means nothing if people don’t know you exist. The primary pillar of founder-led sales isn’t the sale itself; it’s the awareness playbook that precedes it. (𝕏)
And by ‘precedes’ – I mean ‘same time’, obviously. This paradox is a feature, not a bug. If it made sense, you’d be doing it wrong.
TL;DR Awareness is a sales motion on steroids. Everything, everywhere, always. Until it works. Then do it more. (Workbook)
LAST WEEKS FRAMEWORK:
LETS GET INTO IT:
Your awareness playbook is the hardest simple playbook there is. It’s Schrödinger’s marketing plan – a precise science and a total crapshoot at the same time.
Before you think hijack means fast and loose, it doesn’t. Make sure your brand foundation is fire. Anything less will sabotage everything you build atop it.
The game is to hijack the work someone else has already done bringing your audience together. You know your ICP. You’ve mapped your ecosystem. You know where they congregate. How can you overlay on this existing audience to hijack the microphone.
Hijacking can be seismic or incremental. It might mean slowly infiltrating a community through self-invitation. The point, is that someone has done the work. Use that. Before you reinvent the wheel – but also, reinvent the wheel.
More than ever, your personal brand is in play, your journey to ‘expert’ is a chance to drive awareness through you. Your journey, your insights, your personality – the first chapter of your story.
Awareness is what happens before the click, before the search, it’s planting a million seeds, knowing only a few will sprout, but those that do will be exponential.
You have to do it all. All the time. Consistently. It’s impossible, but you still have to do it, you chose to be a bootstrap founder. Impossible just means more hours.
Rethink awareness opportunity. Customer calls, coding sessions, team meetings.. The awareness lens thinks customer calls become case studies. Coding sessions become livestreams. Team decisions become blogs.
You’re looking for the tiniest cracks in the market, the smallest openings that might, just might, give you a moment of attention. It’s not about doing everything. It’s about doing the right things, relentlessly. But you don’t know the right things yet, so you also have to do everything.
You cannot do this as random acts of marketing. You must write your playbook. A systematic, repeatable process that turns the chaos into a program you can execute.
So to summarize, you need to be everywhere, all at once, but with purpose. You need to do the things that work, which means everything until you see what works. So everything, everywhere, always. Got it?!
Awareness compounds. Every little win is exactly is a rung on the ladder. We just don’t know how tall the ladder needs to be to get a voice that carries.
Look up and down the beach. You know the lay of the land. You know your target. You know where they assemble. Your awareness strategy isn’t built in a vacuum – it’s precisely targeted at the people and places you’ve already identified. Before you create new wheels, hijack the ones already turning.
Now go make some noise. The right kind of noise. On the right stages. In front of the right people.
As always, if I can be of service, feel free to grab time with me.
Off topic. I’m thinking of converting all these modules into a cohesive live course, from idea origination to first customers, literally pebble by pebble. Would this be helpful?
— James