The Doube Life Of Startup Marketing: Short Term VS. Long Terms

What is more important for a startup? a 12 month marketing plan or a series of marketing tests to conduct within the next 30 days? 

Almost every growth hacker or marketer that works with an early stage startups will tell you – ‘focus on the next 30 days, who knows if we’ll still be here in 12 months.’ They are mostly right, but also deadly wrong. 

It’s true – planning a year ahead is equal to planning on how you’ll spend your lottery winnings before even buying a ticket, but it is also essential for you to understand where’s your end goal. 

In order to give actual meaning to these 30 days of tests, you need to have an idea of how you would like your next 12 months results look like. 

This is the real struggle between long term and short term goals. 

A series of tests will lead you nowhere without a plan. 

As I see it, you always need to sustain two workflows at once:

Short term: tests we’er conducting at the moment and spend 80% of our time one – as they need to be completed and show results faster. The cycles per project here should be short and valbuble. 

Long Terms: Things that will take longer to see benefit from, but needs to be done. This is where we’ll put 20% of our effort on daily basis.

Lets take Brand Awareness for example:

PR is a short term that mostly does well as a part of the long term goal. 

Lets say you are focusing your next month on getting coverage – it means you find the right reporters to pitch, build your press kit, create you personal email pitch etc. Focus on this 80% of your time next month, pitch to reportes and get your story out. It’s a short term in terms of PR cycle but it helps your progress with your “Brand awarness’ long term goal.

Brand awareness through blogging, is solely a long term goal. You have to put effort into making it work for you, but it’s almost never a quick win. If you’re a new startup and all you do for marketing is only blogging, you will find it really hard to gain initial traction. 

Combine blogging and PR together, and you will get faster traction. 

I’m actually not sure this is the best example, but it’s the one I can think of at the moment (I do a 10 minute rule on this Tumblr blog – more on the later). 

I will write a more in-depth post about this notion in the next couple of weeks, as I feel this post is too simplictic in trying to get a complicated message across. 

But would love to get your initial feedback, what do you think? 

How are you managing your company long/short term goals? 

The One Thing No One Likes To Talk About When It Comes To Entrepreneurship

Everywhere you go, people are advocating and celebrating entrepreneurship. 

If you’re looking for tips on being a better leader, better boss, better marketer, better entrepreneur, more charismatic – just go to every business related blog/ website, read another Steve Jobs biography or “how Mark Zuckerberg hires employees’ article. 

Here’s the most critical thing no one is talking about when it comes to entrepreneurship and they really should: 

What are you willing to sacrifice?

Before you get to be (IF you’ll get to be) the next  Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or Tony Robbins you’re going to be just another entrepreneur trying to make it. 

You don’t start with success, you start with a struggle. With the real hustle. Not the kind inc.com celebrates, but the kind that can you leave you lonely and friendless. 

****Read this carefully: ****

Being an entrepreneur or starting your own startup means long days and nights, sometimes sacrificing the money you planned to spend on leisure activities or vacations.

It can also mean not going on dates, missing a few nights of going to bed with your spouse, not being there to bathe your newborn baby, not going out with friends and i’m not even talking about the stress that comes with running a business that relays on you and having your brain working 24/7. 

If you’re not willing to do some sacrifices, you’re not ready to become an entrepreneur 

Not everybody are cut out to start their own business. It’s ok. But you have to face this question early on. 

In the past year i’ve been mentoring 3 different early stage startup accelerators, and I keep seeing this startups that are looking to be the next Whatsapp or Twitter, or whatever Startup Superhero people are raving about that week. 

A lot of them are not doing this because they feel real passion to starting their own thing, they are doing it because the ‘lets start our own startup’  is the new ‘lets start a rock band’. But they are not really ready to risk or sacrificing anything for it.

Ask yourself: Am I willing to make some serious sacrifices for my business to work? 

A Collection of Un-edited Thoughts and Ideas

Hi all,

After a few years of running a growth hacking and continent marketing blog at: http://roy.roypovarchik.com, i’ve decided I needed an outlet for ideas and thoughts that don’t quite fit the main blog. 

If you got to this Tumblr without knowing my previous work, i’ll quickly introduce myself: 

I run a growth hacking and content marketing agency, helping startups grow their active user base (acquisition, retention, referrals, activation – the whole deal). I’m a contributor to Buffer, Buzzsumo, Shopify and several other big blogs. My work / content was mentioned on sites like Forbes, The Next Web, Fast Company, Time.com and more. 

You can check more information on that on my website: http://roypovarchik.com

Why I opened this Tumblr account

This new Tumblr is more of an experiment than anything else. 

My regular blog is focused more on hands on marketing and growth hacking tips with 2,000+ words long blog posts. All well edited, structured and strategically planned. 

This new Tumblr: “Quick Thoughts & Short Posts” Is the exact opposite. 

Here you’ll find un-edited (i’m Israeli, so my English might not be perfect at all times) and spontaneously written posts – about entrepreneurship, startups and basically everything that comes to mind when working in this field. 

I can promise you

This blog isn’t going to be a marketing blog, not a sales blog. It won’t be consistent, maybe sometimes won’t even be coherent. 

What this blog will be a 100% is transparent. You can ask me anything, tell me anything, whatever you want. 

I hope you’ll enjoy this experiment with me. 

Roy P. 

P.S If you have any questions, want to send me hate mail or funny gifs – here’s my email: roy@roypovarchik.com

Oh, and I think my dog is broken…