Despite the mountain of contradicting evidence, the mantra of “if you build it, they will come” is still extremely prevalent among product-first companies. Don’t delay aligning your product and marketing teams. If you do, you’ll live to regret it.

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No matter how good your product is, if you can’t tell a cohesive, compelling story about it, you’re going to have a very hard time getting people’s attention when you actually do take it to market. At Intercom, our approach to crafting a story begins with asking, “Why?” Why are you building this product, and why does it matter?

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The most important tasks for any early-stage startup are to write code and talk to users. The latter represents your very first marketing opportunity, whether that's asking prospects to try your product over email, meeting them at conferences, responding to them in blog comments, or talking to them on Hacker News.

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There’s a common misconception about marketing at a startup. People think marketing means doing things like signing up on Product Hunt, writing a few blog posts about what’s wrong with your industry, cold-blasting a bunch of journalists with a press release, and then hoping for the best. There’s nothing wrong with doing those things – they are decent starting points – but marketing is significantly more challenging than following a playbook.

What you’ll hear in this series is a collection of lessons about marketing we at Intercom have learned the hard, expensive, messy way.

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