When I Initially started out on my startup journey, I was obsessed with our UI and Aesthetics of the Website.
Tweaked the landing page 5 times.
Rewrote the headline.
Changed the pricing layout.
Made the UI cleaner.
I genuinely thought if the product looked sharp enough, users would just… come.
They Didn't.
Traffic was Low, signups were inconsistent.
The Mistake :-
When I sat down and thought about this issue, I decided that It was finally time to Market and advertise the product. I went onto Instagram, started posting reels, finding Influencers to collab and even went on to try to find a brand ambassador for my company, even though we didn't even have a decent amount of active users. I wasted a lot of money on marketing, hoping one reel will blow up (one reel did blow up and we got a massive spike in signups, but the retention was still very low). That was when I started Researching and Digging up on recent startups, how they became successful, famous and how Did they go from 0 to 1.
The Realization :-
It was after doing hours of research that I realized, I was approaching this problem from a completely Different Direction. Instead of building an active community of users through distribution, I was more focused on marketing the product. After I Realized my mistake, I went fully into distribution. Finding ways to get initial users, Cracking distribution channels, getting feedback from users, interacting with them 1-1, And this has made all the difference.
The Conclusion :-
When you are very early into a startup, Focus on Distribution First rather than burning money on Marketing.
Always Start with a Bottom-Up approach, rather than Top-Down approach.