Stop Building Your Product for Yourself: Why Most Early-Stage Startups Fail at Marketing

My name is Iryna Manukovska. I’ve spent the last 20 years launching initiatives, starting with the first drag racing championship in Ukraine in 2005 and helping to deliver startup babies across AI, Deep Tech, and Enterprise Tech since 2018. I’ve laid my marketing arms on more than 50 startups in Europe and the USA as a part-time, full-time marketer, advisor, or mentor. I've watched 50 startups burn money on fancy websites whilst their ideal customers can't explain what the hell they do. What I share below is a typical QA session I have with any founder I meet, and my expertise condensed into the length of a Hackernoon blog post.

Start With Customers And Stop building products for yourself

​While the corporate world builds marketing ecosystems, founders should first ask themselves who they are building a product for. If you are still getting an answer like “I was struggling with this all the time at my old workplace” or “I was dreaming of having this throughout my career”, it's a red flag that you are missing real customer insights and feedback. And that’s where your marketing starts. Not with a fancy website, blockbuster promotional video, offer deck, or paid advertising.

​Do Customer Research & Interviews Before MVP

You’ve probably read this one at least 100 times. And you really think you’ve done the homework, but you still receive this feedback from investors during pitch competitions. Here is the psychology behind startuping: most founders are too deeply in love with their ideas, unable to see weaknesses, threats, or manage controversial and growth feedback. If you are building a product to help others, not to boost your ego, keep reading to learn how to run your customer interviews before developing your first MVP.

There is an excellent book, "The Mom Test," written by Rob Fitzpatrick in 2013, which covers how to extract genuine feedback from customers. Rob is a seasoned entrepreneur with raising and scaling experience in the US and the UK, who has struggled to understand customers, so he has written one of the best practical guides on his own.

The core idea is that you shouldn't ask anyone—not just your mom—whether your business idea is good, at least not in those direct words; instead, fish out real feedback with a set of rules:

​Talk About Their Life, Not Your Idea

Stop pitching, start asking. The first rule is to avoid pitching your idea and instead focus on understanding your customer's problems, experiences, and how they currently solve challenges.​

The moment you present your idea, people shift into protection mode; they want to protect your feelings and will likely agree politely rather than give honest feedback, or they simply start to judge and disagree. It's an unconscious reaction like freeze or flight. By keeping the conversation centered on their life, problems, and experiences, you allow them to share truthfully without the pressure of validating your specific solution to a problem and the problem itself.​

Bad question: "Do you think this is a good idea?"

Good question: "How do you currently solve this problem?" or "Tell me about the last time you faced this challenge."​

Ask About Specifics in the Past, Not Hypotheticals About the Future

Stop playing with a crystal ball. Ask questions grounded in past experiences rather than hypothetical future scenarios. People are naturally overly optimistic about what they might do in the future, but their past actions are solid facts.​

When you ask someone what they would do or would pay for something hypothetical, they often give you what they think is the "right" answer rather than what they'd actually do. That’s why a lot of focus on ground studies has failed. Past behavior is far more reliable than future intentions when it comes to exploring systematic problems.​

Bad questions:

• "Would you use a tool that does X?"​
• "How much would you pay for this?"​
• "What would your dream product do?"​

Good questions:

• "Tell me about the last time you dealt with [this problem]."​
• "What did you do to try to solve that?"​
• "What other tools or methods have you tried?"​
• "How are you dealing with it now?"​

Talk Less and Listen More

When you are in love, it’s hard to stop dreaming and talking about your passion. However, it’s critical if you are seeking real feedback, not a reassuring wording. The more you talk about your idea, the more you bias customer responses.​

Active listening is key: ask open-ended questions and give people space to tell their stories. By listening more than talking, customers naturally reveal their problems and priorities without pressure from your own agenda. 

Moreover, you begin to build relationships and establish trust, which can be crucial for future success in startups.

• Ask questions that focus on the customer's past experiences rather than hypothetical future scenarios.​
• Talk about their life and problems instead of your idea.​
• Listen more and talk less to avoid biased feedback.​
• Get concrete facts and commitments rather than collecting compliments.

Here is a draft of the easy potential customer interview you can handle.

Choose The Places Your Customers and Problems Are Hanging Out Together

I launched Ukraine's first drag racing championship in 2005. One thing I learned: race cars strip away everything unnecessary. Off-road vehicles have clearance and winches. F1 cars have massive engines. Kart cars sit millimetres from the road. Each is built for its specific goal.

Early-stage startups need the same mindset for marketing.

I've watched founders burn $10k on websites their customers never visit. I've sat through hours-long brand book debates about logo colours whilst the company has zero customer conversations scheduled. Corporations can afford this luxury. You can not.

1. Map where your customers already complain

Your customer interviews from "The Mum Test" gave you problems. Now find where people are actively discussing these problems using AI deep research tool:

• Reddit threads in your industry subreddits
• Slack communities where your target customers hang out
• LinkedIn influencers and opinion
• Substack comment sections
• Industry-specific Discord servers

Spend one week just listening. Screenshot the language they use. Note the satellite problems around the main pain point.

2. Reverse-engineer your competitors' channels

Don't guess where to show up. Look at where your competitors are already winning, it’s a red zone needs investment:

• Use SimilarWeb to see their traffic sources
• Check their LinkedIn company page for engagement patterns
• Google their brand name + "review" to find where customers discuss them
• Look at their team's personal LinkedIn activity – where are they posting?

What are they missing? Thinktanks? Podcasts? TikTok?

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3. Use the 7P1R framework to find your differentiator

You can't out-spend established competitors, but you can out-position them. Ask yourself across these eight areas:

• Product: What do you solve that they don't?
• Price: Can you offer different pricing (usage-based vs flat)?
• Place: Different time zones? Faster response times?
• Promotion: Are you in communities they ignore?
• People: Your team's background that creates unique expertise?
• Process: Your approach that's genuinely different?
• Proud: What do you care about that they don't?
• Relations: How do you treat customers differently?

Don’t Forget to Invite Betty to Every Meeting.

Attunement to the customer is fundamental for any product, service, and relationship. Cause all we build, we build to decrease their pain with our solution. It is just as simple as this. Whether it is a service-based business or startup, the situation during my consultancy, I see the same problem - the product or service is created for C-level suit or founders, their vision, and their pain points in previous years. And this is not gonna work; the customer would not pay for this.

I like the idea of Daniel Pink - leaving a free chair during the meetings for the customer avatar. In Ogilvy, we have named customers and asked ourselves, "Would Betty use this?"

Don't forget to invite customers to your meetings and processes; your business is built for them.

Invest in Channels That Are Always Yours

Starting marketing day one means not disclosing how you build, but engaging in why you build is important. LinkedIn is free to use and allows you to find early adopters and first customers before advertising. Build your weekly content calendar around customer trigger points

Map these triggers, then create content around them:

• Monday: Big pain post – what changed in your industry this week that makes the problem worse
• Wednesday: Customer problem reflection – share a discussion you saw in communities, add your depth
• Friday: Progress showcase – customer conversation you had, talk you gave, insight you discovered

Keep the "Would Betty use this?" test from Ogilvy in mind. Betty is your customer avatar. If Betty wouldn't care, don't post it.

Not sure what to write about? Use the 7P1R framework, which helps to identify every possible distinction feature and unfair advantage your product have.

Become Your Own Brand Ambassador

Many founders are seeking someone to handle marketing for them. While we can’t be a C-level executive in every area as founders, we are the primary brand ambassadors of what we are building. Despite imposture, shyness, and a lack of time, we engage investors, partners, and customers in the early days, so practicing pitching and storytelling is crucial to convey that our problem is significant enough to invest in and our solution is effective enough to solve it.

Use Storytelling to Make Your Problem Urgent (Not Your Product Cool)

The CAPS Storytelling Framework

I use this for every pitch, LinkedIn post, and customer presentation. It's based on how people actually rewire minds. CAPS works because each stage primes the next - you hook attention with a problem they recognise, prove you've lived it, show the gap competitors can't fill, then lock in the new behaviour through a story they can feel in their body.

• Curiosity: Hook them with the tension point moment
• Start with the problem at its worst
• Example: "I watched a B2B SaaS founder spend €50k on Google Ads before having 10 proper customer conversations"
• Not: "Our innovative platform revolutionises…"
• Accountability: Show you understand their world
• Prove you've lived this problem or solved it 50+ times
• Use the Ogilvy "Betty" test: "Would Betty recognise herself in this story?"
• Include the inconvenient truth they're avoiding
• Persistency: Demonstrate why existing solutions fail
• Don't trash competitors – show the gap they can't fill
• Use your 7P1R framework: where are you genuinely different on Process, People, or Relations?
• Example from my Ogilvy days: We won the SABRE Award not because we had the biggest budget, but because we understood Ukrainians' pride in their country better than anyone
• Surprise: End with the new state of aggregation
• The "I wanna go home" → "remember this with every piece of my body" moment
• Show what changes when they act
• Not features. Changed behaviour.

Apply This to Your Founder Story:

Instead of: "I struggled with this at my old workplace, so I built a solution"

Try:

• Setup (Curiosity): "Three times I watched our engineering team rebuild the same integration from scratch. Each time: two weeks, $30k, same bugs."
• Confrontation (Accountability + Persistency): "Existing tools promised 'no-code solutions' but still needed a developer to configure. We were spending more time maintaining the no-code platform than writing code."
• ntegrations in 4 hours. Engineering focuses on actual product features. We finally have time to finish the LEGO Star Wars installation by the 4th of May."

Your First Marketing Manager: Hire doers, not talkers.

Early-stage marketing is similar to playing with your toddler's LEGOs, mixed up in one box, rather than accurately building sets; you try to build what you need with what you have. You need both knowledge of what works and hands-on experience on how to implement, as at this stage, there is no team behind you. When recruiting experienced C-suite team members, ask them what they plan to do and how they intend to implement it, step by step. If they speak about the importance of doing (corporate slang) more than actionable deliverables (we need to build, to run…), it is a red flag that you may have a lot of great discussions and inspo with no actions behind.

Hiring a junior is not a good fit either, as most early-stage founders lack the luxury of teaching others and often also lack marketing experience. A middle/senior person may be the perfect combination of skills and experience you are looking for.

Consider hiring fewer corporate personnel, as they are more process-driven than result-driven - the essence of corporate effectiveness and scale is the support of existing processes in place. Corporate people used to do less with more; you need the opposite.

Ask these 4 questions. Listen for specifics, not corporate waffle:

1. "You have $3,000, 90 days, and zero brand awareness. Walk me through your first week."

• Wrong answer: "I'd start by developing a comprehensive strategy and conducting market research…"
• Right answer: "Day 1: Set up LinkedIn, Google Analytics, HubSpot free tier. Days 2-3: Customer interviews. Day 4: Write first post based on interview insights. Day 5: Ship it."

2. "Show me something you've built yourself. Not managed. Built."

• If they pull up a landing page they coded, a campaign they wrote, or analytics they set up – good sign.
• If they talk about "my team delivered…" or "we achieved…" – that's management, not doing you will need this later..
• You need a doer. You already have a manager (you).

3. "What's the last marketing thing you did that completely failed? What did you learn?"

• Corporate people say "I'd need to think about that…"
• Good people say "Last month I spent $500 on LinkedIn ads that got zero conversions. Learned our ICP doesn't respond to ads, they respond to founder content."
• You're looking for fast failure, fast learning, not risk avoidance and rule obedience.

4. "Here's our customer interview notes. What would you post on LinkedIn Monday morning?"

• Hand them actual interview notes. Give them 10 minutes.
• Watch whether they ask about approval processes, brand guidelines, content calendars.
• Or whether they just write the damn post.

The bottom bottom line

There is an uncomfortable truth: no one can really do marketing for a founder of an early-stage company. The reason for this is that an early-stage venture is a living and breathing entity with a somewhat unclear vision inside a founder's head. Without a clear understanding and framing of what, to whom you sell, and what it is better than alternatives, any marketing effort would be a pure learning experience, not a business one

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