Getting Noticed: Marketing Strategies for Startups

The average startup quietly spends about a tenth of its budget on marketing—yet most founders can’t say which dollar actually worked. In this episode, we drop into three early-stage launches and trace the real reason one goes viral while the others barely leave a ripple.

Most early-stage founders quietly copy big-brand playbooks—polished websites, broad social campaigns, generic “awareness” ads—then wonder why nothing moves. The uncomfortable truth: at your stage, marketing isn’t about looking legit; it’s about being unignorable to a very specific kind of person.

In earlier episodes, we obsessed over “who” and “what problem.” Now we zoom in on “how they actually find you,” and why throwing content into the void almost never works. Effective startup marketing starts more like street-level research than billboard design: stalking subreddits, lurking in niche Discords, hanging out in boring industry webinars, and noticing where your people already talk, complain, and share hacks.