April Dunford: From startup to corporate, and all over again
When I first started following April on Twitter (@aprildunford) she completely broke the mould of what I had envisioned a startup marketer being. In fact, April embodies the scientific side of marketing perfectly. In this interview, she shares her view on Growth Hackers, the most important startup marketing metric, and what it’s like being an engineer in a marketing world.
Tell me about yourself, and how you got into marketing.
I am actually an engineer by training. I graduated from the University of Waterloo in Systems Design Engineering. My friend gave me a job, and the job was as a Technical Evangelist for a technical product they were selling to a technical audience. They needed somebody that could demo the product, talk about the product, and that actually knew what a store procedure was. I got that job, and then I actually ran the marketing for that product a short time later. I loved it, and I never looked back...it was sort of an accident that that’s where I landed, but it turned out to be a good fit.
I know that you can go to school and study marketing, but I think that people who do that think they’re going to come out and market toothbrushes or running shoes or something. I think people doing marketing at startups didn’t originally intend to be a marketer. You fall into it and then suddenly say “hey, this is kind of a cool job!”
Earlier in your career you worked for large corporations like IBM, Nortel, and Huawei - how did you end up in the startup community?
It actually worked the other way around. I started at startups and then did some stints at bigger companies. My first marketing job was at a startup, and then we got acquired by a company, so I ended up there. That wasn’t much fun, so I left and did another startup marketing job. Then we got acquired, and this happened to me about five times. I consider myself a startup marketer, but I have done several stints at larger companies. Most of them I came into through acquisitions, but a couple of times I was recruited in to a larger company to launch a new thing into a new market - which is sort of similar to a startup marketing job. Since I’ve been consulting, I’ve only had one project with a large company.
If you’re doing startup marketing, and you’re doing your job right, your company tends to get acquired by somebody, and you have to figure out if you want to stay there and do your thing, or go find another startup. The smaller ones are way more fun.
At a startup, you have to be responsible for everything, you’re like the VP. You have to do PR, communications, lead generation, sales support - absolutely everything, whereas really big company marketers tend to specialize in one particular thing. They’ll be really good at that one thing, but not so good in other areas.
It’s a huge challenge for startup marketers, that we have so many tasks, but not enough experience in most of them.
At startups, there’s an expectation of constantly learning, because you’re never going to be an expert at every single thing. And, the market keeps changing - your company, your competitors, the product itself is changing. It’s a bit futile to try and be good at everything, when instead you should just get really good at building your marketing system and looking for new ways to drive revenue. The tactics will always change, but the engine is something that is fairly similar from company to company to company.
I think that’s how the whole “growth hacker” phenomenon began.
The thing about Growth Hackers is that they tend to think the engine is always the exact same. I’ve always seen it as being a bit tactical, really. It really is just talking about one particular thing, which is user acquisition. It’s not so much talking about other parts of the sales funnel like user activation or user retention. Growth hacking seems to apply almost exclusively to products where there isn’t a sale. I’ve seen very few examples of people saying they’re doing “growth hacking” on a product where the onboarding process involves selling you something. That makes me nervous. That said, I love the concept of growth hacking. I love the pieces of it - I love having things baked into the product that relate to user acquisition or awareness. If you define growth hacking that way, then I love it. It’s a thing that startups do very well, but that big companies struggle with. Growth hacking isn’t the only thing a startup marketer should be worried about though...I think there’s other things to focus on too.
You’re very strategic when it comes to marketing, but inject a unique and creative touch - where do you find inspiration for this?
I actually don’t consider myself a creative person at all. I am an engineer, so my big thing is thinking about revenue. The whole point of doing marketing is running a business - we’re not running a charity. My thing is really thinking about ‘who are the customers?’, ‘how do I interact with those customers to get them interested?’ and ‘what are the steps those customers go through to buy something, use something, love something, and buy something again?’. A lot of what I’m focused on is around that. You need to get a firm grasp on who the customer is and what they like to buy, and that is the key to your marketing. Don’t start with tactics (i.e. We need to be on Twitter, Facebook, doing PR, etc.), but start with the who and why and how, and then go to tactics. Everywhere I’ve worked, the skill that has been lacking the most is accessing customer insights, and asking how we build a better revenue engine.
What is the hardest part of marketing an earlier-stage startup?
I think the hardest part of marketing a startup is that most of the time you’re marketing something where people have absolutely no idea what it is. Sometimes it solves a problem that people don’t know exists. It’s not the same thing as marketing toothbrushes, because everyone knows what a toothbrush is, why they need one, etc. I just need to convince them why my toothbrush is better than the other toothbrushes that are out there. If I have that toothbrush, and I land on Mars, and I say “You should buy my toothbrush because it’s made out of organic bristles”, everyone else is saying “...what’s a toothbrush?”. You need to educate people not just about the product, but also about the space and the need. You’re trying to illuminate a market space where you’re saying there’s a better way to do something. If you keep doing things the way you’re doing them now, you’re wasting a lot of time, energy and money. When people realize that yes, they do have that problem, then you can show them the different ways to solve that problem, and that your way is one of those ways. That’s very different from selling smartphones, or toothbrushes, or running shoes. Everyone knows what those things are and why you might need them. It’s really a differentiation thing, whereas with startup marketing you’re starting at a completely different stage where you have to bring customers along this journey of showing them a problem that’s worth solving.
How do you prove your value as a marketer to more technical startup founders who are focused on building a product?
This is very easy for me. You prove it by revenue. There is no other number but revenue. I tend to get along well with startup founders because we typically have the same educational background. We speak the same language and are fairly practical people. We tend to be very numbers oriented, and they’re not bringing me on board as VP of Marketing to make everyone feel better. We’re doing it because we’re trying to drive some revenue. If I can show them that we put $2 in and $10 comes out, hey isn’t that cool? The engineers love that. It’s very easy for us to understand, we can put it in a spreadsheet. I think where marketers get into trouble with technical cofounders is when they’re not measuring things. When they are strictly focused on the creative aspects, which is of course important too, and they can’t prove to you in a logical, rational way how that connects back to revenue, frankly the engineers shouldn’t be taking me seriously.
So you think revenue is the best indicator?
Yes, of course, and you have to make the connection too. You have to show the flow of ‘okay, we did this, and that got people to this stage, and then we did this and got them to the next stage and out popped a whole bunch of money.’
You’ve advised a long list of startups across all sectors... what is the most important piece of advice you give to everyone you work with?
I think customer understanding is a really big deal, and it’s not just understanding who your customers are, but it’s understanding how they make decisions about things, what happens between the moment when they think ‘oh, maybe I should investigate this type of solution’ to actually pulling out their credit card and making a purchase. I think for a lot of startups, they design something that is very much for themselves, or they get a great idea and they build it without spending a lot of time really getting inside the heads of their customers. The more you can understand about that, the better your marketing will be. I think a lot of startup founders will think they know this, but there will be a whole bunch of untested assumptions baked into that. Then they’ll run marketing campaigns and they won’t work and they’ll think ‘well, that’s weird. Why didn’t that work? It would’ve worked on me.’ Maybe your customer target set isn’t exactly like you. So you’re making all these assumptions about them and how they buy that are incorrect. I think if you have failed marketing experiments, it’s usually an indicator that you’ve got an assumption that is incorrect. Now you need to go back and figure out what’s wrong with that assumption. That always means going back to your target market and having conversations with them and figuring out why it isn’t working. Really the only way to find out why something isn’t working is to get out and talk to your customers. It’s very difficult to survey your way into figuring out the ‘why?’
What does the future hold for April Dunford?
I have two things I’m working on right now. RocketScope is a new company that I formed with my business partner Amrita Chandra, who is also a very experienced Startup Marketer - she’s been the head of marketing at a number of different startups. We are kind of in the beta phase with an offering that we’re targeting at small- to mid-size, high-growth companies that want the benefit of having a couple of very senior full-stack marketers available to them to help them accelerate what they’re doing. We can basically help them with their marketing plans, and help them focus on the things that are important, and not focus on the things that are already good and working so they can move faster. We have a handful of clients we’re working with now and it’s going really well.
I’m also spending a day a week in Waterloo at Communitech as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. I’m a working resource available to any of their ~800 companies that are part of Communitech. As an EIR, I am a resource available to any of those people that want to spend a little bit of time with somebody who is on their level. I can kind of review things, look at things, and give them my opinion on what is missing and what could use some more work. I spend about two hours every week with the Hyperdrive cohort, so I get those two hours set aside every week for those companies. I think Hyperdrive is amazing, I think they have a great cohort in there. Communitech is an amazing, magical place. I have not seen anything like it in Canada. They have this big building with a lot of the startups in that building, but they also have Google, Desire2Learn, Universities have representation, and some other bigger companies. There’s this really neat energy and vibe in there, and you have all these more senior people that are available as a resource there. I think they’re doing some magic stuff at Communitech right now. It’s fun to be a part of it. Since I’m a University of Waterloo grad, I hadn’t been back there in a while so it’s fun to hang out there. For myself, at RocketScope, we’re very interested in startup marketing best practices, so the EIR thing at Communitech gives me a chance to be exposed to a lot of startups, and they’re all different and they’re all doing things in very different ways. It gives you a chance to see the repeatable patterns of what works and what doesn’t. What are the common mistakes that people make? And how do we help other people to not make those mistakes?
Looking for more from April? Follow her on Twitter, and check out RocketWatcher and RocketScope!