Catherine Clifford

2 years ago, i had done zero marketing. i'd been an engineer my entire life. when i told a founder friend we were building a consumer product, he told me, "tanay, you don't have that consumer dna. you don't know how to build a brand. you shouldn't do this." it sounded like a fun challenge. game on. 2 months after we pivoted Wispr from hardware to Flow, our first launch did millions of views and hit #1 on product hunt for the day and the week. what i've learned about marketing since: 1/ take almost no inspiration from others. standing out means doing things your own way. be unique and bold in your decisions. 2/ pick your first users by who will cause PLG. hundreds of avatars of people loved wispr flow. we focused on 2. developers, because they post about tools they love everywhere. founders, because they roll them out to their whole team. 3/ make every user feel it was built for people like them. most tools assume american english. in wispr you can pick british english, swiss german, or simplified vs traditional chinese 4/ build small moments that make people feel seen. in india, after you've spoken 1,000 words in an indian language, a banner says congratulations in that language, with the flag 5/ do pr even if you can't measure it. if i put its roi in a spreadsheet, the column would be empty. but asking what i'd pitch a journalist about every new feature gives us a lot of our ad ideas 6/ make the message something you can see, touch, feel. have fun with it. we said we'd kill the keyboard, so i sawed one in half in our office for a launch video 7/ treat word of mouth as a science, not an art. after we hit product-market fit, the first thing we optimized for was getting every user to tell their friends turns out you don't need consumer dna or to be the most creative. you just need to treat marketing like a science.