BY TENILLE BONOGUORE
Marketing is one of entrepreneurship’s darker arts. Poised at the nexus of strategy and creative wizardry, it encompasses everything from customer leads to logo colour.
It is also, according to startup marketing specialist April Dunford, completely useless for early-stage startups.
At the beginning, the most pressing issue is not marketing, Dunford says. It is whether the business is viable. Heavy-duty marketing enters the picture later, after the founders have worked their network to land the first accounts, and are facing the need to scale.
“The problem with marketing, however, is that there isn’t a playbook as much as you would think there is,” Dunford says. “Everybody’s marketing problems are a little bit different.”
If Dunford has her way, that playbook won’t be far away. As she begins her term this week as Communitech’s newest Executive in Residence, she will pay close attention to the challenges facing startups in the ecosystem, seeking common themes that could be distilled into, essentially, a guide.
“There are some marketing problems that are really hard, and there’s no way to get around how hard they are,” she says. “But there are some things that are not that hard. We should be able to do a better job of getting people through the not-hard bits, so they can focus on the hard ones.”
The addition of Dunford to the already-strong bench of Communitech’s Executives in Residence broadens, yet again, the wealth of knowledge at the disposal of Communitech and HYPERDRIVE companies, says Steve Currie, the Vice President of Venture Services for the organization.
“April Dunford is hands-down the top startup marketing person in the country,” Currie says. “We’re really fortunate to have someone of April’s calibre as part of our talented startup coaching team – she has already dug in and is helping a number of our startups.”
That assistance can often seem counter-intuitive, such as dismissing early-stage marketing, and insisting on quantifiable data for what has long been a field cloaked in ‘just trust me’ assurances.
That gives you a good idea of how Dunford works. An engineer who fell into marketing 20 years ago, Dunford sees her craft as both an art and a science. And she isn’t afraid of sharing some tough truths in her bid to bring credible analysis to the field.
Take, for example, her assessment of early-stage branding. “I am very negative about the concept of branding for early-stage companies. I am kind of insanely negative,” she says.
Too often, she says, inexperienced people get caught up in the colour, logo and taglines of a business, forgetting the real issue that needs addressing: What is this new thing, and why should a customer buy it?
“As a startup, you have a thing that nobody knows what it is. I am never going to make you buy that thing, even if you feel great when you see my advertising, if you don’t know what it is. It is the first hurdle you have to deal with.”
Regardless of stage, though, Dunford insists marketing and branding should deliver solid numbers and analytic proof about what is working, and why. And for that approach, you can largely blame the University of Waterloo.
The Engineer’s Advantage
When Dunford enrolled at the University of Waterloo in the mid-1980s, she thought she wanted to be a doctor. But after two years of pre-med, she ditched it for systems design engineering and joined her new classmates in a cramped basement classroom of an outdated building.
Since then, the systems design engineering program has moved to the top floor of a beautiful new centre that offers comprehensive views of the fertile grounds from which it sprang.
The same can be said for Dunford’s career. Since graduating in 1993 and becoming one of the first dozen employees at Watcom, her work has been a mix of small tech startups and global heavyweights including IBM, Siebel Systems, Nortel and others. Today, Dunford is the founder of Rocket Launch Media, a blogger, mentor and respected consultant.
All along, she has embraced data, applied critical analysis, and striven for provable results. That approach resounded particularly deeply with tech entrepreneurs.
“I think the fear of numbers and proof has been sort of a crutch for traditional marketers. We are finally getting to the point now with digital marketing that you can measure almost everything, and hold marketing accountable for revenue.
“The smart marketers are treating this as an information management problem. … It is becoming more of a data-analysis game than a creativity game that it was in the past.”
But the help is for more than just startups. Dunford went from being part of an acquired business to joining IBM’s acquisition assessment team, and is bringing a host of insight for medium and large firms as well.
From the secrets of how big companies assess potential acquisitions, determining what aspects of a business can scale, to turning bootstrap marketing into long-term strategy and knowing how to compete with global giants for accounts, she’s got the goods and is eager to share it.
“If you have that perspective, you can understand better what tricks and techniques you can steal from the big guys, and what you definitely want to stay away from,” she says.
Probing for process
When Dunford began her career, she didn’t know any other tech marketers outside Watcom. It would be years before she met another person in a similar role. “Every time I came across a problem, I felt like I had to make everything up from scratch,” she says.
“Now that I’m in the position where I can give something back to the community, I feel it’s my duty to do that, to be that person I wish I had when I was early in my career.”
Gone are the days of startups flying blind. Now, there is such a wealth of advice, resources and information on the internet, from mentors, at conferences and, yes, at places like Communitech, companies often need help finding what suits them best.
And she can’t name a better place to ply her craft. “I think Communitech is really interesting. What they’re doing is really unique, and at a scale that’s mind-blowing,” she says. “I’m looking forward to being able to interact with that many startups in a really efficient way.”
And, as with everything she takes on, Dunford is approaching her EIR term with an engineer’s analytical eye.
“One of the things I’m really interested in as a marketer is the repeatable patterns of startup marketing,” she says.
“The process of being able to work with a lot of startups at once is going to help me identify the places where there are patterns, and then package [that learning] up, so that you can focus your time on the things that aren’t. Because there are a lot of things that aren’t.”d