The marketing wiki
What to do to launch and grow a software product, one topic at a time. Every page links to the steps, the plays and the evidence behind it, and every statistic is traced to the page it came from with a plain note on how well we checked it.
Topics
- Getting your first ten customers
The first customers come from doing things that do not scale: a list of named people, personal outreach, conversations with every user, and asking for the money. You are finding out whether anyone pays before you build a machine.
37 steps · 1 plays · 15 claims
- Cold and warm outreach
Outreach works when it is specific to the person and sent slowly from a domain you have protected. Warm contacts come first, and every rung of the funnel from reply to close is counted separately.
20 steps · 1 plays · 12 claims
- Activation and onboarding
A signup is not a customer until they get a first result. Measure the time to that result, cut what stands in the way, and talk to the people who stall.
13 steps · 4 plays · 2 claims
- Reviews and social proof
Proof is easiest to collect while you still know every customer. Ask the people who got a result, make it simple to leave a review, and put what they say where visitors decide.
18 steps · 1 plays · 1 claims
- Product Hunt and launch days
A launch is a few weeks of preparation around one day. What the platform itself says about ranking, hunters and asking for upvotes matters more than the folklore around them.
21 steps · 2 plays · 4 claims
- Backlinks and directories
Early links often come from listing the product in places that already describe products like it, then claiming profiles and reclaiming mentions you have earned. The work is mostly forms; the care is in the submission kit and in checking each link is live.
76 steps · 15 plays · 6 claims
- Being cited by AI assistants
Answer engines cite pages they can retrieve and trust, so the work is crawlability, clear definitions, sources and consistency across the places that describe you. Track assistants as their own channel and read what the platforms themselves say before trusting a tactic.
17 steps · 9 plays · 2 claims
- Technical SEO and indexing
Before any content can rank it has to be crawlable, canonical, structured and indexed. Check the pages that take money first, and confirm indexing in the search engines rather than assuming it.
19 steps · 1 plays · 1 claims
- Content and search
Content earns its place by answering a question a buyer is asking, nearest to the purchase first. Plan clusters, write for the query, link new posts from old ones, and refresh what decays.
54 steps · 19 plays
- Programmatic SEO
Pages built from a template can work when each one carries something a reader needs and none is thin. Hold new batches until the last one is indexed, and never let a quality gate remove pages that already earn clicks.
8 steps · 3 plays · 1 claims
- Reddit and communities
Communities reward people who contribute before they mention a product, and punish anyone who does not. Read each community’s rules, disclose who you are, and give something useful without strings.
4 steps · 10 plays · 1 claims
- Pricing, paywalls and payments
Price, packaging and the paywall shape acquisition cost, churn and support for years, so test them deliberately. Make it possible to pay, state the price, and raise it for new customers before you discount.
19 steps · 2 plays · 4 claims
- Retention and churn
Past the first customers, keeping revenue matters more than winning it. Measure gross and net churn, ask every leaver why, recover failed payments, and offer a pause or a fitting save before a blanket discount.
13 steps · 3 plays · 1 claims
- Channel testing and attribution
Many companies at this size lean on one channel, so the job is to find which. Record where each signup came from, test a few channels with the win and kill numbers fixed in advance, then put the effort behind the winner.
28 steps · 1 plays · 2 claims
- Paid acquisition
Turn paid on only with a written payback rule, and read the cost of the last unit of spend, not the average. Start with the traffic you have already earned: your own brand, your best pages and posts that worked.
11 steps · 8 plays · 2 claims
- Founder brand, press and talks
A founder who posts steadily on the one platform buyers use becomes a channel. Original data, podcasts and talks make the category term yours, and each one is raw material for the next.
36 steps · 26 plays
- Email, newsletters and lifecycle
An owned list is the one audience a platform cannot take away. Set up sending properly, start a newsletter you can hold the cadence of, and let behaviour, not the calendar, trigger lifecycle emails.
16 steps · 9 plays · 4 claims
- Partnerships and referrals
Other people’s audiences and your own customers are the cheapest growth once something already works. Ship the integrations your customers use, co-launch them, and ask for referrals at the moment of delight.
11 steps · 11 plays
- Mobile apps and app stores
A store listing is a landing page with its own rules, and installs have to be traced to the post that earned them. Add the second platform early and put an attribution partner in before paid installs.
7 steps · 1 plays · 3 claims
- Sales assist and new segments
Larger deals earn a human, and a second customer segment earns its own page, price and channel. Decide the threshold first, qualify before booking, and record why each lost deal said no.
30 steps · 1 plays
The shelves
Behind the topics: what each idea means, the research data, and where every number comes from.
- Foundations
What things are: demand generation and lifecycle marketing stage by stage, the types of marketing, the funnel models and the founder questions.
- Glossary
28 terms in plain English, each linked to the topics that put it to work.
- Data
5 research pages: statistics, prices and the directory study, each checked at its sources.
- Sources and corrections
Every checked statistic traced to the page it came from, and what was removed because no source supported it.
The plan, by stage
The same steps the launch plan tracks, in order. Each stage opens into its objectives and steps.
How the evidence works
- Corrections and removed statistics : what the plan used to say that no source supported
- How claims are graded
- Editorial standards : who writes the library, and how it is reviewed
- The launch plan as one checklist
Sources were read by AI research agents using a tool that can summarise a page, and re-read by a second agent. 20 of 42 claims were then re-checked directly against their pages by Claude in a browser (12 confirmed, 6 partly, 2 not confirmed and corrected). No person has independently checked them yet. Check an exact number against its source before you rely on it. Written by The Marketinque Team.