Many entrepreneurs launch and grow their company by spending tons of money on advertising. However not all founders of startups have the luxury of capital at the initial stage hence they tend to look for cheaper way to push their products out to users. While the theory of zero marketing budget is itself a hoax, smart entrepreneurs can still find the best and cheapest way to grow their startup on a decent marketing budget.

Having access to capital is not a leeway to spending huge sums of money on advertising as it does not guarantee the success of the startup.

In this article, I have outlined steps to build a successful company with zero marketing budget. The strategies applies to all business both offline and online

1. Build a great product

One of the secrets of advertising is that a good product would speak for itself. History has shown that companies that focus on solving consumer's painful experiences go out to win the market. Create a product or service with a unique business philosophy. A great product is not one that has all the possible features but a simple and effective product that delivers on its promise.

Whatsapp is good success case. It was a simple but great product that grew without traditional advertising. Whatsapp came during the era of the ubiquitous Blackberry, Facebook, Messenger but its unique selling point what its ability to allow users send text without paying for sms fee by operators. Slowly it started growing a user base and in 2011 it became the top 20 most downloaded app and has remained there ever since.

2. Build a lean and resourceful team

Your startup is doomed to fail if members of your team can not think resourcefully to grow the business. Members of your team must be able to multi-task at the initial stage. Members of the team must be able to pick up any skill that is required for the success of your strtup. All this guides become useless if your team members are not ready to work their socks off. As a founder you must be able to quickly spot anyone who isn’t a fit for your startup and let the person go. Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos is a person who preaches efficiency and frugality in the workplace. His company is worth over $30 billion but wants all his staff to think and act like a startup eliminating any possible waste and inefficiency.

3. Show your product to power users

Your power users are micro-market for your product or service and comprise small groups of people who will readily adopt your product and recommend it to large network. Ben Silberman of Pinterest leveraged on his power network to grow his user base from 3000 to 75 million active users. Ben silbermann user base may have plateaued at 3000 users but instead of spending money on advertising he decided to organise meet-ups at local boutiques. He also created events for community members to attend. These helped spread his photosharing website and enabled it to gain massive popularity. Facebook also leveraged its power users-students at Harvard to grow its social network.

4. Get feedback and make changes slowly

One of the mistakes many founders make is trying to please all users quickly. They get really anxious when users start calling for new featurse soon. In a bid to satisfy users they end up killing their startup. Experience has shown many users don’t really know what they want, it takes a smart entrepreneur experience to able able to sift through the many request for new feature release. When Whatsapp first came out may users saw it as borring because it had no profile photo, status update or music updates. Rather than go frantic and start adding new features upon features. The founders only added features slowly. This gradual improvemenet enabled the founder to see how their app was performing in adition to new features and hence gave them better insight when adding other features.

READ full article here: http://coffeetimes.com.ng/2017/04/01/how-to-build-a-successful-company-with-zero-marketing-budget/