A Product Development Cycle

Where does development and marketing meet?

We think earlier than you probably think.

The Harry Ford blog is pretty quiet nowadays as we have been building digital assets. Platforms, software and have been making a lot of money in the process whilst providing great solutions to the end consumers and clients. This is why the search engine marketing side of things has started to decrease. We partnered with a bespoke web development firm based in Cardiff and now have a working relationship that not only helps both parties, but allows us to quickly build digital assets and businesses that we can later sell at a profit (although we tend not to sell them.)

But where does design and dev stop and marketing start?

This is the single biggest issue we see with start ups. They want to get an MVP out to market as soon as possible, but marketing does not start then, marketing starts inside the design and development stage in itself. If you look at the guys behind basecamp and the culture they created, you can see how this works in the real world. A product is created out of a need in the market, that is usually a need by the people who first actually made the product.

Think about every large company that exists nowadays. They started because there was a demand in a market that was not being satisfied. This is the core element of starting a business in general but its even more important nowadays when software developers can actually build you a great product within 30 days! That means you can have a Saas business within 2 months that potentially in 2 years can be doing 1 million a month in revenue. If you take a look at the guys behind basecamp and the exponential growth they achieved in a very short period of time, you can see this. Growth is not linear and marketing starts in the product development stage and not after.

Don’t think money – Think users

When doing marketing think about how users themselves can promote your product. Do you see any Google or Facebook ads? Probably not. But this works for physical products too. Think about supercars, they never have ads, at least not Bugatti or Lambo’s. There’s 2 reasons behind this but one of them is down to people who watch TV are not their target audience, but 2 the individuals who promote the products are the people constantly talking about it in a good way and positioning the product as the “god of cars” or however you decide to phrase it.

Thanks for reading.