Budget for Proof-of-Concept Marketing from Day One

It is a sad, but familiar, story in startup land. An entrepreneur raises a limited amount of funds, plows it entirely into building out their product, and has no gas left in the tank for driving users to the site once the product is complete. Then they go to the venture community looking for additional growth capital, without having achieved the proof-of-concept required by the venture investors in the form of initial user adoption or revenues. Hence, leaving them out-of-luck with the VC’s and scratching their head on how to raise sales and marketing money. This is the typical cycle I see over and over again with the startups that reach out to Red Rocket for financing assistance.

Read the rest of this post in Wall Street Journal, which I guest authored this week.

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