On Marketing
After reading The Mom Test, StoryBrand, Don't Make me Think, and experimenting with various marketing techniques, here's what should happen next.
Dedicated to my gf ❤️ , Ronith (who stuck with aquarc for the last 7 months), and whoever was referenced this document.
aquarc has been more than developed as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), i.e. the most simple thing we can put together that people would actually want to use. It has a question bank, AI-powered help, and question sets that can be used to generate and study on the fly. Here's how we refine and grow next.
Marketing is a multi-step process where we constantly build and refine our product (the website) and our messaging (in person and on the landing page) in a loop so that we have a higher likelihood retaining users at each step of the process.
Validation
One of the hardest parts in marketing (for me) is asking the hard, existentialist questions: are we building something that people will actually use? But asking these questions make it easier for us to truly understand what direction we need to build in next.
An example conversation could look like this one before proper validation:
You: Are you studying for the SAT?
User: Yes
You: Use aquarc!
User: Alright, sounds great!
...and then, the user disappears into the blue...
A better example:
You: Are you studying for the SAT?
User: Yes
You: How so?
User: Hmm.. I do a lot of practice questions...
You: What did you do last night?
User: Well... I only study for it once every few months...
You: Why?
User: I feel demovtivated about studying...
You: But don't have to get a good score? Aren't you under so much pressure already?
[...]
Understanding how the user feels or thinks about the SAT is a great anchor point. If this conversation were continued, you'd soon understand how important the user thinks the SAT is in the first place and what they're currently doing to get a good score.
Notice that I avoided mentioning aquarc in the conversation at all. That way there's no emotional attachment associated with them telling me this or that, because people inherently want to make you happy and say that they "will use it". It's not intentionally their fault, but people will forget too if your product doesn't correlate to an actual problem in their lives. At the end of the day, that's what a product is, isn't it? As my mentor would say, it's a "painkiller."
As Fitzpatrick from The Mom Test says, "Compliments are the fool’s gold of customer learning: shiny, distracting, and entirely worthless." People wanna satisfy you if you start pitching because you get excited. Happiness rubs off on others, but unfortunately that sucks for your market validation.
Once you figure out the problem or problem(s), it's easy to build because you don't need any "ideas". Just build and refine.
In order to better understand what students struggled with, I became an SAT tutor at SchoolHouse. Although I never mentioned aquarc, I kept working through problems and finding similar recurring themes:
No one felt motivated to study on their own
Subject-verb agreement was not understood well
Neither were dangling modifiers
And from these problems, I was able to conclude that the information on KhanAcademy (and the platform itself) was not satisfying/detailed enough for students to use as KhanAcademy is very closely connected to SchoolHouse.
Throughout my validation endeavours, I've concluded that motivation and easy to access media (YouTube shorts with companion articles) are top priorities.
Grassroots advertising
You're a high school student, constantly under significant pressure, demotivated but wanting to make your parents proud. Aquarc makes the SAT easy for you; just pick the sections that are hard for you and press "Search Questions"; you'll be able to start progressing with wayy less effort.
Although it needs significant refinement through trial and error, this tagline is already the product of multiple hours of labor and didn't sprout up overnight.
And this tagline, while useful in short elevator pitches and marketing messages, doesn't tell us what should be on the website. How do we figure that out?
Simple. They're all part of a story.
Let's start by asking the fundamental question: What interests us in a movie or a novel? Why do we keep going?
Because the character experiences a struggle linked to their inherent survival needs, meets a guide who gives them a plan, and then they succeed and avoid failure. And the most important part of this story is the character transformation throughout the story.
You'll notice your attention deviating when any of these elements aren't present. A guide is necessary to be all-powerful, all-knowing (at least in the eyes of the hero) because the hero can't succeed without a guide. If the character's struggle is not relatable to us because it doesn't encompass our survival needs.
As an example, imagine an extremely wealthy person struggling with figuring out which luxury Yacht to buy. Doesn't hook you, right?
But perhaps they desire to be appreciated by their girlfriend, or want to show off their elite status to their friends so they can finally be accepted at their university. Now that makes for a much more interesting story.
Every customer is the hero of their story. Empower them. Show them how they're going to transform, and raise the stakes so they feel inclined to use your product.
Your story should have the following elements (directly taken from StoryBrand):
Character
With a Problem
Villain (internal problem, external problem, philosophical problem)
Guide who cares and can help you
A simple plan
Call to Action
Success
The failure they avoided
Character transformation
There will be multiple answers to each of the questions (like what problems your character has), but pick one that is specific and an umbrella for all the other ones and move on.
For aquarc, we have:
Character: A high school student looking to stand out among their peers and make their parents proud
Problem: Demotivated, has other interesting things to do and quite stressed
Villain: Your environment. Your internal problem is your desire to feel validated by your friends and family, your external problem is your lack of time and motivation, and the philosophical problem is that you shouldn't have to spend too much time figuring out how to study or what app to use.
Guide: We (aquarc) understand you are demotivated. We have 500+ weekly users that found our app easy and simple to use.
Success: They get a high score! Parents are proud and bragging rights.
Failure: Retaking, more time invested in studying and preparing all over again... Even worse if you're a junior at this point.
Transformation: from stressed, uncertain, and demotivated to calm, satisfied, and done without much effort. No need to study Atomic Habits.
And based on that, we've built our website and our tagline. Everything is consistent so our users have the highest chance of remembering what we're here for.
Refinement
Now that we have users (that we might've had to coax into checking us out), what next?
Well fundamentally, we still have to ask our users "why" multiple times to figure out what they actually want. Let's work through an example.
I have a friend that's using aquarc to study for the June SAT. One time he mentioned that he wanted to be able to bookmark questions.
"But that doesn't really make sense because it's not a practice test", he added.
So then I had to ask him: What do you actually want? Why?
And gradually:
"I want to be able to bookmark stuff" turned into "I want to save questions to go back to later", which then turned into "I want to be able to practice this like a test" and then I realized that I should mimick a mini-testing environment.
Don't assume your customers know everything.
Another example: my friend had issues with his email while signing up. Simple Google authentication would've made him a loyal user of our site. While this example is more of a bug than a feature request, is it any less important?
One of my friends switched to OnePrep because the UI was easier on the eyes and felt less convoluted. I plan to design an interface using Google Slides to figure out what he actually wants and is usable to him.
Putting it all together
Marketing is a multi step process. But more important than anything else, it means refining when other people think your product is a joke. And constant validation.
I've done it wrong too: when I made the "Ask AI" feature, I didn't realize that the rationale was typically enough for most people. The feature took up space without being used too much. And I had already coded a question similarity finder, thought process generator, and other cognitive tools...
Are those useful features? Yes. But they weren't worth the effort at this point in time. That's what we need to solve right now. Its more important to code features like adaptive practice or gamification to keep the studying process as easy and simple as possible.