Steve Jobs during the 'Think Different' campaign launch (1997).
Menlo and its products & research are getting 200,000+ views each month. Jan, the desktop app for using AI, gets an average of 7K downloads daily. We gather 200+ people in-person in Singapore each month, and 150+ people join our community each week. And we've never spent a penny on marketing.
Whenever I talk about high‑level marketing, I quote Steve Jobs: "Marketing is about values."
From both an anthropological and a business perspective, it's correct and he also admitted that it's a complicated, noisy world. So everyone has an opinion on marketing and loves to give advice, yet one truth remains: there's no single winning formula for every business. And so it goes with marketing formulas. Each one works until it doesn't, and then everyone pretends they never believed in it anyway.
Every startup starts with founding-marketing. As it grows, it needs marketing hygiene.
Marketing hygiene starts with purpose. Why are you doing this? Then framework. How does it fit together? Only then: tactics. What to do, how to do it, who does it.
Most conversations jump straight to tactics. Wrong order.
I'm skipping purpose here. Purpose is about the future you want to create. How your work changes things people care about.
Marketing looks like art. Manage it like math.
Quality content matters more than interrupting someone's cat video. This drives Menlo's marketing:
- Growing together with others
- Playing our game in the highest level
- Listening selectively
- Adding value to what we're working on
- Repurposing content
- Being opinionated about the differentiation and why we're doing
- Understanding the technical aspects at a level that explains a child
- Being aware of the target audience and the messaging
and of course the Big No's:
- Throwing out marketing activities to see what sticks
- Burning money at Ads
- Random posts
- Copying what others do
- Actions without planning or goals
- Prioritizing paid activities over organic
- Jumping on hypes over strategy
See our marketing approach in the marketing piece in our handbook.
Menlo handled 0 to 1. Founding marketing phase. Time to play a bigger game.