If you can code or have a great developer on your team, you can use engineering as an effective marketing tool.

Engineering as marketing means building tools and resources that solve your target customer’s problems. Users will share your resources with their friends, winning you new customers.

The great thing about engineering as marketing is that it takes only one small investment, but provides a high return for a long time.

What to build

• Calculators: 401k calculator, website speed measuring tool, etc.
• Widgets: Video widget, sharing buttons, media player, etc.
• Educational microsites: An interactive or entertaining presentation that will show potential customers their need for your product. Make sure to give the microsit...

Startups, by definition, are in pursuit of growth. Getting traction is proof that you have customer demand—that your company is taking off.

The 50% rule of startups says that you should spend 50% of your time on product development and the other 50% on building traction. Why? Because you need to gain traction before, during and after product launches to survive as a company. Without any early traction, you could run into these 4 scary scenarios after building your product:

• No market: The product you've built is great, but doesn’t earn enough money, or people aren’t willing to pay for it.
• Small market: People want your product, but there aren’t enough people to expand or scale to become profitable.
• Hard-to-reach market: The product is great, but it costs too much to reach target customers, and you lose money per customer you acquire.
• Hyper-competitive market: The product is great, but so are the other hundreds of companies in the same...

The truest indicator of whether your product is providing real value to the users is retention. Very simply, it's a metric that tells whether your users are coming back to your product regularly or not.

How to measure retention

Here are four steps that you should follow:

1. Pick a leading indicator of revenue and repeat behavior: If you're a marketplace with two sides, you need to have metrics for both the supply and the demand side. For example, for Airbnb: Rebook rate (% of customers that rebook after the first booking) and number of nights booked per user over time are good examples of demand side metrics/actions that truly indicate that the user is using the product. A vanity metric like app downloads or pageviews here doesn't indicate much. On the supply side, metrics like number of bookings per unique active host over time is a good supply side metric.
2. Pick the right time period for your compan...

This course has 25 short, crisp tutorials on how to grow your startup — once done, you should have a good understanding of what the field of Marketing and Sales for startups looks like, have a good understanding of how to think and measure growth, as well as have about 20 "Traction channels" in your toolkit to help you grow your product.

If you like this course and want to dive deeper into...