There's no hacking your way to growth - Pre-PMF
Part 1: Pre-product market fit (PMF)
š¤ āWhat should a Growth Marketer do?ā
This is the question I was asked this week, by the CEO of a pre-product market fit (PMF) company.
Before we get into the actionable advice part of the post, letās take a short trip down memory lane, to early 2017.
Back in the early days of Qonto
Back then, I was the āgrowth personā at Qonto, and, in a total team of 8, my job description was literally āanything not related to codingā is yours. At that point, I had managed to make 4000+ companies sign up to Qontoās beta waiting list, with ā¬0 marketing budget.
This was a clear win, but only the start of it.
I remember spending nights and week-ends googling each of these sign-ups using their email address (the only info I had), looking them up on Linkedin, Facebook, Societe.com. I wanted to get a clear picture of who they were.
I had tried to delegate this task, or to automate it, but only my own scrolling through these websites could allow me to build this mental picture, and find patterns. It was very exploratory.
The only tools I had was Google and a spreadsheet, on which I took very detailed notes: what groups they followed, what they twitted, where they worked, how many people followed them, what they ate when they posted it on Instagram, anything that would help me connect with them.
Then I prioritized my list.
When our beta was finally available, the first ones I invited were people I believed would :
a) be forgiving (a beta is called ābetaāā for a reason),
b) be a fit for our product (obviously), and
c) have time to provide feedback.
I did not jump at the star CEO with 50K followers.
My exploration helped me build our ideal persona for this phase: a former entrepreneur who was in-between projects, for instance. Iāve literally watched over their shoulders, one by one, looking at how they reacted when they opened their Qonto account, and constantly sharing my notes with the Product team.
I only invited the segment I had dubbed āinfluencersā last, when our product was almost ready for the official launch.
Opening up to āinfluencersā meant paying even more attention to every details of the experience. Pietro (then at The Family, now at Stride) knew me first as the person doing customer support on Slack.
We knew we were not perfect, but made a point to answer as quickly as possible (within the minute, if possible).

Back then, and for some years after that, whenever we met one of our first thousands customers, they would say: āoh youāre the Anh-Tho from Qonto!ā š
(I do like the ārhymeā, now being the⦠āAnh-Tho from Lagoā.)
This was obviously a lot of (tedious!) work, but looking at Qontoās trajectory, Iām pretty sure it did pay back. š
Donāt get me wrong
I LOVE data, automations, scalability.
This is what Lago is all about. And I might sound like a SaaS geek, but I was SO happy to crunch larger sets of data a few months later, visualizing cohorts, even if it was on an ugly spreadsheet.
Felt like a real treat 𤩠šæ. They do say āSaaS is beautifulā, donāt they?
Getting back to the initial question. Soā¦āWhat should a Growth Marketer do, pre-PMF?ā.
The Growth Marketer job, pre-PMF
Iāve gone back to my notes of the 100+ Growth teams weāve interviewed these past months.
And it struck me that most pre-PMF companies overthink Growth.
I think they should HOLD, do āthings that donāt scaleā for much longer.
Iāve summarized my takeaways here:
ā SHOULD NOT
Throw yourself in an automation feast.
At this point, everything should be manageable on spreadsheets. You should know every lead by their first name. Donāt waste time automating things that might be useless once youāve found PMF.
And allow yourself to feel the pain too (often related to an extensive use of spreadsheets :) ), the more you feel the pain, the clearer you can picture how tools or automations can fix this.Patch lack of PMF by performance marketing.
Paid marketing might hide a lack of traction for a while.
The question is:
- Do you want to know now that you donāt have a strong enough traction (-> donāt do ads), orā¦
- Do you want to realize it in 6 months, when youāve burnt all your cash (-> spend on ads now)?Delegate, especially to an intern, or to an external provider.
Unless you have very specific and simple tasks, that you know will need to be repeated during at least 4 months (the average duration of an internship, minus the ramp-up phase), an intern is useless.
Consultants, agencies, will try to sell you Growth, but letās be honest: your best (if not only) asset at that point is how well you know your product and your target market, how genuinely you connect to users.
š¤·āāļø Does it really sound like something you should externalize?
ā SHOULD
Constantly collect new ādata pointsā.
Chase potential clients, pitch them, log the inputs, identify what made them tick, what did not. The goal is not to convince them (although itās best if it is the case), but to collect data points.Analyze these inputs.
Categorize them, can you see a pattern? Does your value proposition resonate better with a specific group? Startups at Series B stage? Consulting companies? Lifestyle entrepreneurs? Iterate on how you pitch, make different versions according to potential user segments.
It does not have to be statistically relevant, maybe youāll see a mini pattern on a small set of 10 users at first. Try to interview 10 more with the same āprofileā, and see if your hypothesis sticks.Give your waiting list some love.
If you collect leads through a form: google them, know what their job is, how they found you, call them to discover why they would need you, how much they would pay for what youāre solving.Work on copy.
Product copy, website copy, FAQ. The power of a great copy and FAQ is underrated, especially if your product creates a new usage.
People spend weeks, if not months, on taglines, but only a few hours on FAQ. Maybe balance the effort :)!Get people you target to talk about you.
It does not necessarily need to be directly related to what you do. The truth is, tech startups per se are often boring (even for a SaaS geek like myself :) ).
At Qonto, we did not talk much about banking features at the beginning, but we created a lot of content and events around entrepreneurship.
We found this topic more energizing and fertile than āSEPA transfersā for instance. This is what the Qonto Startup Meetups is about (4K+ members).
Were we more legitimate than any other startup to create this group?
No, but we just identified the opportunity, jumped at it, and nurtured it.
āļø Find your place under the sun, there are so many!
Iād like to take this post as an opportunity to thank The Familyās team who has truly been instrumental in helping us get initial traction and amplify it at Qonto, in many impactful ways too long to describe here.
š Thanks Alice, Oussama, Erika (yep, *the* Clubhouse icon), Pietro, Maud, Mathias, and all the team, truly.
Also, the post-PMF phase is a totally different journey, thatās why weāll share our thoughts about it in a totally different post. Stay tuned!
Anh-Tho⦠from Lago š
Want to go further?
Readings: Product Market Fit (by Superhuman), First Growth Hire (myself), listening: Qontoās launch (Growth Makers Podcast, by Gabriel Gourovitch in )
Book a personalized 25-min ādata for businessā coaching session with Lago team. What we usually help on: your tool stack, tracking plan, team organization, recruitment.
Join our invite-only community: comment this post, and Iāll follow-up!
Credits: Photo by Lubo Minar on Unsplash
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