For Starters #51: What if Your Best Customers are on TikTok?
“The purpose of the business is to create and keep a customer.” - Peter Drucker
Starting a business is itself choosing hard mode.
Primarily because all the unknown unknowns quickly become unknown knowns, and all of it is the responsibility of the founding team.
Finance, operations, product, marketing, sales, pricing, customer service, strategy, IT, utilities, every, god-damn, thing.
There’s inherently a tension here; Do everything. Stay laser-focused.
Quickly and confidently address all the issues, and establish systems so they take less labor moving forward, just so we can focus on making money.
It actually doesn’t matter the tool for tracking the sales pipeline, the tool for email marketing, the tool for scheduling, or any of the other thing. Just pick one that you’ll use and move on.
We have such an abundance of tools and services that make operating a business so much easier that I’m always surprised when I meet founders actively resisting even experimenting with a new tool.
Over the past two weeks I’ve spoken to a number of founders building consumer businesses and are resisting the obvious marketing tool to get in front of consumers.
TikTok.
Whether it be a personal distaste for social media as a whole, concerns around the issues surrounding TikTok’s ownership, or insecurity around being the face of their company, it’s all basically mute. This is where the consumers are.
If you’re building a consumer business, especially one serving 20-50 year olds, and you have no presence on TikTok, you’re working too hard.
Especially if you’re pre-product.
Especially if your business is addressing some social issue.
Right now, in this moment, TikTok has the best discovery algorithm.
“Business has only two basic functions; marketing and innovation” - Peter Drucker
Innovation presumably describes your new business.
Marketing is about getting your face is in front of your target customer. This is precisely what TikTok’s algorithm is amazing at.
Just like Twitter and blogs before, the best videos on TikTok are sincere, authentic humans wanting to connect and help other humans.
Your primary business goal on TikTok, and all discovery platforms (YouTube, Instagram, etc, etc), is to move your best customers from this discovery platform to a place you can communicate with them directly (e.g. email, SMS).
If you’re not yet convinced, I think of it this way:
If I had a free tool designed to put my company in front of hundreds of my best prospects I would be professionally negligent to not at least try it once.
If you’re hesitant, consider this experiment:
Take 1 day and brainstorm 10 topics about the problem that inspired you to start your business. Topics you could talk for 2 minutes off-the-cuff.
Over the next 2 days, record a video of yourself talking about each of those topics, conclude with an off-TikTok call to action.
Over the next 2 weeks publish the videos, once a day, on TikTok.
See what happens.
Best outcome:
A pile of new prospects on your email list.
Worst outcome:
You are much more articulate and charismatic in talking about your business.
Likely outcome:
A bit of both.
To be clear, I’m not encouraging buying ads or building out a year-long content calendar, or this being your primary marketing channel.
I’m encouraging small experiments to find your community of customers - even if they’re in places we’d personally rather not be.
If you’re in B2B, I’ve heard this can also work great for industrial-grade glycine.