This document should be required reading for anyone doing a startup.
The biggest takeaway for me from this is that marketing isn't just driving traffic or contacting bloggers. It's a comprehensive process of optimizing landing pages, tracking and split testing, implementing social proof appeals, etc. If you're wondering what a nontechnical founder can do before launch, this is a great start.
What's most interesting to me here is that this is a plan for building a user base, not a customer base. Mint's customers (i.e. the people that provided revenue to Mint) were the financial services companies that paid to pitch products to Mint users. Without them, Mint doesn't make any money, and yet they do not appear in this initial plan. I'm curious to know whether Mint had a "get users first and then figure out how to monetize them" or if there was a parallel strategy for getting customers that isn't reflected here.
Financial service companies will want to advertise where their customers are. Pitching them before you have traction will just get you the question, "Ok, how many leads can you send us?"
But let's say you do and get 20 signed up as advertisers. Who cares? It won't earn you a cent until you get users in the door, you'll get worse terms, and it won't help you improve the underlying product.
Your users are the leverage you have to make good deals with advertisers.
They had a plan to get users AND customers. Look at these two lines:
beta launch: d) Display content of preferred partners who list us as elite partners on their site
public launch: f) Consider exclusive partnerships on specific things, ie. Wells Fargo for banking, T-mobile for cell phones.
This is very roughly written plan, but it covers almost everything required in early phases. The focus was mostly on creating a user base, but it is important that you work on all and start doing baby steps. Most new startups don't cover all the bases and wonder why it isn't working! :)
What may have been assumed here is that they could easily get a standard payout on finance-oriented offers through most affiliate networks. No special relationship needed. Scaling up traffic on these offers would enable them to bypass the network and negotiate better payouts from the advertisers.
The bit about showing Patzer's own financials on a publicly viewable, annotated instance of the Mint dashboard is brilliant. It puts a face on the founder. It shows off the product in a very real way. It makes an impression.
I don't remember them doing it, so maybe they chickened out, but that's a fun idea.
I have been starting to think more about stages of launch for a project I am working on it. It is awesome to see the initial "how" that got Mint to what it is today.
The biggest takeaway for me from this is that marketing isn't just driving traffic or contacting bloggers. It's a comprehensive process of optimizing landing pages, tracking and split testing, implementing social proof appeals, etc. If you're wondering what a nontechnical founder can do before launch, this is a great start.