Amazing Lessons from this week’s podcast guest – Mat Braddy mobile commerce start up specialist

For several days after recording this week’s episode with Mat Braddy I found my brain slipping back to mull over something he said.

You can listen right now

Here’s the key bits I keep returning to for you:

“Nobody gives a shit about your idea”

Key advice for startups – on day one no one else cares, you have to work out why people should care and then make them care!

“Marketing is the icing on the cake, brand building is the cherry on top”

And that quote is from a CMO! (chief marketing officer).

What Mat means is that your business should have a drive all of its own – then you use marketing to push it to the next level and speed up customer acquisition. Then finally once you’re big enough – look at big branding campaigns on TV etc.

Taking Just Eat as an example, their pre-marketing expansion involved getting the takeaways to put their logo in the window, and selling (at cost price) menus, bags and takeaway boxes (all branded “Just Eat” to the takeaways. So the marketing at that stage was a bonus from helping out the supplier side.

Once that build a momentum they started doing marketing to accelerate the growth “building the top spin”.

“A marketplace must solve a problem for the suppliers- they are the chicken that lays the egg”

I asked Mat about the endless challenge in a marketplace – that you need to have both customers and suppliers for it to work, so where do you start?

He was really clear on this one – focus on the suppliers, solve their problems, find ways to help them and the customers will increase naturally. (see the Just Eat example above!)

“In mobile … follow the traffic”

Another big question, where Mat was completely ready with the answer. How do you build for mobile?

First look at where the traffic is, then focus your design and build on that area.

For them the traffic is on mobile so they have:

• Built the website truely mobile first – they’re not too worried about desktop.
• The mobile website is the focus of their growth (not the app), because it’s findable and doesn’t require the user to download.
• The app therefore exists to keep users engaged – so they’re putting a lot of content on there to keep users interested between haircuts.

Hear much more on all these topics and more in the show – available for free online right now.