Company Overview

Name
The name you plan to use across all your branding and communications.

For example, deciding to omit accents in Hōjicha Co. or including them since it’s the official company name.

URL
The main url used across all of your branding and communications.

For example, App.net launched at alpha.app.net even though they have many custom landing pages.

Tagline
Typically 3-5 words that succinctly convey the high level concept in an appealing way. This may evolve over time with customer feedback, but you can get started by browsing through AngelList startups for inspiration.

Pitch
[Company Name] is a [Product/Service] that [Benefit] for [Target Customer] who [Problem/Opportunity]

Description
Unlike your pitch, this can be longer and provide more detail into your features and competitive advantage. You should create one description that will consistently appear on of all your branding and communications, but you might also want to be ready with a few personalized versions for different types of audiences.

Positioning
The following questions will determine the why and how of all of your marketing initiatives.

1. Why do you exist?
2. What are your values?
3. What five words do people think about when they think about your company?

Read this post by Thomas for some great advice about positioning.

Customers

Target Audience

Decide on a target audience and include as much detail as possible. You likely have a large market in mind, but you should start by targeting a smaller niche. You’re not prohibiting anyone from accessing your product, you’re just focusing your efforts to better acquire early customers.

Personas
Create 3-5 ideal customer personas that include the following:

1. Demographics
2. Interests and habits
3. Challenges relating to your solution

There’s some more information you might want to include as Uberflip suggests. It’s helpful to start by picking 50 real people that would be your ideal customer. Find out as much as possible about them through online search, record it all in a spreadsheet, and try to find patterns.

Goals

Decide on a couple of a goals you’d like to achieve through marketing.

For example:

1. Grow userbase by 10% week over week
2. Increase customer retention to 85% per month
3. Build a mailing list of 100K subscribers

Strategies
Each goal above should be broken down into one or more strategies.

For example:

1. Increase customer retention to 85% per month
   • Onboarding
   • Email Marketing
   • Social Media

April has written a comprehensive post about startup marketing that includes most strategies.

Tactics
These are the detailed actions you will take for each strategy and corresponding goal.

For example:

1. Increase customer retention to 85% per month
   • Email Marketing
     • New users receive a welcome email
     • All users receive a monthly email with new features
     • Inactive users receive an email

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