Ideas for entrepreneurs

I've been asked by Cindy Solomon, the founder of the insightful Startup Product Talks to talk about the difficult relationship between product building, marketing and getting traction. I've often found a lot of people were confused about the following questions:

- how do I launch a product to make an impact?

- should I advertise? 

- should startup not do any marketing?

There are myths around these questions, particularly in Silicon Valley which is still a very engineering-driven culture ("build it and they will come"). But while advertising can be crack for startups, marketing is a must-have as I'm glad prominent SV figures like Marc Andreesen clearly states. 

So what type of marketing then? Well, among other things like product marketing, community management, user support which are all essential, I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce the new concept of Lean Content, an approach to content marketing that we've started to discuss during our meetup groups since the end of last year. I believe startups can efficiently build their brands through content and here are some examples showing how.