Perspectives
Aug 8
Note: This blog was originally published in June 2023. It was lightly edited for republication in October 2026.
What does startup philosophy have to teach brands outside tech?
Not everything. Not even most things, but there are a few really powerful ideas that, if applied correctly, can help a sleepy brand wake the hell up.
Finding Product-Market Fit
In his classic post, “The only thing that matters,” Marc Andreessen explains the fundamental concept of product-market fit and why it is so powerful for startups, particularly software companies. I’ve spent almost half of my career working in Silicon Valley and the other half working in very different business cultures. They have much more to learn from one another than you might think at first.
Historically, Silicon Valley marketers haven’t understood brand strategy (though this has changed in recent years; topic for another post). As a pool, they have depth in growth marketing, performance marketing, and product marketing. All of the technical specialties are table stakes, but they don't really understand brand strategy as a group. (There is an amazing contrast of technical sophistication in SV with a lack of understanding of the creative arts. But I digress.)
Most of the consumer and lifestyle brands we've worked with found product-market fit decades ago. They don't talk about it that way, but finding product-market fit was a challenge that preceded the current crop of employees. Borrowing this notion can provide an incredibly helpful strategic framework for evolving their customer base and entering new markets.
So many marketing briefs start from the assumption that the tactics are fixed, and maybe even the audience is fixed, so the only thing we can play with is the message. Which is crazy of course. But sadly it is the norm.
Just because the core business operates one way doesn't mean that each product line needs to go to market the same way. This is where the framework of product-market fit is super useful.
Think of the market you are targeting as a use case that can be defined by an audience and a behavior. And think of your product as the way you choose to serve that use case. By thinking about these as two variables, the strategic playing field opens up significantly. But you have to tackle each of those assignments with clarity. Know which is which, and play with each. Each of these two variables creates opportunities to change the target audience definitions, the channels and tactics, the creative briefs that generate new ideas. All it requires is borrowing a bit of wisdom from Silicon Valley.
Customers vs. Targets
These are two totally different things. We need to stop confusing them.
As a marketer you should have a clear understanding of who your buying customers are. This might vary by business unit, product line, and channel. There are so many tools at your disposal to paint a picture of who is buying your product via each channel, whether direct or through retail partnerships, IRL or URL.
The audience(s) that your marketing targets should be clearly defined even if a significant portion of your spend is programmatic or performance in nature.
If your customer and your target are thought of as the same thing internally, then good job! You've captured the Total Addressable Market and you aren't needed any longer. Thank you for your service. It's shocking how often this basic distinction is confused.
The relationship between these two profiles is a huge lever for marketing. Are they the same types of people? Are they vastly different? What is the relationship between the customers you have and the audience you wish to serve? What is the profile of someone who experiments and drives trial? What is the behavior of a loyal customer? If you don't know, then start your work with questions like these. Define hypotheses and test them. You'll find that almost everything stems from starting to paint this picture.
Celebrating Failure
It's a Silicon Valley cliche to talk about how many failed ventures entrepreneurs have been a part of. Why? Because of the widely held belief that you need to go big, and if you fail then you learned. It's so widespread that it has become a boring introduction up and down the SF peninsula. Baked inside of that overused, backhanded compliment, however, is a way of operating that many in more settled industries ignore, thinking that everything has been established. The weird thing is that this is not at all how many of their founders operated.
Dave Lane and Jeremy Guard knew nothing about waterproofing jackets when they started Rock Solid Manufacturing in 1989. They just knew there was a better way to make a harness. They also didn’t know at the time that the 140-million year old fossil that inspired their name change and logo (Arc'teryx) would become one of the most recognizable icons in outdoor gear—synonymous with quality and caliber.
Emily Weiss was a fashion assistant at Vogue who started a blog, Into the Gloss, because she was interested in how women actually used beauty products, not how brands told them to. The community that formed around it was rabid and specific: they knew exactly what they wanted and couldn't find it anywhere else. Glossier launched in 2014 with four products built almost entirely from reader feedback. Weiss turned a direct line between the people making the product and the people who would buy it into a $1.8 billion business.
James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes over five years before he had a vacuum he believed in. Manufacturer after manufacturer turned him down, in part because they made good money selling the replacement bags his design made unnecessary. He licensed it in Japan to stay afloat, then launched the DC01 under his own name in 1993. Within two years it was the best-selling vacuum in the UK.
Flirting with failure is core to many successful brands' origins. It should be core to their marketing strategies as well.
Taking Risks
This is of course related to celebrating failure. Collabs have become the default method of driving news for established consumer brands. No doubt there have been some really fantastic and unexpected ones—Nike X Tiffany is a great example. But this is classic borrowed interest strategy, not dissimilar from casting celebrities that come with their own followings in advertising. It works, but it's short-lived. It drives quick hype, then it's over.
REI put climbing walls in their stores over 20 years ago. Nike pushed virtual shoe drops starting in 2016. Liquid Death built a water brand on heavy metal aesthetics and anti-corporate provocation, then sold it everywhere. Duolingo turned a language learning app into a cultural phenomenon by letting a cartoon owl become genuinely unhinged on social media. These were all risky operating decisions that happened to be creative, and worked.
Dick’s Sporting Goods is another example of a retailer doing something most retailers won’t. House of Sport shouldn’t work on paper—batting cages and golf simulators inside a big-box sporting goods store. But customers who visit dwell longer and spend more, and Dick’s is opening dozens more. They recently doubled down on this approach with Coach: an AI agent inside the Dick’s app that provides sport specific guidance that is not limited to product recommendations. Most brands automate the transaction, but Dick’s is automating its expertise in the broader category
The window for this kind of risk-taking is always open, but most brands won't walk through it. Which is the irony at the heart of this post: Silicon Valley borrowed the founding spirit of the best consumer brands (build something real, fail fast, try again) and turned it into an operating philosophy. Now those same brands are looking back to Silicon Valley wondering what they can learn. The answer won’t be found in growth hacking or performance marketing. It's the willingness to make something nobody asked for yet.