Nicky Dibben: People buy products, not technology

So, you’ve spun out of a university to sell your shiny new invention. How do you attract customers?

You’ll need a marketing strategy, which isn’t a fancy way of saying “put ads on Google” or “post on social media”.

Rather, marketing is everything that comes between your company and your customer. It’s the art of figuring out your value proposition (you have a technology, but what’s the product?), of crafting messages that resonate with your customers and your investors (they’re related but they must never be identical), and of evaluating markets to find traction. It will even help you decide whether you really should raise venture capital funding.

Nicky Dibben runs Invention Marketing, helping deeptech founders build their marketing strategies. She’s worked with NG Studios (an accelerator run by Northern Gritstone and Deeptech Labs for startups emerging out of the ecosystem around the universities of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield). She’s also a mentor for initiatives like Founders at the University of Cambridge.

Nicky shares her experiences mentoring startups, comparing ecosystems in Cambridge and northern England, offers tangible advice for founders, and ponders how “product” has become king of the hill even though that’s not the right focus.

Find a copy of Nicky’s marketing framework here.