Hey, founders: Google wants you to get better at marketing your startup

How many great startup ideas have floundered because their creators had no clue how to tell people about the idea?
Google’s newest project is Primer, an app that offers bite-sized lessons that startup founders and small business owners can read to be constantly improving in areas that might not come naturally to them.
“We have a platform, we have a mobile phone, it’s attached to us,” the head of the Primer project, Bethany Poole, explained Tuesday night at a Primer primer hosted by Brooklyn’s Digital DUMBO at Google’s headquarters in Manhattan. “As much as you’d like to go to a conference or watch a webinar, you don’t always have time for that and the world is changing constantly.”

Poole gave a demonstration of Primer, a free mobile app available on both iOS and Android, followed by a networking happy hour with a live DJ that Digital DUMBO has come to do so well in the last few years.
“Digital DUMBO started out as a small happy hour six years ago and now, well, we’re in Google,” cofounder Andrew Zarick explained over a beer. The company has seen great growth in recent years, and has expanded beyond the Brooklyn neighborhood to East London for the last three years, as well as Boston, Montreal and Dallas.
Zarick mentioned that they were looking forward to growth in 2016 as connectors.
“One big priority is helping talent reach opportunity,” he said. “We help introduce people to companies they might be interested in. It’s almost event-centric talent placement.”
Primer did well when it was introduced on Product Hunt three months ago, garnering more than 1,600 upvotes. The team, like the product, believes in incremental gains to market itself.

“The silver bullet is a myth. There’s usually not one thing you can do to turn your product into a success,” Primer’s Teo Soares wrote in a blog post recently. “Instead, we used a lot of lead ones. We got on social. We wrote content. We ran AdWords. We tapped into communities. We pitched press and newsletters and blogs. We wrote personal emails and had hundreds of one-on-one conversations with people who were interested in Primer.”

These are the things you have to do to market your product. At least so I hear, I’ve only gotten through a few of the daily lessons.