--- title: "The 13 Critical Questions to Answer about Your Startup's Product Marketing" description: "Learn the 13 essential questions every startup founder must answer about product-market fit, growth strategy, and customer segmentation to scale successfully." categories: ["marketing"] keywords: ["startup marketing","product marketing","product-market fit","customer segmentation","growth strategy","Theory Ventures","Tomasz Tunguz","customer acquisition","salesforce productivity","new product launch"] ai_summary: "Explore 13 essential questions for startup founders to enhance product marketing and achieve sustainable growth." date: 2019-11-18 lastmod: 2026-07-21 canonical_url: https://www.tomtunguz.com/the-13-critical-questions-to-answer-about-your-startup-s-product-marketing/ author: "Tomasz Tunguz" --- Last week's post on [The Most Frequent Mishire in Startups](https://tomtunguz.com/most-frequent-mishire/) generated the most comments on a post this year. In particular, it was this section. _Though the startup may have achieved product market fit, the company may not understand the fit. Who is using the product and why? How does the buyer journey evolve with time? How do buyers describe the product amongst each other? Few early stage companies can answer those questions accurately._ Why is this? Early in the life of a business, the product manager (often a founder) plays both the role of the PM and the PMM. Over time, the startup's growth demands a more specialized role. Many times, the PM builds the product as quickly as possible to establish product/market fit. In contrast, the PMM answers critical questions about the company, product and market to ensure the product sells. What are these critical questions? I found an excellent list in [Kotler on Marketing](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC0QPC/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) that I adapted for startups. How many of these questions can you answer about your business? * What is our company's story? What is our pitch? * Which market segment should we pursue? * How do we differentiate our product from competition? * What is the best way to assure a successful new product launch? * How should we respond when customers ask for discounts? * How much customization do we offer? * How can we reduce or maintain cost of customer acquisition? * How can we retain our customers for longer? * Which of our customers are the most important? * What are the best ways to improve salesforce productivity? * What are our payback periods on each of our marketing efforts? * How can the business develop multiple channels of customer acquisition and avoid channel conflict? * How can we orient the entire business to be more customer oriented? These questions are also excellent interviewing questions. When evaluating candidates, use [structured interviews](https://tomtunguz.com/job-interviews/) and work projects to maximize chances of success. Structured interviews are the best predictive factor of job success with 28% correlation. Work projects, (a presentation that answers a key question about the business like a 60/90/120 day plan) explain 26% of variance. The unstructured interview (let's have a conversation!) correlates at 14%. See [Laszlo Bock's Work Rules ](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MEMMVB8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)for a deeper dive into these interviewing concepts. The role of the PMM may be one of the most frequently misunderstood in Startupland. But it's worth understanding the role and finding a great one. PMMs answers some of the thorniest questions about a business and so that everyone can work more efficiently. With the answers to the questions above, a startup can scale with greater success by eliminating unnecessary experimentation.