How better positioning leads to more word of mouth

It’s the holy grail for most technical founders: Your project is getting so much organic growth and people are talking about it so much that you don’t really need to invest in marketing. Growth seems to be happening by magic.

This magical state does exist for some open source projects and some startups. In fact, I was recording a podcast episode with Nicklas Gellner of Medusa.js this morning, and that is exactly how he described Medusa’s growth — as coming largely from word of mouth. Even at the very beginning of the project, before it had been open sourced, when the creators had built what would become Medusa as a custom project for an ecommerce client, they immediately started getting interest from people the clients had spoken with.

But why?

Because they were extremely focused on building something for an audience that was underserved (really not served at all) by existing tools, and focusing only on serving that specific audience’s needs.

There has been a huge amount of buzz around Medusa.js recently — so much so that I was shocked to discover they are only a seed stage company and in fact don’t even have a clear monetization strategy yet. I’m not in their core audience (and chances are neither are any of my readers), so the buzz around Medusa clearly jumped out of the bubble of developers working on ecommerce applications that need to be flexible and customizable. But for the first couple years they existed, that buzz was formenting.

People who fit very specific characteristics often hang out together and know each other. Chances are a senior engineer who specializes in ecommerce has had more than one job — he or she will have former colleagues who themselves have a web of professional connections. If you are able to solve a problem they care about, they’ll talk. Word of mouth isn’t instantaneous — and often, though not always, geography does matter somewhat in how it spreads. But word of mouth as a marketing strategy requires very little investment other than making sure your positioning is solid and your target market is small enough, and its ability to build trust in potential users is unmatched.

Word of mouth almost never happens unless your positioning is tight — it’s both easy to describe what the project or product does so other understand it immediately, and focused on a small market with needs that aren’t being met by existing solutions. If you don’t do those two things, word of mouth is really just wishful thinking. But as the team at Medusa prove, with tight positioning word of mouth can really drive growth.