marketing-plan

Marketing Plan is a business-advisory skill that helps founders build a minimalist marketing plan focused on growing an audience through authentic content rather than paid ads, channeling The Minimalist Entrepreneur by Sahil Lavingia. It solves the problem founders face after early product-market fit: how to scale reach without wasting money on advertising before they understand exactly who they are trying to reach. Its guiding idea is that marketing is sales at scale, about making fans rather than headlines, and about spending time before money.

The skill lays out prerequisites (a community, paying customers, roughly 100 repeat customers, and one-on-one selling experience) and a five-stage marketing funnel from Engage to Buy. It distinguishes community from audience and presents Three Levels of Content that reach progressively wider audiences: Educate, Inspire, and Entertain. Practical guidance covers running separate personal and business social accounts, building in public, picking one platform, and treating email as owned land versus social media as rented land, with a lead-magnet strategy for list building. A content-calendar section promotes a sustainable, consistent schedule, and a Spend Money Last section explains when paid ads and lookalike audiences make sense.

The target users are indie founders and small-business owners who have reached early product-market fit and want an organic, content-first growth strategy. The output helps the user choose a primary content platform and posting schedule, generate five content ideas per level, define an email-list strategy, plan what to share when building in public, and decide when to consider paid advertising.