Startups + Marketing + Geekery. From someone who's been there: Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software.
Listening to first-time entrepreneurs talk about their competitive advantages is as predictably invalid as the local weatherman's 10-day forecast.
Here's the top, invalid competitive advantages startup founders like to claim.
After reviewing several hundred startup pitches for Capital Factory, I found several extremely common problems. You're probably making the same mistakes -- I did have too ten years ago -- so let's get that fixed.
Original postA lovely new company/customer etiquette has emerged, and small startups are especially suited for capitalizing on it (literally). I hope you're not ignoring it.
Original postDon't get caught in a cycle of useless A/B testing. Sometimes you need to try something radically different, and sometimes that can change more than just your AdWords campaign.
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You don't believe Nostradamus was prescient, because you know that if you write enough vaguely enough and stretch the match enough, you can make anything look like anything.
And yet, you're making the same fallacy every day with Google Analytics and other marketing and sales data.
It's not that you ought to fail, it's that you are constantly failing. Ignore it at your peril.
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You worry about competition from the big, brand-name, deep-pocketed company.
But there are better things to worry about and ways to avoid running into gorillas in the first place.
Selling to big companies can be lucrative, and small bootstrapped startups absolutely have the power to sell to the big boys.
But it's a very different world than you're used to. Here's what you can expect and how to deal with it.
If you think of tech support as the bottom of the corporate food chain, you're exactly wrong. Tech support is a powerful channel for product development, marketing, and sales; don't squander it!
Original postI'm amazed how many startups follow the "marketplace" pattern but don't acknowledge or address the peculiar difficulties of that model. Here's some guidance.
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Words like "authentic" had meaning year ago, but they've been repeated so much they've lost all meaning.
Here's a bunch of phrases to remove from your vocabulary, and several specific ways you can make your point stronger without them.
Howard Mann -- entrepreneur and business acceleration specialist -- explains why you should ignore competitors, how to be successful with "singles and doubles" instead of home runs, and how he sells his book online.
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Accounting is a necessary evil, foreign to most bootstrapped entrepreneurs.
Here's a brief treatise on the definition and usefulness of two forms of accounting in the little startup context.
(Plus a third method for conservative planning.)
I remember "disruptive" when it was called "paradigm shift."
You should be worrying more about making something useful and less about disrupting everyone.
This is a guest post by Jarie Bolander, author of Frustration Free Technical Management and a moderator at Answers OnStartups.
It'd be wonderful if you could run a business without interacting with anyone else — never relying on others to deliver quality work on time and never having to "be salesy" on the [...]
When we do the minimum necessary to get the job done, we're efficient but not thrilling. We're "lean" but we're not stirring hearts. We're effective but not playful.
Sometimes, you should do something just because it's cool.
They say "statistics lie," but they don't. People do.
Here's a few basic mistakes I encounter constantly, and how to avoid them.
The Butterfly Effect: Naomi Dunford pounds a curse word into a Wordpress text editor and Brian Clark makes $172. Or Paul Graham releases a silent-but-deadly outside a Menlo Park Starbucks and a social media company gets funded in Boston.
It's a great story: Little actions can have enormous influence.
So how do you harness this power? Or can you?
Non-native speakers of English tell me that the basic rules of grammar aren't too hard to learn, but the idioms are murder.
So I figured we should have a bit of fun at the expense of the English language.
Most people start their first company while they still have a day job.
It makes sense: You don't need loans or funding and the worst case is you learn something.
Actually, that's not the worst case. Read on to learn how to start a business on the side with maximum success and minimum risk.
We need to unhealthily obsess over our creations. But take this too far and your productivity drops off the cliff.
Exercise increases total productivity.
A little goes a long way. Here's a bunch of advice about how to get started.
When I asked recently whether you'd like to see other people guest-posting here, I got a much more positive response than I expected.
So I'm going to try out a few as a test. Here are the ground rules.
What if your company were allowed only <i>one</i> advantage over the competition?
Hanging your hat on just one advantage that you can own completely is stronger than diluting your message across many advantages.
Here's an exercise that will make all your sales calls and marketing material stronger.
Help me spread the word about this program!
I'm a mentor and investor in CapitalFactory, a seed-stage startup mentorship program in Austin, TX. Each year we pick 5 companies to participate in a 10-week summer program: $20k in cash, $20k in services, and 20 mentors, culminating in Demo Day.
I'm sick of being admonished that success is predicated on spending the next 10,000 hours of our lives becoming "an expert."
I'm sick of hearing about how I should be molding my life in the image of Michael Phelps or Albert Einstein, because the only thing that separates me from genius is identifying my strengths and working really really hard.
I'm calling bullshit.
Many of my mistakes can be trace back to a failure to recognize and appreciate "sunk cost."
It's perfectly natural to feel attached to your sunk costs. It sucks to acknowledge that you've wasted time, money, energy, and reputation.
But it's even worse to irrationally prolong the waste.
I guest-post on other blogs fairly regularly, but it was pointed out to me recently that I don't usually share those with you!
So here's a selection of articles I've published elsewhere.
You need more than a "devil's advocate," you need ruthless abuse.
Here's how to dole it out to yourself so that normal sales calls and company pitches seem easy by comparison.
Tradeshows are a combination of high-level strategy and low-level minutiae, so a checklist comes in handy.
Here's a bunch of advice learned the hard way -- through making mistakes and seeing what worked.
I felt like a fraud during the early days of Smart Bear, and in many ways I still feel like one today.
It turns out this is a common phenomenon among entrepreneurs and others. If you have these emotions, this might provide some solace.
I get asked all the time which Wordpress plugin I use for this thing or that.
Here's a complete list of how I've customized my blog, and why.
Startup expert, mentor, and writer Bob Walsh talks about what's most important for success, the role of social media at a new startup, productivity for startup founders, and why his new tool for startup founders is useful.
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Tired of articles instructing you to break down large projects into smaller, more annoying and less interesting tasks?
The technique I'm about to tell you about is weird, and not in a good way. More like a painful, aggravating way. I know, I did it myself.
But it really does work. You'll measurably improve your productivity.
Therapists don't tell you what to do. Rather, they ask probing questions that get you to discover for yourself what is true for you, your situation, and what you want.
Similarly, these ten questions will force you to make the important decisions about your business. Ask them of yourself every month instead of writing a useless business plan.
As they say, businesses don't plan to fail, they fail to plan! Who could argue with such a clever turn of phrase?
Me. Business plans are always wrong, and they're not even very helpful when you're raising money.
Is it repeatable?
Yes and no. Here's what I did; it's up to you to decide how much of it applies to you.
On Thanksgiving we give thanks,
but to whom?
I guess it's nice to be reflective at least once a year. But what good is it, casting our thanks into the void?
So this year, let's give thanks to people.
Strategies for social media and SEO are so... squishy.
Recently, however, I've come across several sources of empirical, experimentally-sound data sources that tell us how to be awesome at both SEO and social media.
If you want another pair of hands to screw things up, the question is how to acquire resumes, how to pair them down, and how to identify someone who is going to work well in your company.
Here's a load of advice. Includes my favorite articles from around the Internet as well as my own advice that you might not have heard before.
I sold my company, Smart Bear, in December of 2007. I haven't talked about it at all on this blog, and it's time I spill my guts about the whole affair.
Now that almost two years have passed, I can relate exactly why "selling my baby" was right for me. Hopefully this thought process is interesting to you and possibly useful in the happy event that you're faced with the same choice, but the truth is I just need to get this off my chest.
I'm giddy about this new project!
Dharmesh Shah of OnStartups started a new website for entrepreneurs, and he graciously invited me to co-moderate the site.
A lot has been said in response to Jason's post about sacrificing your health for your startup. Some think his position is excessive; some say it depends on your goals. Can you run a lifestyle business that doesn't require so much personal sacrifice?
I did. I started Fork In The Road, a wee little healthy dinner delivery business. I actively chose to stay small and was profitable and happy for years. So what about sacrifice? Here's my story.
It's unfair of me to say "find out what's stopping sales" and then not tell you how to go about it.
So here are eleven ways to collect empirical data about why people are checking out your product but not buying it, most of which can be implemented in less than a day.
A few people were wondering why I switched blogging platforms from Squarespace to Wordpress.
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I'm involved with several little companies right now. They all have the same problem, and they're all avoiding the clearest, fastest path to fixing it.
Their problem is: We don't have nearly enough sales.
I hate most interviews, and I think everyone else does too. They're rarely actionable or insightful. You want to learn and get specific ideas from interesting, thoughtful people, not read a biography.
This interview is different.
I'm starting the Uncommon Interview: Five questions that solicit deep answers with actionable advice, examples, and insight. Answers in paragraphs, not one-liners. Depth, not breadth. (Leave a comment and tell me if you want more of these.)
What if we ran kindergarten classes with the same rules as social media marketing?
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I talk to a lot of companies that are still hunting for customer #1, or a few sales have been made but the ball isn't rolling yet.
Most of them are making the same mistake: Their public persona is exactly wrong.
Do you read business blogs where the author has failed three times without success?
No, because you want to learn from success, not hear about "lessons learned" from a guy who hasn't yet learned those lessons himself.
Everyone says "be remarkable" is the best marketing advice.
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I've been guest-posting over at the Avangate blog on the subject of increasing sales conversions for software sold over the web.
This five-part series covers downloading, installers, follow-up, and user interface design.
Everyone wants to "go viral" these days. A viral video, blog post, news announcement, who cares so long as it's viral!
I still can't stand the phrase, personally. "Dude, we're going viral tonight." Sounds like a one-night stand without protection.
Some of my articles have "gone viral," so I'd like to offer up my own perspective about how to make something viral: The Darwinian Theory of Going Viral.
It's not clear that company blogs are a good idea, despite arguments for social media generally.
I'll give you the bad news first, dispelling some common myths about what corporate blogs can achieve, but then I'll show you how a corporate blog can significantly increase revenue, even without 10,000 RSS subscribers.
I've never posted commercial crap about "special offers" or other thinly-veiled advertisements, but considering this one is from my own company, and considering it is really is pretty awesome, I wanted to share.
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The Internet is full of good advice about how to lead a healthy, balanced work/home life.
If you don't have your health and your family, nothing else matters. On your deathbed will you wish you had worked longer hours or been a better parent? Will you wish you had spent more time Twittering or more time exercising, extending your life by five years?
Compelling. And yet, in my experience this attitude is not the path to success in small business.
