A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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Brittleness comes from “One Thing”

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Examples: large bidders tripled the cost per click, Google’s SEO algorithm changed, the event organizers changed the rules or stopped doing the event, the link-sharing site became irrelevant, the hot blog lost its traffic, the magazine running the ads finally failed. . copy you) or just fail, that’s the end of the company.

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Real Unfair Advantages

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Google's search algorithm was just better, therefore they won the eyeballs, therefore they were able to monetize. Google has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on their search algorithm, the single biggest focus of the company even today, a decade after they decided that was their One Thing. Personal authority.

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How do I get my first few customers?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

There’s all the startup marketing ideas you’d expect: Adverts, split-tests, media splashes, networking, pitch-competitions, inside baseball, creative stunts, SxSW launches, you name it. But for every one of those, another founder has the opposite experience. There’s no easy answer for you here.

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Should this startup exist? Converting 5W’s into existential justification

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

This probably means capitalizing on the unique experience or abilities of the founding team, choose trade-offs in things like language/framework, algorithms, UX design , and delivery platform that the team is particularly adept in and thus can create quickly and with low risk. Social Media makes group-games viral.