A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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No, that IS NOT a competitive advantage

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Software patents are especially useless for small, bootstrapped startups. We're better at SEO and social media. Well 80% of the folks I meet tell me they're way better than average at SEO, Twitter, and "building communities" whateverthehell that means. Social media and SEO is ever-changing quicksand. Can't be true, right?

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If you build it, they won't come, unless.

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

We're better than everyone else at SEO.". "A WhenBusy is a bootstrapped startup that lets people schedule meetings with you in currently-available time-slots without you having to share your calendar [disclosure: I'm an advisor]. We're going to A/B-test our landing pages until the right message appears.".

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How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEO is extremely powerful, but it takes time. Those higher costs make learning to write ads, manage campaigns, A/B test, and design landing pages a very expensive activity for an early stage, bootstrapping startup. When I started marketing my first webapp almost two years ago, I started the way I imagine most people do: online.

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Solving the "marketplace" business model

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

At the same time, they also run television ads (with celebrities), are expert at SEO and AdWords, built a user-friendly web site, and do tech support for consumers. To see this done right, consider Threadless , a bootstrapped marketplace matching people seeking unique T-shirts with people who invent them. Solve the seller side first.

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Fermi estimation for startup business models

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Suppose the goal of this particular company is to achieve $1m in annual revenue for a two-person bootstrapped startup, with a goal to be so efficient as to never have to hire employees, and therefore produce a terrific little business that nets each of them a few million dollars over the next ten years. Bigger markets make things easier.

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The rise of the “successful” unsustainable company

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Note that some of those companies were bootstrapped, some bootstrapped and took money later, and some had huge funding from the start.

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Smart Bear Live 6: Jared from Padseeker.com

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

They’ll just Google it, and they’ll find apartmentratings.com, for example, which is really good at SEO, and is basically a way to find apartments, with ratings even, and it’s very popular. Your SEO is going to improve. Like, “We know that this will increase your SEO and you’ll get more traffic.

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