A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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The Lindy Effect on startup potential

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Or you might have gotten to 1000 customers through one marketing channel, so although surely that same channel can produce another 1000, it’s unlikely that there is 10x the inventory inside that one channel to get you to 10,000 customers. In fact, to achieve 10x you’ll need to make multiple other channels work.

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For marketing early startups: Deep, not wide

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Watch a bunch of interviews of founders of successful companies, and here’s what you don’t hear: We tried eight different marketing channels — AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, social media, events, retargeting, SEO, guest-posting, PR, and so on. How to pick the one channel?

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Capturing Luck with “or” instead of “and”

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

That is, you need a good marketing channel and you need a few killer features and you need great initial employees and you need a healthy market, etc. Consider marketing channels. Some days I had the worst portfolio, other days I had the best. The competition happened to end on an up-day. This was an example of “high risk, high reward.”

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Kung Fu

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Sometimes that’s defensible distribution channels. A reliable paid acquisition channel results in a somewhat stable business. (HT Mike Maples Jr ) Corollary: A startup has to be so excellent at one or two key things, that they can screw up everything else up and not die. Sometimes that’s airtight product/market it.

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No, that IS NOT a competitive advantage

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

In the case of ITWatchDogs, the reasons we were cheaper were that (a) we sold direct instead through a channel , so our product wasn't marked up 6x before it got to the customer, and (b) we used the newest, cheapest parts whereas our established competitors had stopped innovating and were using expensive 5-year-old parts.

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Why it’s nice to compete against a large, profitable company

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

They have everything: money, brand, momentum, existing customers, press, product teams, distribution channels, expertise, market insight, analysts, sales offices, product features, and, by definition, a working business model. A big, profitable company seems like the hardest thing for a small company to compete against.

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Brittleness comes from “One Thing”

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

, but informally I’ve observed the following things, which follow a pattern that can be identified and counteracted: The initial marketing channel quickly saturated , so growth stalled at a non-zero but unsustainably-low rate. The initial marketing channel was sustainable for a while , but got wiped away due to external forces.