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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Kung Fu

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Sometimes that’s defensible distribution channels. Or you can start selling to enterprise — nothing wrong with that — but then your high cost-basis of marketing, sales, and service will not scale downward. Sales” is not a dirty word. A reliable paid acquisition channel results in a somewhat stable business.

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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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What did they do before you came along?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Here’s a simple question, often asked when designing software but more useful when you’re designing your marketing and sales pitch: How are people doing this today without you? Your power users are the mavens to whom non-power users look for advice, so they become your sales force. World domination! Launching Doggie Cards.

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Why I feel like a fraud

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

I would orchestrate purchases, but should I be handling large sums of money with no knowledge of accounting, cash-flow, invoicing, purchase orders, or "enterprise sales" process? Don't I need an MBA or at least some sales training? And sales isn't as mystical and unknowable as I feared. Aren't I too young?

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Tech Support *is* sales

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

If this is your attitude, your conception of tech support is completely backwards and you're missing out on important channels for marketing, product development, and sales. Tech support is sales. At Smart Bear we made millions of dollars in both individual and enterprise sales without "sales.". That's sales.

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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.