A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 13, 2011

co-founder Alexis Ohanian is so cool and smart and rich and funny and successful and good-looking that really he doesn’t deserve to be alive. co-founder Alexis Ohanian is so cool and smart and rich and funny and successful and good-looking that really he doesn't deserve to be alive.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 21, 2009

Okay okay, "Planning == Bad," but the supposed benefits of planning are still important: designing for profitability, understanding your customers and competitors, focusing your attention, deciding what's worth doing next, changing directions, and ensuring the founders agree on important issues. Cartoon by Andertoons. Or switch off.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

Seeking tension in co-founders or team members means extracting everyone’s best while maintaining decorum and respect. Seeking balance means starting with two strong stances, then stripping out the powerful bits until both are weak enough to coexist in a gutless truce.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 17, 2011

Finding and agreeing upon a worthy name is always a struggle, especially if you have co-founders. You’re the one who has be to proud to be the founder of this company, even when all the other person knows about it is its name. That’s simpler to do, except when you have co-founders.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. Well yeah, you could potentially find a cofounder. I first did it for the founder. Edwin: You get a cofounder onboard.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 6, 2012

Almost all founders I encounter are leery about discussing their product plans. When you’re pitching customers and mentors and investors and potential hires and co-founders, just talk. If a competitor got ahold of this — especially a well-funded one — I could die before I ever got started!

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 29, 2013

But since you don’t, in my experience (and in a non-scientific survey of some of the 100 startups currently officing at the fabulously Capital Factory co-working space in Austin), a good pre-data rule of thumb is 20 months. If you do have data, here’s my deep dive on cancellation rates and LTV.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 11, 2012

That one was good but execution wasn’t there; then you find a co-founder for another concept. And that blindness is what I see most often in startup founders, and what I know will ultimately kill off their companies. This idea can fail; then you have another idea. They’re wasting time to protect their ego.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 11, 2011

SEOmoz founder and figurehead Rand Fishkin wrote a typically transparent, thoughtful blog post about his struggle of whether to raise a Series B. The typical arguments against: (a) unfair to employees/co-founders, (b) now you’re not hungry so you care less, work less, (c) swinging for fences without attention to detail is imprudent.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 1, 2012

This is a choice that every startup founder must make , so I’d like to dig in deeper. If a co-founder has a rolodex in the industry — extremely common — then it would be surprising not to find 10 people. The ensuing discussion swirled around the merits of selling more units (i.e. I disagree.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Jay Neely of Social Strategist and co-founder of EasyImpress. Please welcome: Bob Walsh of 47hats and StartupToDo.com (recently interviewed here ). Jarie Bolander of The Daily MBA and author of Frustration-Free Technical Management. Tim of StackOverthrow. Promote yourself with flair. Get one step closer to 37 pieces of flair !

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 28, 2011

On the other side of this radio interview are Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams , both founders of their own startups, both coaches and mentors to dozens of other startups over the years, and who together created and still run the In Good Company co-working space for women entrepreneurs in New York City. They’re really neat.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

This post is by Scott Edward Walker , the firm's founder and CEO. It is here where my father began his 15-year journey from entry-level engineer at Western Union to founder and CEO of Walker Telecommunications Corporation , a NASDAQ-listed public company. If you like it, check out Scott's blog and tweets @ ScottEdWalker.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Idealistic founders believe they will break the mold when they scale, and not turn into a “typical big company.” Or it’s fatal because that was a co-founder. Some idealistic founders believe the root cause of scaling issues is the “command-and-control” organizational structure.

Government 223

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

My co-hosts were Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley , hosts of the well-known Startup Success Podcast. How cofounders can collaborate without going crazy. Or in co-working spaces it’s not. We are a company of five, and we have two co- founders, myself and Adam Ride. Ryan: C-H-E-X-T. Jason: Wow, Chext.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

How cofounders can collaborate without going crazy. Jason: It’s Adelaide and Amy, two women who have a co-working space in New York specifically for women entrepreneurs. What does it mean to have a co-founder or not? How to move from a free to a paid product without losing all your users. Women In Good Company.

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Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 20, 2010

A year after leaving Smart Bear, having talked with dozens of startup founders about their marketing woes, I realized 100% of them needed the marketing-measurement engine I built at Smart Bear. Startup founders in my town of Austin were the most obvious target because it was easy to take them to lunch. There's the magic moment!

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 15, 2014

And, if you grant my indulgent inclusion in that pantheon, I did the same as WP Engine took off, with a noticeable decrease in early 2012 and relatively little in the past twelve months.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 25, 2011

“Yes&# if it means one of the co-founders can quit her day-job. . “Yes&# if this extends the runway of our startup by at least three months. “Yes&# if it completely funds development we’d like to do anyway. “Yes&# if it will completely pay for three new marketing efforts.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 30, 2010

He blogs to 10,000 web entrepreneurs at Software by Rob and co-hosts the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us. A virtual assistant (VA) is a remote worker hired to complete tasks you should not be doing as the founder of a startup. In 2009, I launched the Micropreneur Academy , a private membership community for startup founders.

Software Review 284

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

In each case, the founders were super-smart, had complimentary skill sets, worked together well (or well enough to get to important success milestones), and as a team represented a unique, powerful, and (in retrospect) unstoppable force. The Dream Team. The VC game is more lemming-like than most care to admit. Existing customers.or

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 7, 2016

When investors interrogate founders, these interrogatives arise, but with a twist: Adding the word “why” in front of each. But also you de-risk by aligning the solution to the founder’s existing abilities, for example in using whatever language/framework the founders are already adept in. When → Why now?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 6, 2011

Summarized here , their modern “rules of business&# include “Solo founders take 3.6x Supposing you’re a solo founder, after reading that quote above you can’t help but start in with the self-doubt. “Maybe I need to think about finding a co-founder. more money than those that don’t.&#.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 9, 2013

Guest post by Ben Yoskovitz, the co-author of Lean Analytics , a new book on how to use analytics successfully in your business. They may not have been rigorously following Lean Startup from the get-go, but founder Robert May was testing his ideas right from the start. He blogs regularly at Instigator Blog and can be followed @byosko.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

Another thing they have in common: I find most high-tech startup founders are software engineers enamored with the idea of waking late, sidling up to a coffeeshop table, pecking away at an IDE, getting into the zone for hours at a stretch, and doing what they love – coding something of their own invention.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 20, 2011

As you’d suspect, I was similarly ignorant of such things while watching the sale of ITWatchDogs (where I was a co-founder), and still harbored misconceptions as I went into the sale of Smart Bear. So, once and for all, I’d like to share my own perspective on how this works. I’ve also heard “10x profit.&#.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 2, 2010

Every founder struggles to find a great name for her company. Often it's the first source of good-natured strife between co-founders.

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