A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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How to find that first big customer

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Freshman Salesman writes: I’ve read somewhere in your blog about how you had a very large organisation as the first customer for your software. How did you reach out to your first customer? It’s rarely true that your first customer will be big. make for not putting customer development before writing code.

Customer 231
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Why “saving money” and “ROI” are probably the wrong way to sell your product

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

” And customers demanded it — some even required that we produce an ROI spreadsheet. At a fully-loaded developer cost of $150/hr, that’s $3,000/mo. Code Collaborator costs $499/developer — one time — so you make your money back inside the first month! And we did.

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Kung Fu

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

They’re a selfish ploy, tricking people who thought they were customers into being alpha testers. Founders explain failures with things like “our two main competitors did [thing] to us” or “customers didn’t understand [our point of view].” Sometimes that’s product design so thrilling that every customer spreads the word to five more.

Restful 202
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Sunk Costs: An invisible, pervasive peril

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Many of my mistakes can be traced back to a failure to recognize and appreciate "sunk cost.". The term comes from economics: "Sunk Cost" is money you've already spent and cannot get back no matter what. Of course we carbon-based life forms can rarely be described as "rational," especially when it comes to ignoring sunk costs.

Cost 273
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Pricing determines your business

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. ” How many times have you heard someone agree that “it would be great if someone did X,” but when show them someone did do X, but it costs $39.99, they don’t buy? simple enough to be self-service).

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Which is better: Many customers at low price-point or few at high price?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Company A has 1,000 customers each paying $10/mo. Company B has 10 customers each paying $1,000/mo. B can extract more money from the limited pool of customers, so that’s better. If you’ve already found 1,000 customers, there’s 10,000, and likely 100,000. Which is better? Oops, bad question.

Customer 320
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How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

You can’t sell anything without significant traffic, especially since 80% of it is crap even with a good campaign, and it is preferable that some of that traffic is not costing you dollars per click. On top of that, the cost has escalated tremendously over time. I had a good idea what my customers should look like.

Campaign 272