A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 22, 2013

You can’t put 100 average designers on a committee and get a fabulous design, right? A great developer, or a great designer, is better than 10x an average one — they’re better than an infinite number. At WP Engine, we’re living proof of this.) That’s not true.

Engineer 257

Engineer Social Media Acquisition Sales 257

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 12, 2014

This article originally appeared on the WP Engine Blog. ” We have a swag culture at WP Engine, particularly in T-shirts. .” ” We have a swag culture at WP Engine, particularly in T-shirts. I see those benefits manifest every day at WP Engine. Thanks @shaptora @asmartbear pic.twitter.com/ipAUbBU1DA.

Engineer 229

Engineer America Hiring Design 229

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 12, 2012

(from his blog post ) …some civil engineers think the world of project management in their field is ripe for revolution, but do I know enough of them? I talked to 30 people before I realized that a certain idea of mine was a crappy idea, and about 40 people before starting WP Engine. How many should I talk to?

Customer 252

Customer Customer Development Dilution Engineer 252

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 19, 2011

” This is how one of our competitors attempts to differentiate and compete with us at WP Engine. Google wasn’t the first search engine, the iPod wasn’t the first mp3 player, and DropBox wasn’t the first shared filesystem. Is it effective? Most startups insist they’re “first” at something.

HTML 243

HTML Hosting Engineer Leadership 243

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. (e.g. Cartoon by Andertoons.

Startup 315

Startup Revenue Cofounder Sales 315

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 22, 2017

We don’t build MVPs at WP Engine. For example, it was okay that early versions Google Docs had only 3% of the features of Microsoft Word, because Docs did a great job at what it was primarily designed for, which is simplicity and real-time collaboration. At WP Engine we pronounce it “Slick.”

Customer 336

Customer Video Engineer Social Network 336

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 3, 2011

I was listening to Noah Kagan (founder of AppSumo and the marketing mind behind Mint , and the author of this great guest post ) talk to the current crop of Capital Factory companies, when he said something so simple, so obviously correct, and yet it completely changed how I thought about my approach to WP Engine. importance of design.

Metrics 273

Metrics Startup Revenue Engineer 273

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 5, 2011

Designers want to be “right,” but have to temper that with analytics data. Is it even theoretically possible for the Startup Genome Project to not have holes for me to poke at? Does that really make the project dubious? I stand firm that my criticism was sound, but… so what? I still hate being wrong.

Lean 281

Lean Analytics Metrics Engineer 281

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 15, 2013

the most online-visible person at WP Engine. Austin was quick to point out the various benefits of our “social media and community guy” being in the bay area and in close proximity to several of our other team members not to mention the heart of WordPress and a nerve-center of designers and marketing agencies.

San Francisco 247

San Francisco Austin PHP Social Media 247

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. How we’ve designed and started to scale the sales team. Because m y daily experiences are unsharable.

CTO Hire 266

CTO Hire RSS Cofounder Algorithm 266

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 15, 2010

Automatically create a "robots" meta-tag for search engines. Tags: How-To blogging design tools. Not even sure if it makes a difference, but. Google XML Sitemaps. Creates proper Google sitemap automatically. Robots Meta. Conspicuously not a plugin. These aren't plugins, but they're Wordpress customizations.

HTML 216

HTML RSS Caching PHP 216

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Sure, when WP Engine launches a new product, the marketing department needs predictability for the launch date, but that’s because it’s a highly-skilled, well-funded group, which explodes with press, events, campaigns, social media, and newsletters, grabbing more attention in a single week than a smaller company might garner in a year.

Government 223

Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

In other words, if I’m thinking about this just from a WP Engine perspective for a second as a potential customer, when you come up to me and say, “Meetings are awful because half of them don’t even have an agenda, and the ones that do, you don’t stick to it and they go long. ” Or “What could it tightly be?”

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 17, 2011

I put in these particular elements because I did a study of the reasons people cancel at WP Engine , and these are the main reasons for cancellation. We’ve also rolled out new initiatives designed to reduce this rate, and for the most part we’ve been successful. Cancellations as deactivations. Revisionist history.

Business Model 245

Business Model Metrics Engineer Technical Review 245

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 20, 2010

A stranger presented with this "system" would conclude that it was intentionally designed to be impossible for anyone but the creator to run, and furthermore intended as a peculiar form of self-torture. There's the magic moment!

Startup 239

Startup Campaign Turkey Customer Development 239

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 1, 2010

There's a myth that "more features are always more complex," but that's just bad user interface design. Customer: You say you have great support, but BigCorp is the one with 100 developers and support engineers willing to help me. You get to complain directly to the engineers who can fix the problem in weeks — or sometimes days.

Open Source 239

Open Source Dilution Software Developers Software Development 239

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 31, 2011

His response was unintentionally evasive: My background is in SaaS so I designed it with that customer persona in mind. So, to dig into #1, my response to the email above was: Describe for me your perfect customer — a person who currently experiences every pain point you solve, who is in a position to spend money to solve it, etc.

Customer 279

Customer Software Review SEM Technical Review 279

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 28, 2011

I know a lot of people like me who are technical or engineers and then the business starts growing and of course writing code or doing that sort of thing is one of the first things that you have to give up because there’s everything else and you’re the person who has to do that. Jason: Yeah that makes sense.

Cofounder 223

Cofounder New York Conversion Entrepreneur 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 25, 2016

But I’ve seen little startups, mid-sized companies like WP Engine, and large companies struggle with complexity in decisions even in conditions of relative certainty. Examples: how a market will evolve, what competitors are investing in, whether new marketing campaigns will be successful, or how an important new hire will perform.

Differentiation 120

Differentiation Framework Restful Software Review 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 14, 2013

And my own company WP Engine wasn’t dissimilar two years ago. However, that’s not the case for us at WP Engine. You think: I might be just a clever turn of phrase or an eye-catching design away from changing that click-through rate from 0.1% I don’t have data to give you, it’s just been my experience.

Affiliate 282

Affiliate Marketing Campaign Channel 282

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2012

Unless you have something tangible, that they said I will pay X dollars if you do this thing, then you’re just a web designer, which is fine, but then just do that. You’re an engineer, is that true? It cost you less than a week because you’ve got your template and you’re fast and smart, and you’re done.

API 220

API Software Review Hosting Technical Review 220