A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 27, 2012

This is a guest post by Sacha Greif – a designer and entrepreneur who recently sold thousands of copies of a self-published eBook that shows how to design a user interface step by step. He’s worked with multiple startups and is also the founder of Folyo , a service that helps companies find vetted freelance designers.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 12, 2010

Identifying specific pain points and explaining how your software addresses those is easier than trying to tap into a general malaise and promising a better world. Here an innovation in design alone was enough to win the market. Had I tried to fundamentally change how everyone writes software, I'm sure I would have failed.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2011

The visual bug tracker for web developers & designers. importance of design. Tame bugs like a boss! Powered by LaunchBit ). Tweet. --> At this moment I’m in the worst seat on the plane. Another thing we can do is literally measure customer “happiness&# and intercede before it goes from bad to 32B. On the (un?)importance

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 3, 2010

In fact all these words and phrases should theoretically carry meaning, but theory is for people who don't need to sell $2,600 more software by next Friday so they can make rent. Tags: Essays How-To advertising design marketing persona writing. We get it! What other phrases should be avoided? What are good alternatives?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 15, 2011

I built this software for myself, and then it turned out a million people wanted it exactly how I originally envisioned it. I wish we had spent less time talking to prospective customers before designing interfaces and writing code. Thanks to a software patent we filed, we never had a serious competitor.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 15, 2012

I mean, don’t you agree that just doing things like designing a UI and or what features are good and estimating all that is itself a combination of art and science that very few human beings who are trained in it and have experience can do? Nick: Yeah. They definitely can’t. That’s fantastic.”

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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.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 12, 2012

Robert Graham of WhiteTail Software (and this awesome guest post on cold calling ) asks: @whitetailsoft When do you stop #custdev efforts and build the product? “But it’s impossible to get non-technical people to pay for ‘software’ that’s nothing more than sketches on a napkin,” I hear you say.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 19, 2011

So too with software — “v1.0″ New competitors get to swoop in afterwards with the hindsight that you created — in pricing, positioning, marketing, features, design, … anything. ″ might imply novelty, but it also implies “buggy” and “incomplete.”

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 26, 2010

Free legal services to set up agreements, contracts, and EULAs, free graphic design work to make a nice logo and website, free PR services for product announcements, free office space, free website hosting, free software, and more. From the mentors themselves, personally. 20,000 in free stuff. Present at Demo Day.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 11, 2011

So MailChimp doesn’t need to blog about their software (except maybe to explain a tip or announce a new feature), and certainly doesn’t need to talk about Barak Obama or Miley Cyrus. I’m not good with software / I don’t know about “the world of&# blogging software.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 15, 2010

outside the main text, not word-wrapped inside), and none could handle the use-case of dealing with imported posts from other blogging software (I used to be on Squarespace ). Tags: How-To blogging design tools. There are plugins for this, but none could place the button in those four spots, none put the button where I wanted it (i.e.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

During a lull in her practice she got a serendipitous opportunity to shift gears completely and ended up leading software product development teams. But now she has the vision and ability to design her own software, capitalizing on modern trends (e.g. Now Adriana has an epiphany?:

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 19, 2010

It's nice to have accommodating software, but which one should you pick? It's perfect when you're wondering if you can afford $5000 in graphic design work, a new $6500 marketing campaign, or whether you can hire someone and have 3 months of runway to discover that was a massive mistake. Here's a little help.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Jason: Okay, so that’s a very small company in which the CEO is pulling out the credit card for meeting software because even people with a hundred people, the CEO is not the person pulling out a credit card for the meeting software. I don’t care about what the software looks like yet. Edwin: I tend to disagree.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 3, 2011

And Dharmesh is a SaaS business-model God, as evidenced by his well-reasoned Business of Software speeches and tangible success with Hubspot. importance of design. It went something like this: NOAH: So if you could change just one thing at WP Engine, what would it be? ME: Well Dharmesh told me it’s our cancellation rate.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 1, 2010

We employ actual software developers for Level 1 tech support and email, so you're talking to someone who not only can answer every question but can even read the code to get answers. For example, one of the reasons we're expensive is that we integrate with 20 other software packages. We do things open-source would never do.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Yet, it’s the job of a Product Manager at that mid-sized company to invent, discover, design, implement, and nurture those products — something that most entrepreneurs will never succeed at. In software terminology, communication challenges scale as O(n 2 ). All hardware and software systems have bottlenecks.

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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. More than two years ago, my business partner and I discussed launching a hosted version of our ASP.NET invoicing software, DotNetInvoice. It's a similar process when finding a designer, developer, or any outsourcing partner.

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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. Here’s the most common one which I got just this week: I’ve read somewhere in your blog about how you had a very large organisation as the first customer for your software.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2012

Welcome back to Smart Bear Live, the call-in show with Jason Cohen, sponsored by Software Promotions. Don’t forget to sign up for the wonderful Business of Software conference to hear Jason speak in person. So it’s property management software? Our software will do that. I don’t get this. Jared: Okay.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 28, 2011

’ So a lot of them, there’s one woman that comes to mind, she’s actually a textile designer. It’s like backup software. ’ And then the first thing you do after restoring the machine is you go and get backup software. It’s not that interesting to me to just now pursue doing that more.’

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 7, 2016

This probably means capitalizing on the unique experience or abilities of the founding team, choose trade-offs in things like language/framework, algorithms, UX design , and delivery platform that the team is particularly adept in and thus can create quickly and with low risk. Also it’s more painful and stressful than a real job.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 25, 2010

Design your banner and handouts. You can also bring floor pads designed for people who stand all day, or for a fee most venues can put padding under your booth's carpeting. Yes, even if they took your oh-so-memorable swag or your fabulously-designed brochure. Apply what you learned about your software. At the tradeshow.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 20, 2011

They’ve heard rules of thumb like “A growing software company is worth 5 times their trailing 12-months revenue.&# accounting, law, design) where the mechanisms for revenue and profit are well-known. In fact, it’s rare that just putting your software into channel alone will be enough!

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 2, 2010

It sounds like shareware, not enterprise software. Software Test and Deployment Systems, Inc, which shortens to the unfortunate "STDS.". So they decided to poll everyone they could find in the software industry — customers and otherwise. Tags: Essays branding design marketing positioning. His suggestion? Smart Bear?

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