A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 22, 2013

There’s a saying that a great developer is 10x more productive than a mediocre one. A great developer, or a great designer, is better than 10x an average one — they’re better than an infinite number. Now, if you understand this universal, timeless, human rule, you then realize you cannot afford to hire anyone less.

Engineer 257

Engineer Social Media Acquisition Sales 257

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

Are you OK with innovation taking a back seat to developing scalable, mature processes? I didn’t want to manage managers or figure out what changes, strategies, hirings, products, marketing, and sales were needed to make $100m/year. Are you emotionally prepared for this as well?

Software Review 295

Software Review Startup Cofounder Search 295

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

By which they mean: Without stupid rules that assume employees are dumb or evil, without everything taking ten times longer than it should, without wall-to-wall meetings, without resorting to hiring anything less than the top 1% of the talent pool, and so on. It’s a big reason why they move quickly. No, it’s a colossal failure.

Government 223

Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 30, 2010

Rob Walling generously allowed me to reprint this excerpt from his new book, "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup" available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon and in PDF and ePub from StartupBook.net. As a developer, the features we dropped seem like a necessity from day 1. So we tossed it.

Software Review 284

Software Review Startup Technical Review Hosting 284

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

The typical attitude is, “We now have a large customer, so pour extra money into development to make sure we don’t lose it,” but the right attitude is to use a lot of that money to land other customers. Also, up-front payments, so you have the cash-flow to invest in that growth right now. Talk about brittle!

Software Review 294

Software Review Channel Revenue Non-Compete 294

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

So Leon and I have met numerous times, about marketing strategy and the music one is that developed after Chicago became a customer. Interviewee: Well, I’m talking web development. I haven’t really developed any web applications. The one thing that you might be able to do is outsource the development costs of it.

Cofounder 199

Cofounder Technical Review Chicago Technical Cofounder 199

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 28, 2012

We can’t afford to put in the development effort required to take ${product} where we all want (i.e. hiring a few developers). And we can’t afford to hire tech support folks who will ensure your questions, bug reports, and feature requests are handled with the speed and friendliness you’ve come to expect.

Software Review 240

Software Review Technical Review Email Revenue 240

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 13, 2015

Suppose the goal of this particular company is to achieve $1m in annual revenue for a two-person bootstrapped startup, with a goal to be so efficient as to never have to hire employees, and therefore produce a terrific little business that nets each of them a few million dollars over the next ten years.

Business Model 120

Business Model Affiliate Startup Bootstrapping 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 25, 2011

In the mid 90s it was clear that Apple had lost the personal computer battle and all their developers were fleeing like rats off a sinking ship into the ocean of opportunity that was Windows 95. Maybe that means a big new advertising campaign, or hiring another WordPress expert for our staff. I could have said “no.&#

Java 311

Java Software Review Technical Review Salary 311

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 17, 2010

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. Yes, I'm flagrantly paraphrasing the legendary Kathy Sierra , but the idea applies as much to tech support as to product development.). Are you surprised?

Technical Review 245

Technical Review Sales Turkey Software Review 245

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

Indeed, this is why many CEO's and other business leaders prefer hiring hungry, working-class guys over the wealthy Ivy-leaguers. While at Comtech, my father had developed strong relationships with a few key senior executives at Nissho Iwai Corporation , a huge Japanese trading company.

Entrepreneur 246

Entrepreneur San Francisco North Carolina Cofounder 246

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

We started with the product about three years ago, development, a year later we released it. They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. You have your general management meeting and in your general management meeting you talk about product development, about marketing and about finance.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 8, 2010

You can't afford to hire three developers to add features and bugs. Your side venture has constraints a "normal" business doesn't have: You can't answer the phone during normal business hours. You can't answer emails during normal business hours. You have to work in fits and spurts.

Startup 252

Startup Email RSS Internet 252

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2012

” Just adding a Google map to a website, I mean, you might as well just be a web developer and charge $100 an hour and have a WordPress template and knock us out and charge them $5,000. We’re constantly trying out and developing new techniques, so month to month we’re not just serving traffic like some web host would do.”

API 220

API Software Review Hosting Technical Review 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 24, 2012

I’m in development right now. Then we hired two people and got profitable again in another six months. I started to develop a thesis that the future of content distribution is going to be different. You’ve got to find a way to get some developers working with you to ship your product, test it, learn some lessons.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley Software Review Internet Technical Review 204

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. So that means stuff like thinking about what a business model might be, it does mean customer development. So I have a question for you, Jason. Patrick: Exactly.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. Jason: It does, because one of your goals is to have enough runway to try lots of stuff and fail a lot of times, or hire a really good person.

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Maybe hire an employee for $30 per hour and re-bill them at $60. Suppose you hire an employee at $60,000/year. And let’s suppose you want to allocate just a little time for career development. Employee turnover becomes more common, so you’re permanently in hiring mode. Easy money, right? Double is nothing.

America 330

America Employee Hiring HTML 330

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 6, 2011

Just ask the 10,000+ subscribers to Rob Walling’s excellent blog for the “micropreneur&# who never want to hire a single employee or go to a single meeting, much less “scale.&# ). can hopefully develop your own intuition about the validity of the results. My third company Smart Bear was a great example of this.

Startup 234

Startup Cofounder Texas Austin 234

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 4, 2012

Ask a very specific question around a metric or a financial model or how to validate a specific idea or how to price something or whether to hire a first employee or anything like that is likely to pique my interest and make it possible for me to help. Asking for “15 minutes of advice” is almost never possible.

Internet 270

Internet Email Engineer Web 270

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 25, 2016

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. Suppose we’re hiring a high-level, experienced position, like a VP of Marketing. If any are impossible for you to ameliorate, it’s a no-hire.

Differentiation 120

Differentiation Framework Restful Software Review 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 28, 2011

Whereas, I think that if you look at your current business or your careers as an entrepreneur, on a longer term view, then I think you see that there is opportunities for reinvention and creativity in terms of what you do within the business and products that you have, and seeing new opportunities to develop new products for your clients.

Cofounder 223

Cofounder New York Conversion Entrepreneur 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 22, 2012

During the summer, one of the Capital Factory companies developed a plan to sell into the “mid-sized” corporate market. If we just chose one or the other, we could optimize the rest of the business around it — hiring, automation, marketing, sales — and maybe we should.

Marketing 235

Marketing RSS Employee Software 235

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

If you hire employees, are you not responsible to them? Yes, except if you don’t listen to what customers are telling you to do, you’ll build a product no one wants to use. If you have a co-founder, are you not responsible to her as well? If you take a seed round, are you not responsible to your investors?

Cofounder 312

Cofounder Startup Founder Engineer 312

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 20, 2011

When selling Smart Bear I had an M&A guy pull data about other companies which (a) sold development tools, (b) were sold recently, (c) were profitable, and (d) were growing. To hire key employees. Otherwise they have a lot of planning and hiring to do before the project has a decent velocity, which could take 6-18 months.

Sales 260

Sales Channel Cofounder Valuation 260