A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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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. It’s unlikely the product is sufficient out-of-the-box, and you might need in-house professional services or to partner with consulting firms for implementation. 10,000/mo means larger companies only.

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Hiring Employee #1

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Hazards of hiring by Eric Sink — Great tips, including some specific to hiring developers (for more on the latter, here’s another ). Ideas: Develop your blog/Twitter so you have a steady stream of eyeballs from people who like you. They hear about a cool company, and when they’re interested in new work, they call you.

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Startup Therapy: Ten questions to ask yourself every month

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

We get caught up in free-but-takes-tons-of-time marketing and development activities — and most of the time that's a good way to think — but sometimes it's still true that "you have to spend money to make money.". It could be a new partner willing to work for stock. It could be a part-time consultant.

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Why startup biz dev deals almost never get done

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Here’s the problem , and how you can change your approach to business development so that it can succeed. A much better approach for business development is as follows: How can the smaller company make money for the larger company in the manner that the larger company already makes money?

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Vetting a startup (or two): The systematic birth of @WPEngine

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

As a good student of startup theory, especially modern theories of customer development, this time I was methodical and purposeful. If you want a step-by-step, here's a great guide and checklist of how to do early customer development by Ash Maurya. This time, though, it was intentional. And it worked. Here's how to do it.

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How a startup should leverage a personal assistant

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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.

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How do I raise prices?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

We can’t afford to put in the development effort required to take ${product} where we all want (i.e. hiring a few developers). So it’s our fault, and yet I’m asking you to lock arms with me and walk through this phase of our development by accepting this modest price increase. But there it is.