A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

Even outliers like WhatsApp (sold for $19b with 55 employees) and Instagram (sold for $1b with 13 employees) raised lots of venture funds. Requires venture funding because you have no income, and if you’re successful you’ll need lots of people and tech to run the business. simple enough to be self-service).

Bootstrapping 294

Bootstrapping Technical Review B2C Sales Cycle 294

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 21, 2009

No need for a new employee of course, but maybe you should re-prioritize those tasks next month. Help" doesn't necessarily mean a proper, 40 hours/week (OK, who are we kidding, 60 hours/week) employee. Can you share the burden with your co-founder or employees? It could be a part-time consultant. It could be an intern.

Startup 315

Startup Revenue Cofounder Sales 315

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 16, 2014

Instagram had 13 employees when they sold for a billion dollars. That was before WhatsApp sold for 19 billion dollars, with 55 employees. That’s $345m per employee, compared to Instagram’s paltry $77m per employee. Was there any startup founder who didn’t feel depressed when that happened?

Metrics 246

Metrics Early Stage Retention Revenue 246

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 8, 2019

That is, you need a good marketing channel and you need a few killer features and you need great initial employees and you need a healthy market, etc. What can you do, to reduce this effect and maybe even turn luck to work in your favor? The list above is a bunch of “ands.” And” is bad!

Affiliate 245

Affiliate Stock Channel Portfolio 245

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 15, 2013

When people can devise their own lifestyle, career, and mobility more than at any other time in history, it’s interesting to ask how a startup can support and encourage its employees beyond a paycheck. But that prose is aimed at the founders, not employee #8. But what about everyone else?

San Francisco 247

San Francisco Austin PHP Social Media 247

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

Although of course the business is physically separate from you, and its success is undeniably due to your faithful employees even more than it’s due to you, emotionally the business is not a separate entity. .” It’s sort of like selling your baby. But it’s more like selling yourself.

Software Review 295

Software Review Startup Cofounder Search 295

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 16, 2017

Is employee #2 not working out, or does she maybe just need more time? Yes you are. You’re just scared. Which is understandable. But you’re sure. If you have to ask, you know the answer, you just don’t want to do the difficult thing.

Operations 215

Operations Hiring Employee Founder 215

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 15, 2011

We were so good at acting that our first few customers never knew we were a new company with no employees and buggy software. Selling the company was an easy decision, and everyone in the company was on the same page. Thanks to a software patent we filed, we never had a serious competitor.

LLC 335

LLC Founder Startup Campaign 335

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 24, 2011

Easy to attract passionate employees. Of course if that turns out to be true it’s means a bankrupted business, but if you pull it off… isn’t that one of the highest compliments a customer could ever pay a company? It has the ring of loyalty and delight. I’d rather that testimonial than “It’s a great ROI.&#

Intellectual Property 242

Intellectual Property Open Source Bandwidth IP 242

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. Why is this impossible when you have 500 employees? From Brittle to Robust.

Government 223

Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 21, 2011

It’s among the most-asked questions on startup forums, and an issue we’re dealing with right now at WPEngine as we bring on new employees: How do you decide how much equity (shares) to give a new employee or partner? The question is further complicated when the new hire is getting a salary.

Equity 276

Equity Salary Hiring Institutional Investors 276

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 24, 2012

Employee-Investor writes: I’ve been invited to join as startup as employee #1. questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live. To get your question answered , email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com. They’re giving me a salary and an OK stock grant, but I want more stock.

Salary 229

Salary Stock Startup Valuation 229

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 8, 2015

But we are judged, by our customers choosing between us and a competitor, by our employees choosing whether to entwine their careers with our fate, and by our peers, allies, and passive-aggressive antagonists on social media. We’re told not to judge, lest we be judged. We’re instructed to respect others, especially other cultures.

Social Media 120

Social Media Media Employee Design 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 18, 2016

You can’t know right now whether you’re done 10x’ing , but if indeed that’s not a plausible result, how could you be redirecting your attention to other important things, like creating more jobs and better working conditions, to be a catalyst for employee’s personal growth, to give back to relevant communities, to use (..)

API 120

API Social Media Revenue Advertising 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2017

Successful companies can stall out because they lose sight of the fundamental reasons they earned success in the first place — the key insights and UX of the product, or the key culture and values that attracted their first hundred or thousand employees.

Demand 159

Demand Employee Management Product 159

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

A key employee left the company, which caused the company to fail. “One key employee” is brittle. For example, with $260M in 2016 revenue, still growing at a blistering 60%/year, with a thousand employees, Hubspot is not brittle in any of the ways outlined above. That is a “One Thing.”

Software Review 294

Software Review Channel Revenue Non-Compete 294

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 11, 2011

The typical arguments against: (a) unfair to employees/co-founders, (b) now you’re not hungry so you care less, work less, (c) swinging for fences without attention to detail is imprudent. All rational. But in the end, in a spirit of directness and with the greatest respect, I say: Dear Rand, Take some money off the table.

.Net 230

.Net Cofounder Dilution Finance 230

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 23, 2012

It’s not about the financing path, it’s about what you’ve decided to build. It’s my goal to join the ranks of those excellent companies at WP Engine.

IPO 240

IPO Flash Bootstrapping Private Equity 240

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 20, 2016

You can’t kick in an extra $10k/year to win a critical employee with especially germane experience. If you publish the salary formula for everyone at your company, you no can longer compete for talent on the sole basis of compensation. This forces you to build a company where great talent wants to work despite lesser remuneration.

Open Source 120

Open Source API Framework Salary 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 5, 2011

To infect customers and employees with your peculiar disease. You’re right , and utterly useless. The goal of the entrepreneur is not to be “right.” ” It’s to construct with humility. To listen and talk simultaneously. To live to fight another day. To acknowledge being wrong before the fault turns fatal.

Lean 281

Lean Analytics Metrics Engineer 281

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 19, 2012

years before I could even hire one employee, and even then it was 1/4 of the salary he deserved (and later ended up making). Now we’re making millions of dollars, employ 20 people, growing at 15%/mo, etc. But we started just like that — slowly, and not profitable. Same with my previous company Smart Bear — it took 2.5

Salary 246

Salary Bootstrapping Web Distribution 246

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 8, 2010

Most people dread following up with customers, vendors and even employees. Permission Follow-up allows you to contact your customer, vendor or employee because you have a pre-established agreement on when it's appropriate for you to communicate with them. You Are Not Alone. Think of this as permission marketing applied to following-up.

Harvest 227

Harvest Email Lean Customer 227

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Both of these are aimed at the employee rather than the employer. I wrote up the full behind-the-scenes story. How to get hired at a startup and. How to write a cover letter that actually gets read. WorkAwesome). Still, no matter which side of the table you're on, this is useful for your hiring process.

Angel Investor 161

Angel Investor New York City RSS Viral 161

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

JANUARY 28, 2014

If you had just 10 servers and 100 customers, you’d have much fewer problems and many fewer employees. Today you have more customers, more servers, and more employees. . “Well sure,” you say, “that’s normal as you grow. What’s so hard about that?”

Technical Review 275

Technical Review Social Media Engineer Cost 275

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 28, 2011

” 5) Management type in meeting to employees – “Honesty is big right now. He liked that idea and I continued work on a few additional concepts taking some different tacks: 4) Pinocchio with elongated nose sitting in audience says to person next to him – “This is the honesty in business seminar, right?”

Customer 228

Customer Audience Web Hiring 228

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 11, 2014

While serving as COO of a SaaS company, I came up with a simple graphic that I used to educate the company’s employees about these all-important levers of success. In this blog post I use the graphic to explain the basics and then explore various “what if” scenarios.

Churn Rate 288

Churn Rate .Net Metrics Hosting 288

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 19, 2010

You've probably heard "cash is king:" Real cash (not purchase orders) pays your mortgage, keeps the internet up, and pays employees. Cash is king, much of the time. Bills can be paid late, but they don't take "accounts receivable" at the grocery store. Thus for daily operations, cash-basis wins again.

Revenue 232

Revenue Startup Forecast Finance 232

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 28, 2010

You're doing everything in your power to be the best, evidenced by a culture of awesome employees and inventing new ways to make your customers successful, so mistakes are ordinary human error, not negligence or indifference.

Social Media 233

Social Media Stock Hosting Media 233

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 9, 2012

I still remember having 51 so-called subscribers, knowing full well half were blog directories and half of the rest were family members or Smart Bear employees who probably felt it was their duty. That title never makes sense to me.

New York 248

New York Ruby Social Media RSS 248

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 15, 2010

It's bad for the employee too — he deserves a chance to find a job where he can be successful.). But he won't, and deep down you know that. You can't get that time back, and yes this is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make, but even worse is prolonging the inevitable. You try a marketing effort and it doesn't work.

Cost 273

Cost Reputation Agile Sales 273

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

How many employees would a medium-sized business have in your definition? Jason: If I’m managing my whole business with this tool, I don’t have 100 employees. you can’t have one employee because meetings are just too easy and you don’t really have them formally. You can’t have 5,000 employees.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 23, 2011

He was formerly an early employee at Facebook and Mint. This guest-post was written by Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo of AppSumo.com , the daily deals site for web entrepreneurs. I woke up and rolled over to the left side of the bed as I do almost every morning and snapped up my iPhone.

Argentina 316

Argentina Email Web SEO 316

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 28, 2011

Four years into Smart Bear I had several employees getting paid decently (which at a bootstrapped startup is hard to do!), It’s still there three years in, despite real revenue, profitability, customers arriving everyday, and a great team. Since that is not obvious, I’d like to share a personal story. Life was good!

Bootstrapping 312

Bootstrapping Sales Texas Salary 312

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 8, 2010

I work on my hobby only at home and on my own time; it is not in conflict with my employee agreement. I'm writing this letter to make sure you're aware of it so there's no misunderstanding. My hobby is. I own it; [Company] has no ownership or rights to it. Like any hobby, it could generate a small amount of income.

Startup 252

Startup Email RSS Internet 252

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 28, 2011

’ Or, ‘Not every company has to be big and be the next Twitter, not everybody even needs employees.’ Or let me hire this person or bring this employee in or this consultant or something like that.’ So, the internet is full of people saying things like, ‘you have to seek happiness not money.’

Cofounder 223

Cofounder New York Conversion Entrepreneur 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

I’m actually very fortunate because I’ve had the same employees pretty much since day one. So we’re kind of trying to put systemizing everything; but what I’m struggling with is going into year three because everybody’s been doing their own thing, right?

Cofounder 199

Cofounder Technical Review Chicago Technical Cofounder 199