A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

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WP Engine passes $100M in revenue and secures $250M investment from Silver Lake

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Every day, 5% of the entire online world visits a customer running on the WP Engine Digital Experience Platform. And everyone else at WP Engine would tell you the same thing. So to everyone at WP Engine, let me repeat the message from one year ago: Look what we did ! We just announced a few more things. Period, full-stop.

Engineer 152
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How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Search Engine Marketing and online ads on the other hand can be set up in minutes. Those higher costs make learning to write ads, manage campaigns, A/B test, and design landing pages a very expensive activity for an early stage, bootstrapping startup. I’m really interested in learning more about deer management.

Campaign 272
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Scaling by “delegation” isn’t good enough

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

But doesn’t this mean that ultimately leaders are managing a set of people, all of whom are better-qualified than that leader to do those jobs ? And isn’t that difficult to manage, after all how do you argue with those people, and how will you earn the respect and confidence of those people?

Warrant 120
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Startup identity & the sadness of a successful exit

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Are you OK releasing control in day-to-day operations to managers, and then releasing control of the managers to your executive team? I didn’t want to manage managers or figure out what changes, strategies, hirings, products, marketing, and sales were needed to make $100m/year. That’s exciting to me.

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Hiring Employee #1

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It’s happening now at WP Engine.). How do you manage that, especially when you’re small? You’re not hiring a Systems Engineer III for IBM or a Senior Regional Sales Manager for Dell. So why wait until the interview to see whether your personalities mesh? Put it right in the job description.

Hiring 282
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Not disruptive, and proud of it

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Google was the 11th major search engine, not the first. Their technology proved superior, but "a better search engine" was hardly a new idea. In retrospect we say that Google transformed how people find information, and further, how advertising works on the Internet. They were the disruptors, but they didn't profit from the disruption.

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Yes, but who said they'd actually BUY the damn thing?

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

If the VP of Engineering thinks the target customer is just like him/her, you're doomed. If the VP of Marketing thinks the target customer is just like him/her, you're doomed." — Cranky Product Manager? If you're still not convinced, think of it as project risk management. founder Blogger & Twitter. "If