A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 21, 2009

What follows is your startup therapy session. For example, I'm an engineer, so my first answer to "Why don't you have more customers?" That's where this article comes in: To splash cold water on your face, forcing you to face reality and continue to defend or change the important choices inside your business. Cartoon by Andertoons.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 22, 2017

We don’t build MVPs at WP Engine. MVPs are great for startups and product teams because they maximize validated learning about customers as quickly as possible. Startups are encouraged by the great Reid Hoffman to “launch early enough that you’re embarrassed by your v1.0 Well, it’s not the best system.

Customer 336

Customer Video Engineer Social Network 336

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2011

In 32B , jet engines thunder mere feet from my eardrums, a fact confirmed by a window whose proximity to the engine affords a vista only of three sheets of metal and 37 rivets. I’ve seen it at WP Engine. For example, at WP Engine we had another customer with lots of custom needs. Powered by LaunchBit ). Tweet. -->.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 28, 2014

As the founder of WP Engine, I receive weekly emails from startups proposing a “win-win” deal. Distribution is the hardest thing for a young startup, defined as “getting in front of potential customers.” “Maybe,” thinks the startup founder, “I can tap that ass. . I mean asset.”

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 12, 2011

There’s already a lot of great advice about hiring at little startups. ” Why startups should ALWAYS compromise when hiring by Dharmesh Shah — There are many attributes you’d like to see in a hire, but compromise is necessary; here’s how to do it. .” Or therapy. Write a crazy job description.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 13, 2011

We recently underwent a Cinderella-like transformation: A total redesign of the WP Engine website from despicable steaming pile of hideousness to a designed, thematic — dare I say artistic? Modern Lean Startup theory blares out from the red-tiled rooftops of Stanford: Seek the Data and Ye Shall Find! — sleek new look.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 14, 2013

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Your bootstrapped startup is finally off the ground. These aren’t hypotheticals — I talked to no fewer than four startups in the past few months (mostly at SxSW) in exactly this position, with these advertising channels, with about the same costs.

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Affiliate Marketing Campaign Channel 282

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 17, 2011

I put in these particular elements because I did a study of the reasons people cancel at WP Engine , and these are the main reasons for cancellation. These three factors are, of course, critical to a healthy, growing startup, and yet individually they’re impossible to measure as precisely and easily as cancellation rate. (I’ve

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Business Model Metrics Engineer Technical Review 245

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 29, 2014

What does it mean for you or me, that the same thing is true for startups ? Let’s do it with math: You spend 99.99% of your time on the journey of building a startup, and 0.01% basking in the temporary euphoria of “success,” such as selling it to someone else or ringing the bell on the morning of your IPO.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 25, 2016

But I’ve seen little startups, mid-sized companies like WP Engine, and large companies struggle with complexity in decisions even in conditions of relative certainty. The same is true of startup founders themselves, where it’s your job to fill the company with people much better than you at every position.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 13, 2015

This is the perennial question for startups who have started to taste success, and are ready to invest in themselves in the form of new helping hands. Examples: You hire the VP of Engineering for Facebook. Now you can scale anything — both computers and people — inside your engineering department.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 9, 2010

This is Part 3 of the series: 5 lessons from 150 startup pitches.? Of hundreds of startup pitches at Capital Factory , almost none had unearthed 10 people willing to say, "If you build this product, I'll give you $X.". Aren't you sick of every startup blogger on Earth badgering you about this? Short-sighted, no?

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Software Review Part-Time VPE Houston Cofounder 312

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

No brand, no features, no customers, no money, no distribution, no search engine rankings, no efficient advertising, no incredible executive team, no NPS, no strategy. How do the successful startups rise above all that? Do you feel the crushing weight of the disadvantages facing every new company?

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Software Review Technical Review API Algorithm 133

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) Either of the following scenarios makes sense for a new startup going after a large-scale enterprise market: You’ve identified a deep pain at a large company. questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live. You’re just stalling.

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Customer Software Review IP Technical Review 231

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

On his startup’s sale to a larger company, he then laments that the “youthful energy that created so much value was siphoned off.” WP Engine is one of those, and we laugh about how drastic the changes are, in the rare spaces between tackling the latest challenge.

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Acquisition Technical Review Stock Options Employee 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 3, 2011

Get more involved in the Bay Area startup community: Join the WebWallflower mailing list to get a calendar of upcoming startup events and exclusive discounts sent right to you every two weeks. Tweet. --> You might tacitly assume that I have no major blind spots when it comes building little tech startups. Powered by LaunchBit ).

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Metrics Startup Revenue Engineer 273

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 10, 2012

This isn’t just true with engineering productivity. As the startup founder, what do you do about all this? If a company spends $30k on marketing, and your tool “saves” them $15k, are they now spending $15k on marketing?

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Software Review Product Software Developers Software Development 256

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 11, 2012

Maybe it works for startups too? Oops… This reminds me of startup investment theory. Of course startups are not analogous to roulette, are they? Roulette is a random process; startups are determined by human beings and systematic processes like Lean and AdWords. ” (So it’s a CHAR(2) not an INT(2)).

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Startup Algorithm Cofounder Lean 254

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 22, 2012

WP Engine is a perfect example of this. During the summer, one of the Capital Factory companies developed a plan to sell into the “mid-sized” corporate market. ” But there isn’t necessarily an opportunity. Maybe your competitors have figured out that it’s not cost-effective to sell to the middle.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

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. SEO is extremely powerful, but it takes time.

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Campaign Software Review Brazil Conversion 272

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 17, 2011

But even this isn’t the best idea because you’re squandering a chance to get in good with search engines. All search engines consider keywords in the domain name to be vastly more important than anywhere else — even the page title. Want to work with me on a startup? Details here.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 11, 2017

I started WP Engine in a boom (2010) and it went great. So it’s always a fine time for a startup, which is why it’s the wrong question. The right question isn’t: “Can a wonderful startup be started now,” the question is “Should this startup be started, right now, by me, solving this problem, for these people.”.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 31, 2011

Tweet. --> It’s one of the hardest steps in a startup, getting that first rube to part with their money over your barely-minimum barely-viable product. At this point you’ll be tempted to argue that speaking to such a tiny sliver of the population is too narrow-minded, even for a small startup. (Powered by LaunchBit ).

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Customer Software Review SEM Technical Review 279

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 14, 2014

It was: “ You’re a real company when… ” An existential question of when a startup becomes “real.” “The WP Engine Building.” Feedburner said there were 50 RSS subscribers, but at least 40 of them were directories or scrapers. It’s a magical building, even if only for me.

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RSS Engineer Metrics Government 309

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 20, 2010

This story is one shared by (in my experience) the majority of successful startups — an initial idea inspired by travails from my own life, an idea which turns out to be unworkable, but which ultimately leads to truly good ideas through both incremental and discontinuous transformations. A process you can learn and get better at.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 7, 2014

You still signed that 5-year office lease, hired support, sales, and engineering, and brought in training, a comptroller, and a business operations person. You scramble to hire ahead in support, sales, and the additional demands on engineering. Marketing is over-spending to compensate. So, you’ll need more money than you planned.

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Revenue Finance Equity Engineer 270

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 4, 2012

I get a constant stream of requests to look at new startups or to announce something that a startup just did. The joke is: How much time does a startup take? Running WP Engine takes all my time. It’s typical: Dear Jason, COMPANY has just completed its first startup accelerator program. All of it, as well.

Internet 270

Internet Email Engineer Web 270

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 19, 2011

” This is how one of our competitors attempts to differentiate and compete with us at WP Engine. Most startups insist they’re “first” at something. Google wasn’t the first search engine, the iPod wasn’t the first mp3 player, and DropBox wasn’t the first shared filesystem.

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HTML Hosting Engineer Leadership 243

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

It’s Episode 3 my little “ Loveline for startups. ” Introduced a few months ago as an Austin event, I’m now doing this live audio advice column to the web, taking phone calls from startups around the country. My co-hosts were Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley , hosts of the well-known Startup Success Podcast.

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Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 12, 2012

(from his blog post ) …some civil engineers think the world of project management in their field is ripe for revolution, but do I know enough of them? I talked to 30 people before I realized that a certain idea of mine was a crappy idea, and about 40 people before starting WP Engine. How many should I talk to?

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Customer Customer Development Dilution Engineer 252

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

In other words, if I’m thinking about this just from a WP Engine perspective for a second as a potential customer, when you come up to me and say, “Meetings are awful because half of them don’t even have an agenda, and the ones that do, you don’t stick to it and they go long. Jason: Exactly. Jason: Yeah. Edwin: Right.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

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. the most online-visible person at WP Engine. But wait, what if Austin finds a hot new startup in San Francisco and bails on us?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) Burgeoning Startup Founder writes: After a year of work, my startup is now doing about $6,000/mo in revenue and $3,000/mo in profit. ” Rand over at SEOMoz just wrote up what he thought about how we did this at WP Engine.

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Affiliate Revenue Bootstrapping Campaign 261

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 5, 2011

I suppose if your goal in life is to be right , you should bet against every startup, certainly against any novel ideas. The Lean Startup movement also values learning and experience over “being right,” specifically casting this concept as “running experiments.” Or startups. Congratulations.

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Lean Analytics Metrics Engineer 281

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 31, 2012

We react to most things from a position of scant knowledge, especially when we’re running a startup where essentially every decision, every day, is a guess. For example: Folks call up WP Engine tech support nearly always from posture of accusation. This isn’t specific to WP Engine support, of course.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 12, 2016

Isn’t this true in all walks of life, not only engineering? We quit the startup because it’s apparently not working. He then spent another 18 months on the drudgery of trial and error before discovering that a carbonized bamboo filament would last 100x longer, and finally a modern-like light-bulb was born. So sometimes, we quit.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 12, 2013

This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) Frustrated Engineer writes: I’ve been writing code for ten years, recently promoted to a position where I have to talk to our non-technical customers. questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live.

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Software Engineer Naming Customer 294