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? founder Blogger & Twitter. "If

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

.” He explains: Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough. On his startup’s sale to a larger company, he then laments that the “youthful energy that created so much value was siphoned off.” Companies are constantly changing.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

That’s great of course, because in a new startup everyone needs to be either making stuff or selling stuff — there’s no room for managers and executives and strategists. The trouble is, this is almost certainly not the activity that would most benefit your startup. You make stuff. Here are two: 1.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 11, 2010

This is Part 5 of the 5-part series: 5 lessons from 150 startup pitches. Ask a technical founder about his startup, and he'll proudly describe his stunning software — simple, compelling, useful, fun. Four uncomfortable seconds later, a smile breaks across the founder's face. Infection built-in, not bolt-on.

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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. .

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 4, 2011

This guest-post is from Joannes Vermorel, founder of Lokad which produces sales forecasts for off-line companies. At the same time, I personally observed at the startup incubator of Telecom ParisTech the impact of one co-founder leaving his company after 18 months. He has a personal blog about cloud computing. is here to stay.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2011

It’s “ Loveline for startups ,&# where entrepreneurs get to ask any question about their startup and have me and a rotating co-host tackle the problem and devise constructive next-actions. I finally started Smart Bear Live. Like most ventures, it didn’t work the way I’d imagined.

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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. Founders typically revert to whatever they’re already expert in, and decide they need more of that. The question is: How do you decide what role is most important to hire for?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 21, 2012

This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) Ambitious Sailor writes: How can a former navy officer with twelve solid years of overseas defense contracting experience convince a tech startup to hire him as their business guy? Especially a hot tech startup? Who would the founders be?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 26, 2011

Check out How to Scale and Attract Superstars from startup founder superstars Alain Chuard (Wildfire Interactive), Lee Linden (Tapjoy), and Ravi Mohan (Shasta Ventures), and participate in a “hot seat” to get your real-life challenge solved by them. . -->. Startup Weekend pep talk: It ain’t the code.

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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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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 5, 2010

This is a guest post by Mike Schoeffler, founder of iPhone running application Roadbud. I hesitate to take issue with Jason’s Sacrifice your health for your startup — particularly after his wife gave her up-close-and-personal. As founder of a run/bike app startup, I can write off my workouts.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 9, 2014

Watch a bunch of interviews of founders of successful companies, and here’s what you don’t hear: We tried eight different marketing channels — AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, social media, events, retargeting, SEO, guest-posting, PR, and so on.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 12, 2010

This is part 1 of the series: 5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches. Software patents are especially useless for small, bootstrapped startups. The landscape of successful startups is littered with people lacking post-graduate education. In all the interviews you've read about founders' success, how many credit their MBA program?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 18, 2010

As it turns out, it's not even just business founders. Don't founders forge ahead even when others say success is impossible? Doesn't a founder invent a new product based on her confidence that others will want it? Sounds like the stereotypical attitude of the arrogant startup founder, but wait!

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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. Maybe you worked there or a co-founder or investor has some juice).

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

It's nice to highlight awesome articles about startup that I didn't write! Startup Business Checklist 2010 [link]. Startup Business Checklist 2010 : Steve Smith's Blog. Below is my current checklist for startup businesses in 2010. How To Land a Killer Job At a Tech Startup Out of College - [link]. interintelli.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 24, 2012

This is part of an ongoing startup advice series where I answer (anonymized!) Employee-Investor writes: I’ve been invited to join as startup as employee #1. Of course the value of working at a startup isn’t just financial. questions from readers, like a written version of Smart Bear Live.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 20, 2016

Clickbait works. Stop clicking on crap and get back to work.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 13, 2011

Modern Lean Startup theory blares out from the red-tiled rooftops of Stanford: Seek the Data and Ye Shall Find! But as much as I respect and follow Lean Startup theory, objective measurements aren’t the only things that matter. I was embarrassed when referring you guys to friends.&#. But hold on. They were still customers.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 17, 2011

Finding and agreeing upon a worthy name is always a struggle, especially if you have co-founders. You’re the one who has be to proud to be the founder of this company, even when all the other person knows about it is its name. That’s simpler to do, except when you have co-founders. Want to work with me on a startup?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

We all know that startups should make decisions quickly. Fast decisions leads to rapid action, which accelerates the loop of production and feedback, which is how you outpace and out-learn a competitor, even one that already has a lead.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Idealistic founders believe they will break the mold when they scale, and not turn into a “typical big company.” Or it’s fatal because that was a co-founder. Very few products can generate that sort of revenue, whether invented by nimble, innovative startups or stately mature companies. A team of one is brittle, but fast.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2011

We founders unwittingly focus on how to make the best customer experiences better , rather than making the worst experiences less worse , and sometimes this is a mistake. Accounting for Startups: Cash-basis or Accrual-basis? Hubspot has this down to a science, more so than almost any other company. Tweet. -->. On the (un?)importance

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 10, 2012

As the startup founder, what do you do about all this? First, create so much value (efficiency, time-savings, cost-savings, happiness, whatever) that there’s no need to “compute” it.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 17, 2012

” Pin It There are many people who compare building startups with having children. After all, a kid will grow up pretty much no matter what; a startup can die if the founder notices that another startup is similar, has a good designer, and just got $600k on AngelList. Perhaps they’re right.

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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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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 8, 2010

You just need to give up all your free time which, if you've caught the "founders" bug, is A-OK with you. I've been on both sides of the table: I've done a startup while working and I've employed people who either were or are very capable of having their own startup on the side. Here are my tips for how to pull this off.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2011

In a recent Capital Factory all-hands discussion, one of the founders started a question with a well-worn preamble: “I talked to a bunch of the mentors and they all told me the same thing about pricing, but I’m telling you, they’re wrong. I know our industry , I know how our customers think, and in our industry …&#.

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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

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

That last bit should sound familiar if you follow theories of Startup Laws & Metrics. Amazon’s cloud computing services enable the creation of technical products and services which would be impossible to create a decade ago, both for new startups and 100-year-old companies still reinventing themselves into relevancy.

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Technical Review Viral Metrics Salary 120

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 wait, what if Austin finds a hot new startup in San Francisco and bails on us? But wait, isn’t that an HR no-no?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

Here’s some of my super-secret winning strategies from fifteen years of building startups. The last thing any startup needs is people finding out about it. The easy part of this startup will be getting attention and making sales. The world isn’t littered with startups having decent products and barely any customers.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

The way Bitvibe broke in is that the co-founder is the drummer for several really big bands that you’ve heard of from the 80′s and right now he’s in Gregg Rollie Band. But the answer is the co-founder’s been in the industry for 30 years and he’s somebody and so they can get meetings. Interviewee: Right.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 16, 2014

Was there any startup founder who didn’t feel depressed when that happened? Another collective sigh shudders through the ranks of startup founders, as we grumble over our trifling grindstones. Instagram had 13 employees when they sold for a billion dollars. Yes, depressed. They’re next!

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Metrics Early Stage Retention Revenue 246

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 29, 2013

An entrepreneur confided in me recently that he didn’t like Lean Startup; did I think that was OK? Or is he not cut out to build a startup? A startup pitch-deck boasts about the mistakes they’ve made because of the lessons they’ve learned. There’s no map in startups. What does predict an outlier?

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Framework Lean Design Revenue 253

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. Why Should My Startup Use a Virtual Assistant? It's a mix of shock and excitement. The Lesson.

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