A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 31, 2011

Marketing, advertising, positioning — they’re all forms of persuasive writing, just like an op-ed in the New York Times. But this was 2003 when AdWords was new. I spent only hundreds of dollars a month and covered the entire spectrum of SEM. But that’s how you build a hobby, not a company.

Customer 279

Customer Software Review SEM Technical Review 279

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc. For eBay, this is caused by the incredible network effects of their business (so-called demand-side increasing returns and supply-side increasing returns).

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 19, 2015

Along with Greycroft, I was the first institutional investor in Maker Studios (sold to Disney for nearly $1 billion) and am still the largest investor in Mitu Network , the largest online video producer of Latino content. But you don’t need to spend money on SEM. You can’t build a brand on YouTube.

SEM 150

SEM Los Angeles Silicon Valley Acquisition 150

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

For example, one angel investor reportedly invested in several hundred social networking ventures employing this philosophy. SEM on five dollars a day Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences Marc Prensky's Weblog: Cell Phones in Class A new version of the Joel Test (draft) Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your c.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Customers found it confusing and it turned out to be at odds with our fundamental value proposition (which really requires an independant IM network). Unfortunately, positioning our product as an "IM add-on" was a complete mistake. So we had to completely throw that code away, including all of its beatiful tests and specs. Talk about waste.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

Spray files across cheap disks on your network. SEM on five dollars a day Andrew Chen: Growing renewable audiences Marc Prensky's Weblog: Cell Phones in Class A new version of the Joel Test (draft) Smarticus — 10 things you could be doing to your c. MogileFS - "Distributed (meta) file system. Pay less for storage.

Open Source 107

Open Source San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 107

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

This was 2004, and we had never even heard of MySpace, let alone had any understanding of social networking. It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business. But the early customers all compared it to MySpace.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131