A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Marketing isn’t scheduling a launch and recruiting isn’t timing the start-dates of the next 50 hires in customer service and sales. — optimize myopically for speed-to-market. A marketing campaign that adds two sign-ups/week is a success. This means you can — and should! Almost anything you do, counts.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 4, 2015

Many marketing channels are “zero-sum,” meaning that if one company wins a piece of the channel, other companies cannot also use that piece. Counter-Example: Social Media. Example: AdWords, where the price is set by the highest (dumbest?) Example: SEO, where the top three search results receive nearly all the traffic.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 13, 2015

Does that 10x the company or create a feature so important that you win your market? Hint: If you’re not already in the scaling phase, well beyond product/market fit, the answer is: No.). Would that effect be larger than the next three features you could implement, or achieving similar excellence in marketing and sales?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 31, 2011

Here’s an email I got last week: Hello Jason, I am a big fan of your advice and wanted to see if you could offer any advice for marketing my start-up XYZ. Marketing, advertising, positioning — they’re all forms of persuasive writing, just like an op-ed in the New York Times. Any advice will help.

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Customer Software Review SEM Technical Review 279

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

No wait, I forgot, actually the question is: What happens when employee #2 makes off with your code and roadmap and marketing data and customer list, moves to Bolivia, and starts selling your stuff world-wide at one-tenth the price? To summarize: Anything that can be copied will be copied, including features, marketing copy, and pricing.

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Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 12, 2010

A disruptive product causes such a large market shift that entire companies collapse (the ones who don't "get it") and new markets appear. What's wrong with taking a known problem with a known market and just doing it better or with a fresh perspective or with a modern approach? Should you? I'm not so sure.

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Technical Review Software Review Engineer Search 243

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 17, 2010

If this is your attitude, your conception of tech support is completely backwards and you're missing out on important channels for marketing, product development, and sales. Apparently tech support is a better "social media outreach" program than hiring interns to spray comments on random blogs. The unexpected face of your company.

Technical Review 245

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 17, 2017

The analog in startups is: What is right for this company, in this market, with these competitors, with these customers, at this price-point , with this business model , with this team, with their goals. So the question is: Which advice is right for me ? . In diets, half the answer is physiological — how your body reacts.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 28, 2014

Then our social media team has to piece all this together, attempt to respond, maybe put together a special phone call with that customer, etc. Or, consider the scale-ramifications of on-boarding 1,000 new customers a month. .” ” But some things you can’t automate.

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Technical Review Social Media Engineer Cost 275

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 9, 2011

If this weren’t sufficiently absurd, it turns out these people are affiliate marketers, and what they neglected to mention in the introductory email is that these auto-published articles would furthermore push products for them to monetize. Bullets and numbers in titles guaranteed?!? I’m certainly not the poster child for this.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 8, 2019

I won a fake stock market competition in elementary school. 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. For example, can you pick a large and growing market? Consider marketing channels. And” is bad!

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

There’s nothing inherently wrong with obsessing over growth; in fact, using the same argument you can point out that in winner-take-all markets, growth is objectively the main objective. ” Many of the market-winners do make the world better. The problem is “growth at all costs.”

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Technical Review Viral Metrics Salary 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 25, 2010

Ask potential customers 3 specific things (market research). I know, you thought "print media" was dead. This means they keep the postcard handy starting now and even during the tradeshow, which means whatever else you put on there (marketing material) gets seen repeatedly. Examples: Make a sale on the tradeshow floor.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

It’s no one’s job to market or sell the product. So you “put it out there&# hoping that the magical world of “social media word of mouth marketing&# will bestow eager users upon your sign-up form. No one wants to do it, and it’s no one’s job to do it, so it doesn’t happen.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

You can’t just “decide” to avoid working on sales and marketing and still have a business that you can rightly claim is more stable than a job. Never mind managing consultants or employees! Does it mean you decide your working hours?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 21, 2009

If you do know the answer, these two sentences should drive your marketing efforts. At the least, these represent the themes that drive your marketing campaigns. If you don't have evidence, it is OK to have a hypothesis but you should be concerned about collecting proof and disproof.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 5, 2010

This is a guest post by David Garland, author of a new book: Smarter, Faster, Cheaper : Non-Boring, Fluff-Free Strategies For Marketing & Promoting Your Business. Zero media appearances in traditional media. Or really any connections for media. My marketing "budget" was a whopping $0. Why did I tell you this?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

Oh how the media loves superlatives (but only because that’s what we click on and share). Jake Lodwick wrote an article on PandoDaily entitled “An acquisition is always a failure.” ” He explains: Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough.

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Acquisition Technical Review Stock Options Employee 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 22, 2013

A great writer (content marketing, social media) versus 100 average bloggers. A great developer, or a great designer, is better than 10x an average one — they’re better than an infinite number. Because they’ll come up with ideas and implementations that 100 others wouldn’t.

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Engineer Social Media Acquisition Sales 257

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 21, 2011

Marketing of most sorts can be solved with money. One big exception is anything that requires authority , like blogging and other social media stuff. Social media marketeers (like mouse-katteers but with larger Twitter followings) have already beat this point to death; no reason to repeat it.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 25, 2010

In a mature market you need severe points of differentiation , and one of those (I felt) had to be the team itself. He knows all the major players in the industry including the key folks at WordPress.com, BZ Media (the CopyBlogger media group), ProBlogger, and members of the press at Mashable, TechCrunch, and others.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

Gary Vaynerchuk (the founder of Wine Library TV and the so-called " Social Media Sommelier ") made a similar point in a speech at the Web 2.0 Comtech"), a small public company in Long Island where he was the Director of Marketing, and launched his own consulting firm. This was the beginning of something big — very big.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

Jason: Because you said premium digital media, so I didn’t get selling music out of that. So Leon and I have met numerous times, about marketing strategy and the music one is that developed after Chicago became a customer. I think that makes sense, that market, and it’s even pretty obvious how to find those people.

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Cofounder Technical Review Chicago Technical Cofounder 199

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

How to differentiate yourself in a crowded market (and when perhaps you shouldn’t try). Jason: So another thing is that whatever you decide to do, maybe it’s a bridge, it sounds like maybe you need to do a little more market research. It then hit the market, which happened to be the enterprise market.

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Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 15, 2013

” I vividly recall the moment when I connected on this level with Austin Gunter — our social media keymaster (are you the gatekeeper?), I just got an email from our VP Marketing about an interesting conversation she had with Austin and, now that they’re both in San Francisco, that’s happening all the time.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 13, 2015

Often your best estimate of any metric or market behavior or business model component is at best accurate within a power of ten, for example “expected conversion rate between 0.5% Question: How big does this company’s target market need to be? Bigger markets make things easier. So what can be shifted?

Business Model 120

Business Model Affiliate Startup Bootstrapping 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 7, 2016

There’s many possible solutions, each with trade-offs on speed-to-market, risk-of-implementation, difficulty-of-implementation, and choices in target audience, price point, and go-to-market methodology. A good answer minimizes time-to-market, because true learning doesn’t happen until customers are paying for something.

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San Francisco Startup Framework Azure 170

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

In the next 10 years: There will be another “surprising” Black Swan financial market event. “Old Media” will be consumed less. How much should you care about “trends?” ” A lot of predictions are easy. Mobile device usage will increase. Attention spans will shrink. Go disruptive or go home!

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Institutional Investors India China Viral 240

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 28, 2011

My single best advice about writing — whether for marketing copy, blogging, a sales pitch, an investor pitch, or even humor, is: BE SPECIFIC. Here’s our starting point: Experts say Twitter usage is increasing, but in many industries your marketing efforts are better spent in other channels.?. Writer’s Workshop.

Channel 250

Channel Conversion eCommerce Social Media 250

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

How to differentiate yourself in a crowded market (and when perhaps you shouldn’t try). It’s a different market and you need to connect with the people who already have a burning need. The reason is that, that all you’re doing is making the market smaller for yourself. So I have a question for you, Jason.

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Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 18, 2012

Is that a pipe-dream? Well, I know one woman who did exactly that.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 22, 2010

Or Dave McClure releases a silent-but-deadly outside a Menlo Park Starbucks and a social media company gets funded in Boston. It's relevant for marketing and sales because it's an inside scoop about how to manipulate strangers on the sly. This news should be simultaneously titillating for marketers ("Ooo, puppet strings!")

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Madagascar Sales Viral Argentina 227

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 3, 2011

I was listening to Noah Kagan (founder of AppSumo and the marketing mind behind Mint , and the author of this great guest post ) talk to the current crop of Capital Factory companies, when he said something so simple, so obviously correct, and yet it completely changed how I thought about my approach to WP Engine.

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Metrics Startup Revenue Engineer 273

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

Chris Brogan, prolific social media how-to author, blogger, and $22,000/day consultant , recently wrote a post describing his "Simple Blogging Formula" in under 1000 words. Tags: Essays advice blogging choices honesty introspection social media writing. Thing is though, I do almost the opposite of his formula.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 28, 2010

Tags: Essays culture honesty inspiration introspection marketing persona philosophy positioning social media.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 16, 2014

the darlings of the news media, and this is not a path to finding good answers. Because, if you’re not confident in reasoning about yourself, you have no choice but to compare your worst fears (exaggerated negative) with the public façade of other people (exaggerated positive), and to the absurd extremities that are (rightly!)

Metrics 246

Metrics Early Stage Retention Revenue 246

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 9, 2012

Social media usually isn’t a debate, it’s a combination rotary club and soap box. Talk about the social media echo chamber!) The media predicted an embarrassment, playing to a massive, largely empty stadium. ” Wah wah wah. I didn’t send it; what’s the point ? ” I liked that part!

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