A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

When I started marketing my first webapp almost two years ago, I started the way I imagine most people do: online. I didn’t know much about marketing and I hadn’t prepared for the kind of lead time necessary to be effective. Search Engine Marketing and online ads on the other hand can be set up in minutes.

Campaign 272

Campaign Software Review Brazil Conversion 272

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 29, 2010

a pile of content-free marketing buzzwords. If you're betting the entire business on getting traffic through search results, at any moment a competitor or the platform itself could oust you. Unlike Twitter, where social media marketing consultants don't care which Twitter clients are most popular. Now what they do is.

Marketing 229

Marketing Ruby SEO Widget 229

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 18, 2015

They have everything: money, brand, momentum, existing customers, press, product teams, distribution channels, expertise, market insight, analysts, sales offices, product features, and, by definition, a working business model. This market is willing to pay far more than cost for this product (else profits wouldn’t be generated).

Technical Review 120

Technical Review Valuation Flash Revenue 120

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.

Customer 279

Customer Software Review SEM Technical Review 279

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. Example: SEO, where the top three search results receive nearly all the traffic. Example: AdWords, where the price is set by the highest (dumbest?) Counter-Example: Social Media.

Channel 120

Channel SEO Marketing Social Media 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 14, 2010

But unlike the basketball example, the baseball announcer's error runs deeper, and following that thread will bring us to marketing data and the heart of the fallacy. Bringing it home to marketing and sales data? Of course saying he "retired out 5 of 9 batters" doesn't sound as impressive even though it's the same data!

Software Review 254

Software Review Analytics Conversion Metrics 254

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 13, 2011

Specifically, by making the flight-search problem pleasurable and useable instead of feeling like you’re navigating pivot tables from Excel ’98. Here’s what I mean. It’s clear from the outset that design is the only competitive advantage Hipmunk has over its competition.

Design 253

Design Lean Database Cofounder 253

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

On the other hand, it’s a whole universe and you’d need an interesting perspective on why you should go attack that market and face all that competition and noise and everything that’s in the market. So when you’re thinking about marketing positioning to me, that side of it is the interesting side of it.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 12, 2011

Assuming you really are in the market for another pair of hands to screw stuff up worse than you already are, the question is how to acquire resumes, how to pair them down, and how to identify someone who is going to work well in your company. Try to get your “Jobs” page to rank well in local-only search.

Hiring 282

Hiring Employee Ruby Java 282

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. Isn’t getting into the first position in a Google search for “party candy” worth it?

Naming 247

Naming Cofounder Startup Search 247

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 7, 2011

People search for “saas business accounting model spreadsheet,” not “custom business intelligence analysis tool.” get some traffic with paid search, then get some press around the customer’s story (not your story) where you drop your landing page as the way they solved the problem. Sounds do-able!

Database 229

Database Metrics Search Customer 229

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 19, 2011

Google wasn’t the first search engine, the iPod wasn’t the first mp3 player, and DropBox wasn’t the first shared filesystem. Yet they are the market leaders. Indeed, their market’s greatest innovators. On the surface being “first” sounds impressive , implying innovation and leadership.

HTML 243

HTML Hosting Engineer Leadership 243

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 10, 2010

It's a "marketplace" in that they "create a market" in which sellers connect with buyers because eBay provides a sufficient quantity of both. When a potential buyer made a search, they grabbed their email or phone number and said "Thanks, we're going to find you a great deal by Thursday." (I won't spoil the surprise!).

Business Model 310

Business Model Finder SEO Bootstrapping 310

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). And as I mentioned earlier, there was a huge context searching over head when we switched between your e-mail and the CRM. It then hit the market, which happened to be the enterprise market. Do that make some since?

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 24, 2010

You go to their web site, try to find the link to buy, figure out how to pay, get to the checkout page, then stop and search Google for "adobe coupon codes", go back to step 1. Imagine you are asked to buy some software from, say Adobe. keep refreshing your email for the link, download the software. Keep of record of the receipt somewhere.

Software Review 233

Software Review Technical Review Sales Software 233

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? Not many search terms have that many impressions even over 3 years.

Business Model 120

Business Model Affiliate Startup Bootstrapping 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 22, 2010

It's relevant for marketing and sales because it's an inside scoop about how to manipulate strangers on the sly. Students performed word-searches from random words. This news should be simultaneously titillating for marketers ("Ooo, puppet strings!") and frightening for consumers (Are you ever in control of your own decisions?).

Madagascar 227

Madagascar Sales Viral Argentina 227

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2012

I think that our biggest, our easiest group of people to target or market to are people who. Jared: The ability to market their properties better as opposed to the way. Like, if this does start growing, you can afford to do whatever like hire someone else to help on-board people, or spend more money on marketing, or I don’t know.

API 220

API Software Review Hosting Technical Review 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 29, 2010

For example, here are the origins of search engine traffic to my blog: There are several "other" search engines (e.g. The Long Tail is the least expensive way to sell because it means reaching under-served markets, which means cheap ads and hungry customers. Top lists can be useful. Instead, let's try to be #1 at one thing.

Metrics 257

Metrics Analytics Conversion Ratio Texas 257

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 21, 2010

Thus you reap the straightforward benefits of incremental improvements while also searching for something that could radically improve your revenue. Maybe your idea of what the market wants should shift. Maybe your entire business can change for the better.

Metrics 233

Metrics Austin Global Audience 233

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 20, 2010

30 simultaneous marketing campaigns, particularly when offline (e.g. A year after leaving Smart Bear, having talked with dozens of startup founders about their marketing woes, I realized 100% of them needed the marketing-measurement engine I built at Smart Bear. And it worked. Here's how to do it. print ads or trade shows )?

Startup 239

Startup Campaign Turkey Customer Development 239

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 21, 2013

His most recent company, ConvertKit , makes email marketing suck less. My search for the perfect pricing model resulted in an additional $50,000 (a 170% increase) in revenue. Nathan is the author of Designing Web Applications , The App Design Handbook , and Authority: A Step-By-Step Guide to Self-Publishing. Here’s how.

Sales 335

Sales Revenue Design Web 335

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 25, 2011

It’s surprisingly difficult to build a company where revenues outweigh costs of marketing, salaries, and operations, even at scale. Evidence of searching and asking demonstrates not only need but suggests a way to reach those people. If you prove yours can work, you’re already ahead of the group.

Startup 284

Startup Algorithm Design Salary 284

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 26, 2016

It is historically true, after all, that large internet businesses attempt to control the flow of online communications (Microsoft with IE, Google with their search results and Chrome, Facebook with their algorithms and the corn-maze you have to go through before leaving the site, Amazon with commerce, Apple with in-app purchases).

Security 120

Security Government Internet Algorithm 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 5, 2012

At Smart Bear I tried literally a hundred campaigns: paid search, trade shows, postcard mailers, newsletter sponsorships, and magazine ads (yes, print!). Which are best? Are any actually good at generating sales?

Advertising 229

Advertising Campaign Demand Audience 229

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 15, 2010

Hacker News, Search, Twitter, Reddit). Automatically create a "robots" meta-tag for search engines. Nice-to-haves: WP Greet Box. Generates a message near the top of the page suggesting that you subscribe by RSS or email, tuned to the source of the traffic (e.g. Not even sure if it makes a difference, but. Google XML Sitemaps.

HTML 216

HTML RSS Caching PHP 216

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 5, 2010

Your mind is searching for something to think about besides your body’s pain. Exercise is pretty useful for anyone in a startup even without the health and stamina benefits. Just as your best ideas appear while you’re soaping up in the shower, elegant solutions spring up when you’re out running.

Sweat Equity 208

Sweat Equity Startup Viral Equity 208