A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 8, 2019

You could get your first few hundred customers through GoogleAds, or Facebook ads, or affiliate sales, or targeted outbound sales, or partnering with a high-profile reseller, or great press about your unique brand and message, or other ways. Consider marketing channels. Only one of these needs to work!

Affiliate 245

Affiliate Stock Channel Portfolio 245

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 11, 2010

It sounds simple: The average cost of acquiring a customer is $C (advertising, sales, support, doing demos) and the lifetime revenue you get from that customer is $R, so if C < R you have a business. Tags: How-To advertising branding lead-gen marketing positioning social media. Share the love in the comments section.

Software Review 261

Software Review Technical Review Viral Software Developers 261

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 22, 2013

A great writer (content marketing, social media) versus 100 average bloggers. Even in sales, which is tempting for Vulcan engineers to think of as revenue-acquisition-robots with zombie-like drive to make phone calls, in which a slew of barely productive “closers” may not be financially efficient but will still get the job done.

Engineer 257

Engineer Social Media Acquisition Sales 257

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 12, 2010

It's hard to explain" should not be a standard part of your sales pitch. When they hear about a new social media craze they cringe in agony, desperately hoping it's a passing fad and not another new goddamn thing they'll be aimlessly paddling around in for the next decade. You just need to try it" and "trust me" don't cut it.

Technical Review 243

Technical Review Software Review Engineer Search 243

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 25, 2010

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. On sales of $216, Eric sold Winnable Solitaire for a small sum. Maybe with an Aaron we'd have a chance.

Reputation 229

Reputation Hosting DC Social Media 229

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. “It’s not fair,” we all said to ourselves. That was before WhatsApp sold for 19 billion dollars, with 55 employees. That’s $345m per employee, compared to Instagram’s paltry $77m per employee. Don’t forget it.

Metrics 246

Metrics Early Stage Retention Revenue 246

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 13, 2015

Maybe between higher MRR, more targeted marketing, and stronger sales, you can whittle down the required number of customers and impressions by 10x. Yet another answer might be developing a digital following through social media, email lists, blog posts, eBooks, and so on. So what can be shifted?

Business Model 120

Business Model Affiliate Startup Bootstrapping 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

Examples: A popular app drops to zero downloads after Apple builds it into iOS; A Microsoft Office add-on drops to zero sales after Microsoft builds that feature into Office; A Twitter utility breaks when Twitter removes functionality from their public API. The product was built on a platform , and the platform changed.

Software Review 294

Software Review Channel Revenue Non-Compete 294

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Andrew Warner, the interview host, summarized it well: "My hands were trembling as I was faxing eighty pages of the agreement over to the lawyers in New York City," Jason Cohen said about what it was like to finalize the sale of the company he founded, Smart Bear.

Angel Investor 161

Angel Investor New York City RSS Viral 161

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 5, 2012

Are any actually good at generating sales? I eventually built a system that could measure campaign efficacy with pinpoint accuracy, even with traditionally different media like print. (I

Advertising 229

Advertising Campaign Demand Audience 229

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

The easy part of this startup will be getting attention and making sales. Getting consistent attention from the media is easy too — why wouldn’t popular bloggers want to write about you all the time?

Stealth 309

Stealth Database Software Founder 309

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 11, 2011

You already know that nowadays you’re invisible without some sort of social media presence. You need a sale today. You already know the (alleged) benefits of having a personal or business blog. But you still don’t blog, and for good reason, right? Blogging is work, and ten other things are more important.

Widget 268

Widget Social Media Software RSS 268

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 11, 2010

Q: You’re a big advocate for startups using social media because it's essentially free (in dollars). Jason, you’re right: social media marketing takes lots of time. And depending on your startup’s market, traditional marketing (paper spam, email spam, sales visits, shows, conferences, display ads, etc.) Guilty! :-).

Entrepreneur 225

Entrepreneur Social Media Software Web 225

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 31, 2011

I had none of those things at Smart Bear , no unfair advantage at all, no network, no blog, no insights, no sales skills, no marketing skills, not even a particularly good product. One gets 100 paying customers from a single TechCrunch announcement; the next says their TechCrunch announcement garnered 10,000 visits and zero sales.

Customer 279

Customer Software Review SEM Technical Review 279

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. We didn’t line up that press and have those sales materials and ensure code-quality high enough to scale on day one, without predictability. This means you can — and should!

Government 223

Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

P.S. For more, here are detailed examples of how this mindset also sets up your sales pitch. Chris Brogan commands $22,000 for a single day of consulting in an industry (social media marketing) where all the information you need is already online and free. I can see the sales pitch now. Personal authority.

Software Review 325

Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

There are things you can get for sales force if you use salesforce.com. First of all, the enterprise level processes and the one like you described, where there is one or two people just trying to do basic sales with Highrise, extremely different context that they operate in, and different price points, by the way.

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

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 My father was very successful in his consulting position and was instrumental in a number of significant sales of earth stations and satellite equipment. starting at the 35:39 mark].

Entrepreneur 246

Entrepreneur San Francisco North Carolina Cofounder 246

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 4, 2015

bidder, and the few companies who get the good slots will get the vast majority of the clicks, whereas the other companies cannot get enough clicks to materially impact their sales. Counter-Example: Social Media. That is, not only do you get the sale, all your competitors don’t get the sale.

Channel 120

Channel SEO Marketing Social Media 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 5, 2010

Zero media appearances in traditional media. Or really any connections for media. I’ve been blessed to have snuck into the media over 100 times including ABC, CNN, CBC, The Wall Street Journal, Bnet and more. Here are some of the lessons learned: #1: It Starts With Being A Media Source & Creating Interesting Content.

Community 261

Community Audience Video Social Media 261

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 28, 2011

So, what I mean is, especially at the beginning, you want so bad to get that big sale, or get that big customer name on the website, or add some feature, because you only have three customers, and they’re asking for something. Or, yeah, you didn’t want a business that was 70 hours a week.

Cofounder 223

Cofounder New York Conversion Entrepreneur 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 7, 2016

A good answer is previous experience in the industry, including easy sales contacts and insight into the language, life, and challenges of that industry (although this is also a trap ). Social Media makes group-games viral. Smart phones (with internet and GPS and maps) at sufficient consumer penetration make Uber and Lyft possible.

San Francisco 170

San Francisco Startup Framework Azure 170

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. This is the principle behind my satirical post on the “rules&# of social media. (In All done, you can stop reading now. (As As if I have the power to decide when you stop reading.).

Channel 250

Channel Conversion eCommerce Social Media 250

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 25, 2010

Examples: Make a sale on the tradeshow floor. I frequently get a few sales just from the presentation. The sales guy you see at the counter screws things up. I know, you thought "print media" was dead. Sales people aren't enough. Air out some of those folks who typically don't get to go on sales calls.

Software Review 287

Software Review Sales Email Naming 287

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. But yes, in the words of Ben Horowitz , “Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions.” Never mind managing consultants or employees!

Cofounder 312

Cofounder Startup Founder Engineer 312

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

With all these new tasks, there’s no way you can also manage the projects and client relationships and internal product development, so you’ll need a project manager or a sales person or an office manager or some kind of help, and all of those come out of your profits. None of these new tasks are fun or creative.

America 330

America Employee Hiring HTML 330