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

JANUARY 13, 2015

But if not that, then SEO or blog posts or tweets or word of mouth and so on, so it’s still going to take 10s of millions of impressions. Maybe between higher MRR, more targeted marketing, and stronger sales, you can whittle down the required number of customers and impressions by 10x. So what can be shifted?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

Examples: large bidders tripled the cost per click, Google’s SEO algorithm changed, the event organizers changed the rules or stopped doing the event, the link-sharing site became irrelevant, the hot blog lost its traffic, the magazine running the ads finally failed. 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

MAY 23, 2011

It finally dawned on me a few weeks later that my daily feelings were fluctuating with our sales numbers. For me, most of the time it stems from seeing our daily sales numbers. In other interviews of Noah he’s alluded to mentors in other aspects of his business too, like getting SEO advice from the great Avanish Kaushik.

Argentina 316

Argentina Email Web SEO 316

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 23, 2012

But all that investment in growth and sales force didn’t have a long-term payback, and the actual value of the product to small businesses wasn’t as high as claimed, even though the simplest of customer development reveals this fact (ask any restauranteur).

IPO 240

IPO Flash Bootstrapping Private Equity 240

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!

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Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 11, 2010

Superior SEO" and "unique features" are not competitive advantages. You have all sorts of shortcomings: First startup, inexperienced, ignorant about how "sales" works, buggy software, whatever. Here's the list: Invalid competitive advantages (coming soon.). Lacking an unfair advantage (coming soon.)? Pretending your faults don't exist.

Elevator Pitch 325

Elevator Pitch RSS Startup Software Review 325

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. Example: SEO, where the top three search results receive nearly all the traffic. Counter-Example: Social Media.

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Channel SEO Marketing Social Media 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 11, 2010

And depending on your startup’s market, traditional marketing (paper spam, email spam, sales visits, shows, conferences, display ads, etc.) It happens to be a very happy circumstance that we can now translate time via social marketing (blogs, Twitter, Facebook and all the rest) into sales. may still have some residual value.

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Entrepreneur Social Media Software Web 225