A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 15, 2013

I feel for the journalist, because I see in them the same geekery that inhabits my fellow software developers. There’s no external force destroying our industry and livelihood — in fact just the opposite, software is eating the world , and we’re the teeth. They’re different in detail but identical in kind.

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Salary Software Developers Software Development Software 234

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 1, 2010

We employ actual software developers for Level 1 tech support and email, so you're talking to someone who not only can answer every question but can even read the code to get answers. For example, one of the reasons we're expensive is that we integrate with 20 other software packages. We do things open-source would never do.

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Open Source Dilution Software Developers Software Development 239

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 23, 2010

There's no competition because this is an industry that has never used software to solve this problem.". I know that sounds like a good thing, but what this also implies is that you'll have to convince computer-phobic people to trust software, and that's a disadvantage. But uniqueness doesn't imply lack of competition!

Software Review 275

Software Review Technical Review Software Advertising 275

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 11, 2010

Pick any 5 successful software companies you’d like from one-person microISVs up to the largest and trace how their market focus, product, marketing etc. How were you able to convert this knowledge into a software product? means you need to be the most stubborn S.O.B. Perseverance is the single most important attribute you need.

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Entrepreneur Social Media Software Web 225

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 20, 2011

They’ve heard rules of thumb like “A growing software company is worth 5 times their trailing 12-months revenue.&# This article assumes we’re talking about a volatile industry like software or emerging markets where almost nothing is “well-known&# and company trajectories are all over the map.).

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 31, 2010

What if a huge company with a hundred software developers and a million dollars in marketing budget decides to copy my idea? First, take a deep breath and remember that every little software company on Earth in under this threat. Answer: You're dead! No small company has ever survived competition with a large one! Do what they cannot.

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Software Review Development Team Review Technical Review Software Developers 243

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 24, 2010

Consumers rarely read software license agreements. A good software license agreement that you can re-use in a variety of situations can cost anywhere from $1000 to $5000. You and the end users of your software have patiently waited for five months for the company's legal team review your license. Legal Issues. I hope not.

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Software Review Technical Review Sales Software 233

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 10, 2011

Here’s a simple question, often asked when designing software but more useful when you’re designing your marketing and sales pitch: How are people doing this today without you? Here’s how this gets your marketing and software design off the ground. Example and pattern. What’s the HTML5 tag for sarcasm?)

Software Review 232

Software Review Technical Review .Net Design 232

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 12, 2010

That's what you sound like when you claim that getting a software patent will protect you from competition. Software patents are especially useless for small, bootstrapped startups. If you've lived in the software world for a few years you know the stuff they teach you in school is irrelevant, so who cares what degree you have?

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Intellectual Property Bootstrapping Software Review Open Source 319

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 22, 2012

But the average employee count of the mid-sized is 119 and of the large is 3,100, so if your goal is to sell a copy of your software to everyone inside a company, you have to sell 30 mid-sized for every large. That’s often the argument for going after those mid-sized businesses — look how many there are!

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 4, 2017

Employee #200 will be interested in different sorts of problems to solve, like the ones listed in this document instead of the ones where you’re trying to understand why 7 people bought the software but the next 3 didn’t. In software terminology, communication challenges scale as O(n 2 ). Another is bottlenecking.

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Government Startup Cofounder Technical Support 223

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 18, 2010

My software was the first commercial tool for code review.) I doubt the quality of my software, so I fix bugs as fast as possible, I write unit tests proactively, and I thank my customers for their patience. I doubt the quality of my software, so I spend lots of time covering it up with graphic design and heavy sales pitches.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 28, 2012

Most people are reasonable and in fact want you to succeed, both personally as a small-business owner and professionally in that they want updates to that software.

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Software Review Technical Review Email Revenue 240

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 4, 2019

37signals), maybe due to an informal voice in an otherwise formal market, or because you have a cause — a higher purpose — so that people aren’t just buying a shirt or some software but rather they are supporting a movement (e.g. It could be that your culture resonates with an audience (e.g.

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Software Review Technical Review API Algorithm 133

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Robert has been working in software since 2005. I’m Robert Graham and I’m an internet entrepreneur working on software for deer management. “I’m working on an online software product for deer management and I’m looking to learn from people in the industry and make some connections. He is a Ph.D.

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Campaign Software Review Brazil Conversion 272

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

If not, solving that is much harder and much more outside your control than building software. Don’t forget to vet the price at the same time , otherwise it doesn’t count. Are people coming to your website every day?

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Fractional CTO Coder CTO Hire Design 310

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

Welcome back to Smart Bear Live, the call-in show with Jason Cohen, sponsored by Software Promotions. And please tweet your thanks to Software Promotions for sponsoring Smart Bear Live! Dan: Member Desk is a hosted membership site software. In this episode, we share three more interviews from our AZ Disruptors meeting last fall.

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Cofounder Technical Review Chicago Technical Cofounder 199

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2011

‘Cause otherwise you’ll miss out on stuff like this: How I illegally got 25,000 students at the University of Texas to use my FastScheduler software in the 90′s. Especially if you don’t usually listen to podcasts? When should a company should focus on growth only, ignoring the business model and revenue?

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Cofounder Angel Investor Hosting Software Review 226

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 21, 2017

The reason they want to trade balance-sheet assets for strategy-execution, is that (healthy, growing) software companies are valued on their P&L, i.e. the size and growth of income and earnings. They’re not valued based on how much money they have in the bank nor on how much debt they carry.

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Balance Sheet Vertical Acquisition Revenue 242

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

Freshman Salesman writes: I’ve read somewhere in your blog about how you had a very large organisation as the first customer for your software. To get your question answered , email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com. I’m putting myself in the same boat now with the solution I’m developing so could you tell me: 1.

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Customer Software Review IP Technical Review 231

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 12, 2010

Identifying specific pain points and explaining how your software addresses those is easier than trying to tap into a general malaise and promising a better world. Had I tried to fundamentally change how everyone writes software, I'm sure I would have failed. Change is hard, so a person has to be experiencing real pain to want change.

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Technical Review Software Review Engineer Search 243

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 22, 2011

Congratulations, me, you just out-witted your to-do software. It’s why I couldn’t just make software facilitating peer code review, I had to make it a so-called “real company,&# I had to create the modern theory around it, I had to write a book about it , and I had to push that book into 70,000 people’s hands.

Software Review 250

Software Review RSS Differentiation .Net 250

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 11, 2010

You have all sorts of shortcomings: First startup, inexperienced, ignorant about how "sales" works, buggy software, whatever. It's easy to let your idiosyncratic preconceptions prevent you from observing what the larger market will accept. Pretending your faults don't exist. And a lie by omission is twice the lie.).

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Elevator Pitch RSS Startup Software Review 325

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 30, 2010

He blogs to 10,000 web entrepreneurs at Software by Rob and co-hosts the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us. More than two years ago, my business partner and I discussed launching a hosted version of our ASP.NET invoicing software, DotNetInvoice. Introduction.

Software Review 284

Software Review Startup Technical Review Hosting 284

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 12, 2013

They want to use our software or customize things in ways that are technically impossible, but I don’t know how to communicate this to them. They don’t even know how little they know about software , so how do I basically tell them “You can’t understand this. You’re going to have to trust your doctor.

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Software Engineer Naming Customer 294

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 15, 2011

I built this software for myself, and then it turned out a million people wanted it exactly how I originally envisioned it. We were so good at acting that our first few customers never knew we were a new company with no employees and buggy software. Thanks to a software patent we filed, we never had a serious competitor.

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LLC Founder Startup Campaign 335

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 25, 2010

It's cliché, but it's better to have six solid conversations with people who will buy your software than to give away 200 pieces of branded swag to people who can't remember who you are. Apply what you learned about your software. It will be waiting on their desk one morning without all the distraction of a tradeshow.

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Software Review Sales Email Naming 287

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Jason: Okay, so that’s a very small company in which the CEO is pulling out the credit card for meeting software because even people with a hundred people, the CEO is not the person pulling out a credit card for the meeting software. I don’t care about what the software looks like yet. Edwin: I tend to disagree.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 3, 2010

In fact all these words and phrases should theoretically carry meaning, but theory is for people who don't need to sell $2,600 more software by next Friday so they can make rent. If I had enough hubris to run around christening years, I would declare 2009 The Year of "Authentic." We get it!

Software Review 279

Software Review Technical Review Security Advertising 279

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2011

Another thing we can do is literally measure customer “happiness&# and intercede before it goes from bad to 32B. Hubspot has this down to a science, more so than almost any other company.

Technical Review 236

Technical Review Software Review Reputation Sales Cycle 236

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

Another thing they have in common: I find most high-tech startup founders are software engineers enamored with the idea of waking late, sidling up to a coffeeshop table, pecking away at an IDE, getting into the zone for hours at a stretch, and doing what they love – coding something of their own invention.

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Cofounder Startup Founder Engineer 312

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 9, 2011

Do I dare make fun of Joel Spolsky lest I not get invited back to Business of Software? Do I dare to publicly disagree with a solitary thing Seth Godin says, lest he not consider me for his Domino project? Do I dare to disagree with Jason Fried lest he lay into me like he did Mint ? When do I earn the right to say what I think?

Affiliate 250

Affiliate RSS Software Review Email 250

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

The other thing to say about that is, and Jason may disagree and Pat may disagree, but I don’t think software today has to be morally neutral. I actually sold lots of software to Intuit at Smart Bear. Boy, I’m pretty happy with this new software stuff we’re using here. The back end software for churches.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 25, 2011

These folks had already bought our software, so it didn’t sell more seats. From a business perspective, this was a poor use of my time.

Java 311

Java Software Review Technical Review Salary 311

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 27, 2012

So I hope next time you’re ready to sign up for a monthly software plan or doing your grocery shopping, you’ll take a moment to consider the prices in front of you. But I’m already extremely happy with the sales and feedback I got, so I will resist the temptation to ask “what if?”

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Sales Software Review RSS Web 279

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 30, 2017

In software and startups we can choose when to Maximize , and when to Satisfice. A recent study showed something interesting: Maximizers make better choices , but Satisficers enjoy their choices more , and spend less time and create less stress in making the choice.

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Software Customer Startup Product 182

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 2, 2010

It sounds like shareware, not enterprise software. Software Test and Deployment Systems, Inc, which shortens to the unfortunate "STDS.". So they decided to poll everyone they could find in the software industry — customers and otherwise. His suggestion? Yeah, an acronym already taken by gonorrhea. But which name?

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Naming New Hampshire Cofounder Viral 252