A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Robert has been working in software since 2005. I figured the real problem now was scaling my web application with the influx of new users and handling the overwhelming number of requests to pay me. I’m Robert Graham and I’m an internet entrepreneur working on software for deer management. (Powered by LaunchBit ).

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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. Interviewee: Well, I’m talking web development. Jason: Right. Dan: Exactly.

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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. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Especially if you don’t usually listen to podcasts?

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Cofounder Angel Investor Hosting Software Review 226

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. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. To get your question answered , email me at asmartbear -at- shortmail -dot- com.

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Customer Software Review IP Technical Review 231

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2011

The visual bug tracker for web developers & designers. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Tame bugs like a boss! Powered by LaunchBit ). Tweet. --> At this moment I’m in the worst seat on the plane. Hubspot has this down to a science, more so than almost any other company.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 27, 2012

I had somewhat of an epiphany after reading this article by Joel Spolsky about segmentation (seriously, this is probably one of the top ten posts about sales on the web), and realized that this complex-sounding term actually covered a very familiar concept. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs.

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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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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 3, 2010

When 78% of "About Us" web pages claim "the leading provider" of something, we are no longer impressed. 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. We get it!

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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.

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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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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? Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Do I dare to publicly disagree with a solitary thing Seth Godin says, lest he not consider me for his Domino project? When do I earn the right to say what I think?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

With their new web tool you can collect tweets and snippets, arrange as nicely-formatted collections, then share directly or embed in blog posts as I've done below. 6 Simple Selling Tips For Software Entrepreneurs [link] (from OnStartups). 6 Simple Selling Tips For Software Entrepreneurs. 6 simple tips for selling more software.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 15, 2012

Just like you take a resume and you don’t look at it and go, “Wow, you were in software development for five years. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. So just ignore the feature, in a sense; only use it as a foil to get deeper. That’s fantastic.”

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

Look around — other software companies wait until there’s no bugs at all before they release. Writing software is tricky. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. That’s why they have no usability problems nor lack important features. Write the code first.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 12, 2012

Robert Graham of WhiteTail Software (and this awesome guest post on cold calling ) asks: @whitetailsoft When do you stop #custdev efforts and build the product? “But it’s impossible to get non-technical people to pay for ‘software’ that’s nothing more than sketches on a napkin,” I hear you say.

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Customer Customer Development Dilution Engineer 252

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 19, 2011

So too with software — “v1.0″ Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. The first electric car, while impressively innovative, was pretty bad by most standards — short-range, sluggish, unattractive, and constantly in the repair shop. It’s just history.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 11, 2010

New book: Web Startup Success Guide. Q: You’ve stated that the goal of both your new book ( Web Startup Success Guide ) and your new tool for entrepreneurs ( StartupToDo ) is to double an entrepreneur's chance at success: Increase from 10% to 20%. How were you able to convert this knowledge into a software product?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 15, 2010

Appearing at the top and bottom of posts, both on the web and in the RSS feed, this is the Tweetmeme button that millions of other people use. outside the main text, not word-wrapped inside), and none could handle the use-case of dealing with imported posts from other blogging software (I used to be on Squarespace ).

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

During a lull in her practice she got a serendipitous opportunity to shift gears completely and ended up leading software product development teams. But now she has the vision and ability to design her own software, capitalizing on modern trends (e.g. Now Adriana has an epiphany?:

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 8, 2010

Another clause in most employment agreements is that anything you do physically at work, or on software and equipment owned by the company (e.g. If your project is really yours alone , it cannot be assisted by a company laptop, company software, or company Internet connection. This clause is fair. Assume Big Brother is watching.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 3, 2011

And Dharmesh is a SaaS business-model God, as evidenced by his well-reasoned Business of Software speeches and tangible success with Hubspot. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. It went something like this: NOAH: So if you could change just one thing at WP Engine, what would it be?

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Metrics Startup Revenue Engineer 273

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. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. What are your tips for raising prices? Let’s collect more in the comments.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 1, 2010

Having nothing but the Web of Lies Internet to rely on for tech support is not free. 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. You: Software is so crappy nowadays, we expect failure.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 31, 2011

So I think the ideal customer is: SaaS, ISV, Web Products. ” But “Web Products” is neither a market nor a target customer. Here’s the most common one which I got just this week: I’ve read somewhere in your blog about how you had a very large organisation as the first customer for your software.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 8, 2012

Welcome back to Smart Bear Live, the call-in show with Jason Cohen, sponsored by Software Promotions. Don’t forget to sign up for the wonderful Business of Software conference to hear Jason speak in person. So it’s property management software? Our software will do that. I don’t get this.

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API Software Review Hosting Technical Review 220

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. All orders had to be manually placed through their web-based shopping carts.

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Software Review Startup Technical Review Hosting 284

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

” Introduced a few months ago as an Austin event, I’m now doing this live audio advice column to the web, taking phone calls from startups around the country. 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. ’ Why?

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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. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. From a business perspective, this was a poor use of my time. How do you say “no&# by saying “yes?&# Do you have stories either way?

Java 311

Java Software Review Technical Review Salary 311

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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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 28, 2011

It’s like backup software. ’ And then the first thing you do after restoring the machine is you go and get backup software. You couldn’t, I mean, it’s obvious you need backup software, but you have to fail at that first before you will accept that. And you’re never going to screw that up again.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 17, 2012

Here they are in 2007 , justifiably proud of getting 138,000 sign-ups in 3 short years: Founder Mike McDerment showed us the update at Business of Software 2011 — it’s identical in shape, except they just passed 3,500,000 users. All of them simple, all of them usable by relatively non-technical people, all of them web-based.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 24, 2012

Welcome back to Smart Bear Live, the call-in show with Jason Cohen, sponsored by Software Promotions. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. In this episode, special guest Mark Suster joins Jason to talk with Dan Bowen from SyncBloc.com. Mark: Great, awesome. Jason: Good luck, Dan.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley Software Review Internet Technical Review 204

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

I would work full-time making software all day, and at night I would go home and give ski instructions here in Michigan. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. That’s what I think it is. Melissa: You nailed it. Jason: Woo. Melissa: That’s exactly what it is. This was a lot of fun.

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Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

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. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Would you do it again?

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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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Sales Channel Cofounder Valuation 260

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

How do you get 40,000 fans, whether web app customers, blog readers, or book-buyers? A strong minority aren’t even in software. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. After all, wouldn’t you be happy with 40,000 zealous fans, each contributing $10/mo to your cause?

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