Lone Gunman

When Ilya Licht­en­stein offered free mar­ket­ing advice to star­tups (as a way of thank­ing the Hacker News com­mu­nity) he received over 150 requests and set to work. Cer­tain pat­terns started to emerge in his advice, and so he decided to pro­duced a three-post ‘startup mar­ket­ing lessons learnt’ series (parts two and three).

There’s some fan­tas­tic advice to be found in the series — for both those inter­ested in mar­ket­ing gen­er­ally and those begin­ners actively involved in the craft. For exam­ple in the Artic­u­late a Clear, Spe­cific, Com­pelling Value Propo­si­tion section:

I’m sure you’ve heard the old copy­writ­ing mantra of “list ben­e­fits, not fea­tures”. Take that to the next level. Take the sin­gle most impor­tant ben­e­fit of using your ser­vice, and make that your head­line. […] If you’re build­ing a B2B app to man­age pay­roll, “Cloud hosted SaaS pay­roll for your busi­ness” is not a good head­line. “Spend less time wor­ry­ing about pay­roll” is a bet­ter one. “Cut pay­roll man­age­ment costs by 37% instantly” is even better.

And from Find Your Tar­get Mar­ket, and Seg­ment the Hell out of Them:

When asked who their tar­get mar­ket was, many peo­ple responded “small busi­nesses” or, worse, “any­one”. Alright, fine, you sell your SaaS prod­ucts to small busi­ness in the US. But what kind of small busi­ness owner con­verts the best for you? Which cus­tomers are most likely to be prof­itable cus­tomers? Who is most excited about your prod­uct? You have been track­ing these things, haven’t you? You don’t have the bud­get to tar­get all small busi­nesses, so start with a spe­cific niche or indus­try you think your prod­uct has par­tic­u­larly strong appeal for. Sell­ing time track­ing soft­ware? Start posi­tion­ing as time track­ing soft­ware for accoun­tants, or den­tists, or land­scap­ers. How about tar­get­ing a spe­cific task or fea­ture and find­ing peo­ple look­ing for that fea­ture only? […] Build super niche land­ing pages or, even bet­ter, microsites tar­get­ing each spe­cific mar­ket seg­ment you want to go after, empha­siz­ing the spe­cific ben­e­fits of your prod­uct to that group only.

In 1980, as a $5-an-hour part-time office manager, W. E. Peter­son joined the small com­pany that would go on to become Word­Per­fect Cor­po­ra­tion. Then, twelve years later, after help­ing grow the com­pany to half a bil­lion dol­lars in annual sales and becom­ing the Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent, Peter­son was forced out of the com­pany and set out to chron­i­cle the rise and fall of Word­Per­fect in his book, Almost Per­fect.

You can read Almost Per­fect online like I did after hear­ing about it from Jeff Atwood two years ago. Why am I post­ing this now? Now that the book has a Kin­dle ver­sion I’m re-reading it and liked this para­graph of busi­ness advice from the after­word:

If you read [Almost Per­fect] hop­ing to learn more about run­ning a busi­ness, then I hope you noted the parts about teach­ing cor­rect prin­ci­ples and allow­ing employ­ees to gov­ern them­selves. In spite of the prob­lems I had under­stand­ing and imple­ment­ing this phi­los­o­phy, I am con­vinced it is the best way to run a busi­ness. In today’s com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment, busi­nesses can no longer afford the over­head of one super­vi­sor for every five or six employ­ees. As orga­ni­za­tions flat­ten and super­vi­sion decreases, employ­ees will make more deci­sions on their own and gov­ern them­selves much more than they have in the past. If a com­pany is to func­tion effec­tively, its employ­ees must have a good under­stand­ing of what is expected of them. Very small orga­ni­za­tions may be able to find suc­cess with­out defin­ing and teach­ing cor­rect prin­ci­ples, but any busi­ness with more than 25 or 30 peo­ple must get organized.

Ver­i­fi­able, Wesabe, Sto­ry­tlr, TwitApps, Vox, Swivel and EventVue: All com­pa­nies or prod­ucts that no longer exist after pre­ventable prob­lems caused their downfall.

37signals col­lects their sto­ries so that we don’t repeat the same mis­takes, pre­sent­ing a set of brief post-mortems on failed star­tups.

The recur­ring issues seem to be: solv­ing prob­lems that the world isn’t ask­ing for, not hav­ing a fea­si­ble rev­enue model (specif­i­cally, the dif­fi­culty in mov­ing from a free to a paid ser­vice), the com­plex­ity in scal­ing an idea from a pro­to­type to a func­tional prod­uct, fail­ing to artic­u­late clearly the ben­e­fits the prod­uct will bring and fail­ing to focus on the most impor­tant product/feature.

In addi­tion, there’s the issue Wesabe encoun­tered: com­pe­tent com­pe­ti­tion in the form of Mint:

Mint focused on mak­ing the user do almost no work at all, by auto­mat­i­cally edit­ing and cat­e­go­riz­ing their data, reduc­ing the num­ber of fields in their signup form, and giv­ing them imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion as soon as they pos­si­bly could; we com­pletely sucked at all of that… I was focused on try­ing to make the usabil­ity of edit­ing data as easy and func­tional as it could be; Mint was focused on mak­ing it so you never had to do that at all. Their approach com­pletely kicked our approach’s ass.

You’ll hear a lot about why com­pany A won and com­pany B lost in any mar­ket, and in my expe­ri­ence, a lot of the the­o­ries thrown about — even or espe­cially by the par­tic­i­pants — are utter crap. A domain name doesn’t win you a mar­ket; launch­ing sec­ond or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a mar­ket. You can’t blame your com­peti­tors or your board or the lack of or excess of invest­ment. Focus on what really mat­ters: mak­ing users happy with your prod­uct as quickly as you can, and help­ing them as much as you can after that. If you do those bet­ter than any­one else out there you’ll win.

via @zambonini

When some­one asked for advice on How to become a mil­lion­aire in 3 years on Hacker News, ser­ial entre­pre­neur Jason Bap­tiste took the task seri­ously pro­vid­ing thirty-seven things to focus on when start­ing a com­pany, includ­ing:

• Mar­ket opportunity
• Inequal­ity of information
• Sur­round your­self with smart people
• Your pri­mary met­ric shouldn’t be dollars
• If you do focus on a dol­lar amount, focus on the first $10,000
• Get as many dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels as possible
• Be a mas­ter of information
• Be so good they can’t ignore you
• Give your­self every oppor­tu­nity you can
• Look for the acces­sory ecosystem
• Make the illiq­uid, liquid
• Don’t be emotional
• Don’t leave things up to chance
• Raise rev­enue, not funding
• Don’t get comfortable
• Don’t skimp on the impor­tant things
• Keep the momen­tum going
• Lis­ten to (or read the tran­scrip­tions of) every Mix­ergy inter­view you can
• Learn how to filter

Jason goes into great detail for each item on his list, start­ing his post with the clar­i­fi­ca­tion that these tips are for mak­ing a suc­cess of a busi­ness endeav­our in “a short time frame” (i.e. not specif­i­cally for mak­ing a mil­lion dol­lars in three years).

From the early days of devel­op­ment through to the release and refine­ment of the final prod­uct (and fur­ther), Patrick McKen­zie has been chron­i­cling his jour­ney as a one-man Micro ISV (Micro Inde­pen­dent Soft­ware Vendor).

McKen­zie has recently com­piled a fan­tas­tic list of his best posts and this acts as a list of prac­ti­cal advice for small com­pa­nies on top­ics such as SEO, mar­ket­ing and adjust­ing to the self-employed lifestyle.