131–140 of 492 posts
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I believe that the Tesla Model S does. People were tripping over themselves to buy that thing with no marketing, for all its faults.
Elon Musk is the marketing
Not exactly "business" from a company perspective, but: Learning Solidity. I've been in crypto space for a long time, always wanted to learn Solidity to write contracts, but always postponed. Played with some toy code in the past years and that was it. Recently got back in the scene and saw how many new business opportunities it opens and how financially feasible they are now I hate myself for not going more serious…
Invest in SEO early. And I mean invest all the way, including all the different structured metadata into all of your pages to get your website to appear the best on search results [1]. The long tail and residual effects of it get pretty insane. [1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
Honestly, the two best things you can hire once you have some minimal traction are the best lawyer you can afford and the best accountant / business manager you can afford. The third bit of advice is just something you should tattoo inside your eyelids: cash is king. Now, on with the first two. "Hiring the best you can afford" doesn't mean hiring the best brand (Skadden. PwC etc). Find the person with the best techni…
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It works. These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans. Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months. You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer. -------------------------------------------------------- Startup engine…
"There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD." Don't know from when this is but tech salaries in Thailand are much higher and it's hard to find people. This would be fresh grad level at most.
"The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people are still waiting for customers."
Let's say I've have been having kicked my ass more than I can count on some beliefs I've had, but I yet have to regret working with him.
Me and my two co-founders are asking ourselves this all the time, and in retrospect every strategic change could have happened sooner if we had learnt faster and kept “doing things that don’t scale” as PG famously wrote years ago. The funny thing is that we think we are doing great in that regard only to realize again and again that we have to iterate faster and stop the urge to prematurely optimize for scale. Our la…
Are you saying to take on the consultancy contracts? I fall into that trap as the consultancy contracts are essentially my day job. Also the contracts and my product don’t have anything related to each other :(
I know a handful of people who started with creating websites, then took some consultancy work and now have an entire different software company. They used those two things as a bootstrap to get going with opportunities that presented.
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"There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD." Don't know from when this is but tech salaries in Thailand are much higher and it's hard to find people. This would be fresh grad level at most.
It's heartening to hear how remote work is helping to even out global wealth inequality.
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Tailwind? They've built strong brand awareness through the quality of their OSS tailwindcss product who's been successful without any paid advertisements or sales people that I can see. Similarly Ruby on Rails was great brand awareness for 37 Signal's Basecamp who AFAIK doesn't believe in advertising, and has made a point to pay for a "non Ad" against companies selling ads against their Basecamp trademark https://twi…
DHH and Jason Fried are masters of marketing. Marketing != paid ads. They are great storytellers and have been doing it consistently for the past 20 years with blogs, books and podcasts. The story they built around their products also serves a culture and philosophy of people using their products, and telling other people about it.
If you want to sell into enterprise then you are going to need sales people and hence an expensive product that covers that cost. Those big deals need a lot of hand holding to go through.
There are plenty of counter examples though, where marketing is doing most of the work and the offering is mostly self service. Signing up for a $25/month Saas is never going to warrant a visit from a salesperson.