281–290 of 492 posts
It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spen…
Can't outsource this or even hire for it in the early days
Has to be the founders
To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner: "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…
"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.
Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for – Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will star…
I do miss the days when merely building a good + cool product was enough and organic search traffic would do the rest. The early 00s were great
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember the ABCs A - Always B - Be C - Selling That is, seize the opportunities of presenting your work and your company.
I'll be that guy. Actually it's Always Be Closing. Obligatory Glenngary Glen Ross scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y6EOGY87U&t=104s
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree 100%. I think from an investment perspective putting most of your time into marketing yields the highest return. My biggest struggle so far is: How do I find those people to "sit and talk" to? Any advice on that?
By the way, I just learned the ABC rule in this thread (Always Be Selling) :) So, you should go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter. It's pretty good: https://www.shoto.io
What did one AAA battery say to the other?? Always be celling.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though. Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something…
Gmail didn't just offer 1GB, it also offered the ability to search through emails which I don't think any free service allowed you to at the time In 2004 that was pretty amazing
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes the free product helps you get traction during the initial hard phase of your business when nobody knows your name. A lot of businesses do this as a growing strategy so don't fully discount the backlinks, leads, social media it gave you.
Freemium can work, but without VC it's really hard to sustain. For bootstrappers and small ventures, I'd rather spend the free subsidy in ads. If you do it right, it just works. I hate ads, but they work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?
But aren't there red flags? How can you push too hard too soon, if people were turned off by the product? Unless you're burning budget in an unsustainable manner... but that's not what OP said.
Marketing. The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales. No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/ . In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever wa…
For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?
Crystal Pepsi was another example. Budgets couldn’t overcome the fact it tasted like nutmeg.
Modern era, I worked for a startup that got national media coverage before it was ready. I’m not convinced it was the right product and I know the founder could have spent way more time talking to customers in the ideation stage. But national media coverage created some bad months. I remember a several week stretch with more than 100 support requests in queue.
Fun times, in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the term.