141–150 of 187 posts
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Thanks for the mention! :) However, people who email us with something to include tend to do even better with making it in or even getting highly featured. We are increasingly finding things we get first and feature then end up on HN or Reddit the next day, so we want to encourage that ;-)
Nice, thanks for the reply, it never occurred to me to do it that way :)
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Prior to product market fit, the founders need to be selling. Once you have product market fit, you need people who already know how to sell your type of product into your target market. That was a mistake that we made. We started by hiring smart people and trying to let them figure out how to sell. I strongly recommend NOT doing that. In startupland, time is your greatest enemy and you don't have time for people to…
This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.
I thought sales was just sales and if you could sell one thing, you could sell anything. What I didn't realize is that selling B2B to a small business and selling B2B to an enterprise is as different as a skill set as writing compilers and building web scale applications. It takes years to get really good at each one of those things.
I've also learned that as a founder/CEO, most of my time is spent selling. I was a software engineer for 10 years and now I pretty much spend all day every day selling. Selling investors on why they should buy 25% of my company, selling potential hires on why we are the next big thing, selling the board on our new plan, selling customers on our product and selling employees on the company vision.
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Prior to product market fit, the founders need to be selling. Once you have product market fit, you need people who already know how to sell your type of product into your target market. That was a mistake that we made. We started by hiring smart people and trying to let them figure out how to sell. I strongly recommend NOT doing that. In startupland, time is your greatest enemy and you don't have time for people to…
Interesting. Can I ask was it familiarity with segment-appropriate marketing channels, segment trends, consumer terminology, competitor product weaknesses and pricing structures, something else, or some combination of the above?
Once we had someone who knew how to sell SaaS to medium and large businesses, we just started doing what they considered obvious and fundamental. It was a revelation to us. :)
We started using software to send emails, track opens and clicks and then call prospects that did any of those things. You have to do a lot of dials, but eventually, someone answers. Of course they're not interested, so back to dialing. After 30 answers you'll get one that is interested.
Sales is just a numbers game. It's hard work. It's hella hard work. But send enough emails and make enough calls and you'll make some sales. And there is nothing like the feeling of closing a sale after grinding it out. Over time the sales add up, and before you know it, you are having a party with silly string and noise makers because you passed $1M in sales! (That was a fun day!!!)
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Are you open to consulting? Either to help in hiring a person like you or in getting your help directly? My email is in profile.
only for free, current job prevents me from doing anything outside work :). I'll email you when off work
Love your no-nonsense pragmatic attitude :)
If your product doesn't suck and it won't sell you suck at marketing. "Growth hacking" is just a SV koolaid rebranding of marketing. It wasn't a start-up but a consulting company I worked at that had stagnated for about 7 years. 6 months later we had redone our whole marketing setup. New site, new branding, new software, lots of advertisement $ shifted. A year later revenue was almost 3x. We raised our rates so profi…
So c'mon man, don't leave us hanging. What are your marketing strategies? I'm the dev of a really cool product, we have very little money for marketing and we're looking for ways to gain new customers. Our numbers seem good to us, but we're new to this so not sure. Our visitor to registered user conversion is 4% Our registered users to paid user conversion is approx 10% This seems ok to me, but not sure. What we real…
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As a fellow experienced marketer I would implore you to not use the term "marketing guru." The word "guru" has a really bad connotation with all of the info product snake oil salesmen and wannabe marketers out there. The reality is that marketing is an increasingly specialized and technical domain requiring knowledge of coding, data, etc. and it can be hard enough as it is to help people trust we're not all scammers…
As a programmer I'd be really interested in knowing what kind of coding skills are useful to marketers. Could you give me examples of use cases and useful tools / languages ?
You will eventually need to write stuff to connect a bunch of different systems together and aggregate data in special ways. Basically classic integration and database work. Similar to enterprise programming in a lot of ways.
What happens quickly with marketing is that you need tracking. Not soon after you need custom tracking because you need to track customer interactions like phone calls, page visits, clicks, form filling, appointments, emails, sales(and how much)... It really goes on until you've integrated the sales pipeline into every corner of your companies interaction with customers. It's very unrealistic to find a piece of software to integrate all this stuff for you so that's where code comes in.
The ultimate data driven marketing system tracks every interaction with every person your company ever talks to(or visits your site) and assigns a value to each one of those people to get you an estimated ROI you can feed back into your advertising channels to see how much money you make from X campaign or advertisement relative to him much it costs.
Some companies achieve this nirvana, most with a horde of people and a thousand spreadsheets, and a few smart ones automate it entirely
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> I thought the hardest part was developing the product. I'm curious: Why did you think that? There are articles, from time-to-time, that decry this notion, and yet I find that young/first-time entrepreneurs often think this. Since it's such a common notion - I've become generally increasingly curious about how it (this idea) is spread. How it gets into people's heads. Any thoughts?
You also read time and time again of a developer building a project they've put little marketing effort into banking them 5k/mo while allowing them to quit their full time job. I think after putting a huge amount of time and effort into a project, you just kind of convince yourself that it's good enough to sell itself.
Thanks!
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Prior to product market fit, the founders need to be selling. Once you have product market fit, you need people who already know how to sell your type of product into your target market. That was a mistake that we made. We started by hiring smart people and trying to let them figure out how to sell. I strongly recommend NOT doing that. In startupland, time is your greatest enemy and you don't have time for people to…
This goes completely contrary to your original comment. Your growth hack/shortcut was in the end, to poach a sales guy from a competitor who had clout with a bunch of customers in your field.