Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
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Re: Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
#2I fly out to Microconf 2013 in approximately 20 hours and haven't finished my presentation yet, so I thought I'd procrastinate by finishing the editing on this transcript of my Microconf 2012 talk. Also includes slides/video.
Feel free to ask questions if you have them.
Re: Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
#3Everyone who has a startup should watch this at least once a day (me included). This is great stuff, Patrick.
Re: Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
#4Everyone who has a startup should watch this at least once a day (me included). This is great stuff, Patrick.
Thanks, glad you liked it. What would you like to hear more about? (I'm shamelessly fishing for ideas for this year.)
Re: Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
#5Everyone who has a startup should watch this at least once a day (me included). This is great stuff, Patrick.
Thanks, glad you liked it. What would you like to hear more about? (I'm shamelessly fishing for ideas for this year.)
I always get questions relating to email. People have a lot of issues with that. They don't seem to get the value of automated email selling. Or even doing it manually. I, for example, make the most money from email marketing. So I know it works. But Hackers and email marketing are a very weird subject. Your insight might get some of them to understand the true value of it.
Re: Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
#6Could you post your list of the 400 new things you could do with Twilio? It seems like there ought to be a lot but I can't think of any.
(Or at least post your process for coming up with them.) I think bitcoin might be another technology that makes big "ripples", no?
Re: Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
#7Could you post your list of the 400 new things you could do with Twilio? It seems like there ought to be a lot but I can't think of any. (Or at least post your process for coming up with them.) I think bitcoin might be another technology that makes big "ripples", no?
Or at least post your process for coming up with them.
Think of a business. Think of any phone call, incoming or outgoing, which is sufficiently standardized that you could teach any college graduate to execute that. That person can be replaced with a Twilio script, at a fraction of the cost.
My wife is sleeping in the room with my business notebooks so I'll hold off on finding and scanning it for the moment, but it was literally as simple as a) write down business, b) write down the calls they make, c) star the ones that sound like money.
I think bitcoin might be another technology that makes big "ripples", no?
We will have to agree to disagree on that one. Bitcoin's core innovation is the distributed self-organizing boiler room. As a transaction processing system it's technically innovative but wildly inferior to legacy payments for transactions which need to touch the real world. (It's interesting for transactions which don't, but could be replaced with a SQL update statement, which would improve upon it in virtually every way.) As a currency/commodity, the arguments in favor of it having a sustainable value north of zero are not credible to me. The main reason I have not nailed an 8,000 word stake in its rotten heart is that I think there's a non-zero risk that people will use every additional quantum of attention given to it as a reason to convince other people to "invest."
Re: Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
#8The video was great! It would be nice to hear about how you get people into the funnel so that we could do a lot of the things you recommend. You already covered SEO, do you have any other customer acquisition techniques?
Re: Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
#9The video was great! It would be nice to hear about how you get people into the funnel so that we could do a lot of the things you recommend. You already covered SEO, do you have any other customer acquisition techniques?
SEO and AdWords are my mainstays for my software businesses. This year I'm going to be dipping my toes into a bit of offline marketing, like e.g. going to the (without loss of generality) Omaha Conference For Orthodontics Practice Managers and just talking to people. Given what I currently surmise about the per-account LTVs for higher-end customers of Appointment Reminder, at many plausible guesses for how many conversations I can have per day and how many people I can convert, it might be worth my time to do that. (Step 1: Do it. Step 2: Do it systematically with predictable ROI. Step 3: Pay someone to execute on Step 2.)
Re: Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It
#10Everyone who has a startup should watch this at least once a day (me included). This is great stuff, Patrick.
Thanks, glad you liked it. What would you like to hear more about? (I'm shamelessly fishing for ideas for this year.)
These are a few things off the top of my head that I'd love to read a blog post on:
- SAAS Pricing when marginal costs are fairly high. For example, how would you price a service that offered human translation of a company's social media posts into N different languages?
- Accounting / corporate structure for bootstrapped SAAS companies: do you use an LLC, and if so things to take into account for cash vs accrual accounting, pass-through vs. corporate taxation, guaranteed payments vs. distributions, finding a good accountant, etc.
- The 8,000 word "stake through Bitcoin's heart", or at least the part that talks about how and why banks are going to stop taking Bitcoin exchanges as clients. There is a surprising amount of doublethink going on to allow people simultaneously believe "Bitcoin and traditional banking are natural enemies", "at least one Bitcoin exchange will always be able to access the banking system", and "the nominal price of Bitcoins can only increase in the long run."