11–20 of 39 posts
On a side note, if your Vimeo account is Pro/Plus, please check the 'make accessible for mobile devices' option in account settings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 acc…
My accountant, Cameron Keng, is giving an attendee talk on this very topic at Microconf this year. I'm going to be taking notes. (The cheapest advice from him I'll get this year, for certain. ;) ) Remind me to post them if he doesn't.
Noted on the other two suggestions.
To explain in my eyes, I see marketing as everything you do to promote your project (i.e. brand/product/etc.), which may not always have a direct financial payout tied to it. For instance, FOSS projects have their own motivations for gaining usage and popularity, and revenue may be tied to that, but they're not explicitly selling anything. But, they do wish to get noticed, to have people try them out, etc. and so they are selling the idea of their project even though they're not actually ringing anything up at the register.
On the other hand, "sales" is much more closely coupled with driving a user to purchase (or maybe even just 'sign-up' for) your service or product. This is what I'm mostly seeing in the slides: pricing, email campaigns, conversion rates, etc. These are all pretty exclusive to making a sale, and while they do embody marketing concepts, there's a lot more to marketing than simply corralling the customer to the register.
Why am I droning on about this? I'll admit that it's for selfish reasons; I was hoping to see some marketing guidance for the page itself. I review lots of projects, and a majority of them that are created by engineers fall into one of the following buckets:
* zero marketing whatsoever, possibly only a github page with a couple sentences in a readme
* poorly-constructed marketing, such as using lots of buzzwords and generic phrases without actually telling me anything at all about what the project actually is or does; for instance, many times the only blurb given is akin to "cures what ails you"
Now there are some that get it right, though I suspect that many of these either have someone with marketing skills on the team, or they've had an actual marketing guru help them out. That, or they're generally really observant and pick-up on it without having to study.
Either way, when I review a project, it's a shame that the basics are so often neglected:
* problem definition: in explicit terms, what problem(s) does your project solve?
* product differentiation: if yours is "the best", "an alternative", "the new way", etc., then why do you think that? Why should I choose yours over X? If you can provide some concrete examples here, all the better.
* product demo: if it can be demo'd, then please at least create a simple working demo. Note: I don't consider projects that include demos as a part of the source code, which must be downloaded, built, and configured as a proper demo. I also don't consider any that require you to register or provide an email address as a proper demo, either. Unless it's a very pressing need that I have, I'm not going to spend 5-15m fiddling with your source or giving away my info. Just host it somewhere so that I -- and possibly my CTO/CEO/purchasing agent -- can see it in action.
* licensing, terms and conditions, etc.: make them prominent enough that I don't need to browse your source files or open a support request to find out if I can even use it.
Sorry, this got longer than I anticipated...
I 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.
I 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.
Excellent advice as always. One question: When talking about marketing for internet businesses, I don't remember you mentioning branding much, if at all, mostly direct response marketing stuff. Is this by choice? Have you got an opinion about branding for internet startups - eg how many resources they should devote to it compared to direct response marketing?
Could 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?
That being said, I just got a US phone number and I get at least 3-4 calls a week for the previous owner of my phone number. Those calls seem to be revolving around credit loans that she had.
To me it seems as if they try to remind her that she should pay those loans back. One could pretty easily build a really annoying twilio-based version of those phone calls...
Could 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…
I 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.
I've heard Rob Walling recommend this approach on his podcast, and noticed you do it for AR, but I've never seen you write about it. I would love to hear just a little more about it and any A/B data you've collected on it.
On the one hand it obviously decreases the number of users passing through the sign up stage of the funnel, but on the other hand it's obvious that the customers who do sign up convert a lot more.
Thanks!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excellent advice as always. One question: When talking about marketing for internet businesses, I don't remember you mentioning branding much, if at all, mostly direct response marketing stuff. Is this by choice? Have you got an opinion about branding for internet startups - eg how many resources they should devote to it compared to direct response marketing?
Most of my businesses are aggressively unbrandable (with the debatable exception of myself personally). Branding strikes me as not really playing to my strengths and not being maximally compatible with the sort of time and resource constraints most small businesses / startups are operating under. (If I were in a confrontational mood I'd also describe it as "A great way to spend a lot of money while avoiding any respo…
By the by, I also think that a lot of what you suggest for direct response marketing also has branding effects - just think about educating people by email for free - so the two things aren't necessarily in contrast. And I don't think that there would be much to debate about the value of your personal brand here (meaning no offence - if you don't like the word brand, just substitute "reputation" to it!).