It's always odd to me when a company spends more time trying to market the people behind the product rather than the product itself. The marketing of the product should be in the forefront across all pages and any mention of yourselves should be short and to the point. You don't even need to mention the people behind it (although, we do, but only our names and links to our websites/blogs).
You're a little company, now act like one
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: You're a little company, now act like one
#22Putting aside the corpspeak fluff, I wonder if this advice is valid for SaaS as well. I understand managers won't feel nervous after buying a mockup or code review tool from a small supplier, but would they be as willing to put business-critical data into a small company's servers? Would you let a one-man shop run your CRM?
Re: You're a little company, now act like one
#23A bit of meta-commenting but the "Welcome HN" banner which encourages us to upvote the story put me right off. I'll vote it up if I like it, not because you customized your site to "Welcome" me because I read HN.
For every 100 people who read HN, my guess is that 10 upvote stories and 1 comments. I bet that more than half of regular HN readers don't even know that the site is powered by voting despite the little arrows next to each story.
If people knew to upvote stories they liked on their own then the average story would have something like 800 upvotes. I agree with what you're saying because if everyone did this it would be really annoying, but certainly most people don't upvote the stories they like.
Re: You're a little company, now act like one
#24Why does hitting take me to a login page? That was odd.
Re: You're a little company, now act like one
#25Love this post. This has been our standard marketing tack for years, and was a real conflict early in the company.
How are we doing? Check out:
Do we sound like VC-funded 6-person-marcom team boring jerks, or just the real jerks we actually are?
Re: You're a little company, now act like one
#26I entirely agree with this. I wrote Serendeputy's about page in my own voice. I did it partly to separate myself from the my more corporatey competitors, but mostly because I despise the way I sound when I try to speak corporate droid. It makes me want to cry.
That might be my number one reason for doing a startup: the ability to avoid doing things that make me want to cry.
Re: You're a little company, now act like one
#27[deleted]
Re: You're a little company, now act like one
#28I love the advice given in this article. In working on putting together a little company of my own, I often find myself looking at what seems to be "accepted" and trying to steer in that direction. This creates a lot of fluff in my language and, honestly, I end up with something that I don't think I'd even be interested in trying. Keeping it simple and honest always sounded like a good idea, but the fact that people…
Not sure I agree with this. My startup (Frogmetrics, YC S07) hasn't tried to sound big or small. Our site focuses on the service we provide, in concrete language with a clean design. We don't try to sound bigger than we are, but we also don't play up our smallness with a bunch of cute catchphrases either. We've been pretty successful so far at getting big customers, and I think we'd have done less well with a more "startup authentic" aesthetic.
I think the better lesson is to tailor your messaging to your target buyer. If you're selling to a level III coder at a big company, put the message in a form (s)he will like.
Re: You're a little company, now act like one
#29A bit of meta-commenting but the "Welcome HN" banner which encourages us to upvote the story put me right off. I'll vote it up if I like it, not because you customized your site to "Welcome" me because I read HN.
For every 100 people who read HN, my guess is that 10 upvote stories and 1 comments. I bet that more than half of regular HN readers don't even know that the site is powered by voting despite the little arrows next to each story. If people knew to upvote stories they liked on their own then the average story would have something like 800 upvotes. I agree with what you're saying because if everyone did this it would b…
I up vote 1 in 20 stories because I only like 5% of what's posted to HN. Looking at new submissions is mostly a waste of time, but when I am board I will occasionally take a look. And I expect most regular HN readers act the same way.
Re: You're a little company, now act like one
#30A bit of meta-commenting but the "Welcome HN" banner which encourages us to upvote the story put me right off. I'll vote it up if I like it, not because you customized your site to "Welcome" me because I read HN.
For every 100 people who read HN, my guess is that 10 upvote stories and 1 comments. I bet that more than half of regular HN readers don't even know that the site is powered by voting despite the little arrows next to each story. If people knew to upvote stories they liked on their own then the average story would have something like 800 upvotes. I agree with what you're saying because if everyone did this it would b…
I might vote on 1 out of every 100 things I read, and usually it's not because I like the story, but because I want it to get more comments.