Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

purde.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 67 posts

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#51

Post by shostack »

blumkvist wrote: post #24
standrews wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thank you for chiming in. I'm not sure how you got the impression that I insisted we "don't do any marketing." - sorry if I wasn't clear. What I aimed to say was that product was the main reason for getting to 10k, and marketing tactics and strategies I described each contributed further.

I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success. It also leads to inventing terms like "content m…

Marketer here.

What exactly is wrong with data and insights from a variety of sources that might include Moz, Optimizely, etc? These are marketing technology companies and have a unique bird's-eye perspective of raw data across numerous companies. Further, people like Rand Fishkin know their shit. You might disagree with it, but I guarantee if you had a conversation with him and voiced your arguments, he'd be able to cite plenty of data to back up his claims and have an honest debate about it.

Marketers who take what they read as gospel concern me, and I fully agree with that. People need to do their due diligence and figure out how things apply to their business. They should also read broader respected industry news sources (ie. searchengineland, searchenginejournal, etc.), and be active in communities of people tackling similar challenges with similar experience to trade notes.

I agree with the other comments though on the fact that building a great product isn't necessarily marketing. Informing great product design through solid market research could come from marketing, but that is very different than physically building a product. The "build it and they will come" fallacy is a dangerous one. Communicating that you have a product is the act of marketing. Even placing it on a website with content is marketing because you may get organic search traffic, or referral traffic if people link to you, etc.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#52

Post by floody-berry »

downandout wrote: post #11

>Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing...The main thing that got Pipedrive to first 100, 1000 and 10000 customers was having a great product. I'm sure that it's a great product. That's usually a prerequisite for success, but hardly guarantees it. For every extremely successful product, there are hundreds of equally great products that falter - primarily for lack of luck. This kin…

Remove selection bias or straight up marketing spam from authors and the willingness of many users to believe anything someone who claims they're making money says and HN would be a lot emptier. One can dream..

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#53

Post by blumkvist »

shostack wrote: post #51
blumkvist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success. It also leads to inventing terms like "content m…

Marketer here. What exactly is wrong with data and insights from a variety of sources that might include Moz, Optimizely, etc? These are marketing technology companies and have a unique bird's-eye perspective of raw data across numerous companies. Further, people like Rand Fishkin know their shit. You might disagree with it, but I guarantee if you had a conversation with him and voiced your arguments, he'd be able to…

I don't doubt Rand Fishkin as a marketer. I just don't like misleading people via inventing new terms for already known concepts, like "content marketing" for PR. It disconnects his followers from a lot of knowledge and they keep on reinventing the wheel.

Or optimizely's A/B testing, which depending on your definition is anywhere between wildly imprecise and outright fraud. And this is by design, because they know their customers just won't put the effort into learning experimental design, sampling, normalizing, distributions, hypothesis testing and validating. It's just much better to charge clueless people a monthly fee for what is essentially a redirect script with a WYSIWYG editor, while telling them what they are doing is scientifically sound. And off to the echo chamber they go. Changing a button's color improves CTR by 90%. You can read that on pretty much any blog. Moz, ConversionXL, unbounce, kissmetrics, SEJ, any blog/publication which passes for "industry authority". Sorry, I just don't have the time to sift through all of this self-serving bullshit.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#54

Post by blumkvist »

philod wrote: post #45
blumkvist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success. It also leads to inventing terms like "content m…

I'm sensing a marketing academic. I agree with some points and the echo chamber is very real However, while I wish there were more people reading peer reviewed journals and debating the full spectrum of marketing, the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online (we are talking about SaaS here). Research and empirical work takes time but consumers move quickly, especial…

> the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online

Did you come down to this conclusion by yourself, or did you read/heard it somewhere? Also, I'm not an academic.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#55

Post by [deleted] »

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #49
blumkvist wrote: post #2

>Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing and the next paragraph >The main thing that got Pipedrive to first 100, 1000 and 10000 customers was having a great product. Building a great product IS marketing. It's the most important part of marketing. It's at the beginning of any marketing plan. Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the mark…

Two things. First, marketing is not a scientific discipline. Full stop. Calling it a science does real science a disservice, and reeks as we say down south of putting on airs. Second, you're trying to make marketing encompass every piece of a business, from product idea to design to construction and beyond. It isn't everything. It isn't about designing or creating a product (other than marketing materials or services…

[deleted]

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#56

Post by standrews »

adidash wrote: post #44
downandout wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The short answer: luck. Yes, they have created a great product and yes they did some marketing - the same things that their competitors did. Once the prerequisite hard work has been expended, there are innumerable factors that are completely beyond anyone's control that determine which products succeed or fail.

So you mean Everpix must have hit really rotten luck?

I don't know the Everpix story well, so I'd rather not comment.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#58

Post by lexap »

gk1 wrote: post #13

I think "How we did it" case studies are interesting and useful, but the moment you turn it into "Here's how you can do it too!", you're on snake-oil territory. Edit: My beef is with the prescriptive tone of the post, as if getting 10,000 paying users is as simple as 1, 2, 3...

What? He's saying worked for them. It's all good advice and he gives many caveats about how it may not work for everyone.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#59

Post by lexap »

blumkvist wrote: post #2

>Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing and the next paragraph >The main thing that got Pipedrive to first 100, 1000 and 10000 customers was having a great product. Building a great product IS marketing. It's the most important part of marketing. It's at the beginning of any marketing plan. Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the mark…

Wow, I applaud you for defending marketing on HN. Bravo, brave soul. I wholeheartedly agree as well.

Re: How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS

#60

Post by lexap »

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #49
blumkvist wrote: post #2

>Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing and the next paragraph >The main thing that got Pipedrive to first 100, 1000 and 10000 customers was having a great product. Building a great product IS marketing. It's the most important part of marketing. It's at the beginning of any marketing plan. Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the mark…

Two things. First, marketing is not a scientific discipline. Full stop. Calling it a science does real science a disservice, and reeks as we say down south of putting on airs. Second, you're trying to make marketing encompass every piece of a business, from product idea to design to construction and beyond. It isn't everything. It isn't about designing or creating a product (other than marketing materials or services…

Voice of reason, thank god. Are we working at P&G here? This is startupland, nothing is scientific in the academic sense, least of all marketing or customer behavior. "Peer reviewed?" Please....
Post reply on HN