It's easier and smarter to be in the pickaxe business. All the 'miners' will spread the word online in the form of inbound links, and for free! This type of marketing and propegation is much more profitable than having a sales department. Kudos to 37Signals for being very smart marketers in addition to being talented designers and developers!
Creating systems is an excellent way to standardize simple, repeatable tasks so that you can delegate them. A system, process or procedure can be reduced to a checklist or diagram that shows each step that happens in series and/or in parallel. Using an iterative approach you can improve these over time.
Many aspects of a startup require deep knowledge and expert judgment and intuition about customers, markets, trends and products. These creative, strategic and technical challenges such as customer development cannot be delegated - the founders must execute them.
The premise behind E-myth by Michael Gerber is to 'franchise' your business model by standardizing all possible aspects of it. I think Gerber would agree that you need some initial level of traction with customers before you start. Standardizing too early would be waste unless you have figured out what customers want. My best guess about the time to standardize would be once you have achieved product/market fit, and your business model is ready to scale. At that point, you can invest $1 into your business and know that it will generate a customer lifetime value that's some multiple higher.
Some takeaways:
* Don't spend too much time too early on systems, processes, and policies beyond those which relate directly to customers and sales.
* Standardize any task you have mastered that's time consuming, simple and repeatable, and taking you away from mission critical tasks such as raising capital or gathering customer insights. Invest time in creating a simple checklist someone else can follow for any given process/procedure/task/activity (whatever you want to call them), and free yourself up for other high value activities. I have delegated/outsourced/offshored certain tasks such as data entry overseas with some success.
I would be glad to answer any additional questions you have about this - hodgins dot dan at g mail dot com.
So let me get this straight. Critics of this tactic want to get rich doing their own startup, while using the very techniques they just renounced to generate traffic and conversions? Seems a bit hypocritical to me. Wake up folks - business success can be 'seedy' sometimes. As long as your product creates more value than customers are charged, then it's a win-win for everyone.
What if these so-called 'seedy' techniques represented the difference between success and failure for your own startup? I'll bet your position on the white/grey/black hat continuum would shift quite promptly.
Well done Patrick, and thanks for sharing the details about another valuable marketing tactic that people can try.
Very useful follow up to your previous article on 100% conversion rate cold calls. Thanks! By the way, how did you hear about your deer management niche?
This designer used a process similar to the one detailed in the Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly - a book that provides a fascinating and informative glimpse into the innovation process. I highly recommend that book, and I think lots of hackers would both identify with the material and learn new ways of generating both the intuitive and counter-intuitive insights they need to design a superior user experience.
Ever thought of unsubscribing if you don't want the emails? That's what most smart people do.
I have had personal email contact with Derek numerous times, and although we haven't met in person I consider him to be a mentor. He has helped me work through some very specific Rails application architecture issues, and he answered my questions via email in a prompt and thoughtful manner.
Derek has actually done plenty in the past decade, but it looks like you haven't taken the time to find it. He is one of the smartest entrepreneurs out there, and all you have to do is read or listen to interviews to appreciate the depth of his business thinking. Some of the most interesting and effective business, marketing and customer service hacks that I have come across were unearthed from Derek's many talks and interviews that are available online.
Derek, thank you for doing great work for both the music and startup community, and keep doing things your way!
Be where you are. Get a job, save money, do fun stuff with friends. Get outside. Draw. Paint. Travel, Learn guitar. Learn Spanish. Try a new sport. Join a group of some sort. Meet girls! Get outside your comfort zone, and get used to that feeling.
You'll have lots of chances to learn life's tougher lessons along the way - trust me.
At 20 I was a surf bum that had done very little post secondary. Have now completed a two year diploma from a technical school, a university degree, instructor certifications plus one season each of teaching windsurfing and snowboarding professionally, and I am now a self-taught designer/developer - Rails/Ruby/HTML/CSS. It took 11 years between age 20-31 to figure this all out, so be where you are.
To do you need to understand. To do you need to know. This is where insightful teachers like Eric Ries and Steve Blank add value.
I understand your point, but it's also inefficient to put the pedal to the medal and spin your tires endlessly without having any strategy behind your activity.
The whole point of lean startup is to achieve order of magnitude gains of efficiency by focusing on finding out what customers want sooner rather than later.
For those that aren't 'doing'- that's their problem. Eric's work is for doers.
Hipmunk has a great product, strong brand and a promising business model. It sounds like they are targeting more of an early adopter technology audience in the hopes that the 'digerati' will eventually spread it to the early majority and late majority. Both of my parents use Expedia out of habit, and even though it sucks they have learned how to use it and would only switch to Hipmunk momentarily if I hounded them. Even though much of technology is painful to use the prospect of learning yet another new tool exceeds the pain of using something that sucks but gets the job done.
One way for Hipmunk to reach the baby boomer demographic would be to build awareness among the 18-35 link-happy crowd and let them demonstrate it to their parents thus creating a seamless user recruitment experience.
37 Signals has followed a "market by sharing" strategy since the beginning.
They have no sales force or advertising and yet manage to create entertaining, educational and valuable content in a variety of formats that gets spread throughout the web and garners them valuable distribution.
The idea is to share everthing that's in and around your domain. For instance, a small web design shop could create content on the following topics:
* How to write a killer proposal
* How to close sales
* Design tips for small businesses
* Mobile strategy for small businesses
* Is Groupon worth it?
* Web site tips
* etc
Most businesses will never achieve the reach that 37 Signals has - for obvious reason. Not all of us could invent Ruby on Rails. However, I think every small business and startup can implement the strategies used by 37 signals - share everything, including your secret sauces and recipes just like chefs do, and you'll increase reach and decrease user acquisition costs.
"Once you do the math you realize there is far more travel media out there than travelers, especially in a down economy".
I recently shut down my travel startup - a site that offered tours and excursions in many of the world's greatest cities.
Why? The VC-funded big boys have 2,000 affiliates and many thousands of inbound links to their site. This bumps them up in the organic rankings which sends more traffic to their site - enabling them to gather more conversion data. As conversions gradually increase, their product becomes more attractive to other affiliates, and more sign up, thus perpetuating a positive feedback loop.
Learned a ton during the process of building the company, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.
To all prospective founders out there - really do your homework and understand the competitive advantages held by the top competitors in your market - things that are very difficult, time consuming, and/or expensive to replicate!
For example, 37 Signals now has a passionate fan base of hundreds of thousands of people based on years of teaching and writing opinionated rants. Nearly impossible to replicate for a new startup trying to market simple project management software.
Also, realize that cute innovations and a great user experience might not overcome the massive reach held by existing companies.
* Talent
* Cash flow
* Category-leading brand name
* Gain strategic leadership position in rapidly growing market
Assume you were to create a Groupon competitor that could potentially overtake Groupon. How much funding would you expect to raise to fund such a startup?
Yes, Groupon has a strong position right now. But so did the established search engines when Google came on to the scene.....
You're welcome Gareth. Striking a balance between enough information yet enough filtering/curation could prove to be one of your biggest challenges. Nothing that a few rounds of iteration and lots of feedback wouldn't fix.
Firstly, your landing page is beautifully designed. It's simple, minimal, and gets the job done.
I am intrigued by this devops thing, but your landing page doesn't mention anything about it. You might consider adding a new <div> above your email signup <div> containing the 'elevator pitch'. Something like: "Expertly Curated Devops News Delivered Straight To The Inbox, Weekly"
With a couple of tiny tweaks this landing page will be much stronger.
Actually, if the recruiter does their job well, you'll contact them every time you are considering a career change (perhaps every 5 or 10 years) because you'd be a fool not to. This 'cradle to grave' business model results in the highest lifetime value per candidate for the recruiter.
Some recruiters do actually have your best interests at heart and work hard to find you the right role. Why else would you go back to them in the future or refer your smartest friends?
It's a good sign if a recruiter refers you to a competitor or is 100% honest that they don't think they'll have a position for you in the near future. Any recruiter who operates with a shred of integrity will be glad to do either.