If You Build It, They Won’t Come.

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-it-they-wont-come/

by jasonlbaptiste • 16 years ago

216 54 16 years ago

mcargian2• 16 years ago

is anyone else getting a virus fishing attack warning on this link?

Update: The .js file had an unescaped string in it. I just updated to this new design/theme a week ago. I removed the unescaped part and all should be fine now. I'm on mediatemple btw.

mcargian2• 16 years ago

From AVG:

wp_content/themes/LightBright/js/League_Gothic_400.font.js

Exploit link to exploit site

edit: FF 3.6.8 on Windows - AVG 9

anonymousDan• 16 years ago

Ya, something weird happens when I open the site, my computer starts making lots of beeping sounds and tries to run something in windows media player.

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

You really should write that book, I would have given my left arm for this article 12 years ago. Excellent stuff, one thing I would add - and it's only a small thing - get a professional copywriter with PR experience to write your press release for you. If it isn't in the right format it will be completely ignored.

jasonlbaptiste11• 16 years ago

One thing I really want to do in the next couple of years is write a book re: an entrepreneurial topic. Just need the time to do it right.

Agreed re: press releases. They're still used, not sure how effective depending on the audience, but they need to be done right. It's not terribly expensive either.

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

Well, at least I got the email bit right :)

It's disappointing to see how much stuff gets announced here and how little of it is still alive a year later.

patio112• 16 years ago

One suggestion: I'd put SEO in the pre-launch box. There are significant portions of calendar time involved in SEO, so might as well start the site marinating in the Google juice while you go do other things.

Additionally, there are many, many things you can do for SEO which don't require your product to exist. You don't have to have a solution available to show to be able to, e.g., blog about the problem domain, create resources which solve problems for the people you hope will eventually give you money, start pushing the emotional buttons of folks in the niche, etc.

AdWords, on the other hand, you can put off until you have reason to suspect that you'll be able to do it profitably. (If you can't make money with a customer acquisition cost of zero from organic search, it is unlikely you will be able to make money on AdWords.)

jasonlbaptiste11• 16 years ago

great point. updated post and linked to this comment. Gracias amigo.

il6• 16 years ago

I agree, with the exception that you should never view organic traffic as free. Even if you didn't spend any money on SEO directly(e.g. buying links) SEO can be very time consuming, and you should always consider the opportunity cost of time spent on SEO versus other traffic sources.

I pay my outsourced employees who do SEO for me by the hour, so maybe I feel the financial pinch of a large scale SEO campaign more than others, but any time spent on SEO by anyone in your startup is money.

patio112• 16 years ago

This is a good point. I was trying to talk about unit economics: a customer from organic SEO is free at the margin, and if you're not able to monetize them profitably with a marginal cost of 0 then it is strikingly unlikely you will be able to buy them on AdWords and make up the loss on volume.

mcdowall• 16 years ago

I would definitely agree with this plan of action. I am intending on launching my bootstrapped startup in around 4-6 months time, with that in mind I started my seo campaign with longtail keyword landing pages just last week.

zackattack• 16 years ago

Are there any best practices for linking up a blog to your site for SEO purposes?

Do you have any marinating recipe tips?

il6• 16 years ago

Great post, but I wish startups,as well as this article, devoted more attention to SEO and paid advertising like PPC/Social. In many industries, paid traffic will be the primary driver of signups and sales, and it's a mistake to think you can replace a large scale media buy campaign with a few blog posts or tweets.

Groupon and Zynga are excellent examples of this.

Also, don't underestimate the power of affiliate programs. As an affiliate I have the unique perspective of promoting Zynga, Groupon, Zoosk, and other "viral" competitors, and I can tell you that they had one thing in common: one of the main drivers of their early growth and traction was a well-managed affiliate program, with numerous affiliates pushing thousands of signups a day to them.

This requires a budget and strong understanding of the affiliate space, but it can be a tremendously powerful shortcut to success. I think if you're a funded startup with a clear path to profitability, you should absolutely devote a significant chunk of your budget to paid advertising(assuming you or someone you hire knows how to optimize and manage the campaign so you don't lose money).

brianbreslin2• 16 years ago

I'd venture to guess that most startups don't know how to start an affiliate program. There aren't many simple solutions that they can integrate easily (via an api or something) and aren't super costly up front (not all startups have $5k to dump into CJ). Jason's company is touching on this for SaaS sites, but there is definitely a big hole in the market there.

klous• 16 years ago

http://zferral.com/ (not affiliated) has a pretty decent, simple build-your-own affiliate / referral program.

jasonlbaptiste11• 16 years ago

HUGE market for it outside of SaaS. The things out there are either too complex or just all around garbage.

pinksoda• 16 years ago

I saw the virus on your site earlier. It appears to be gone now and I couldn't find any XSS or SQL vulnerabilities on your site. Here's some other stuff to consider:

- Possibly vulnerable to mod_rewrite off-by-one buffer overflow (Apache 2.0.54). Upgrade Apache.

- Possibly vulnerable to header injection (Apache 2.0.54). Upgrade Apache.

- Possibly vulnerable to session fixation attack. Set session.use_only_cookies = 1 in php.ini

- Install mod_security if you haven't already. It's a great extra layer of security and can save your butt when someone forgets to sanitize input (which WordPress and 3rd party plugins frequently do).

jasonlbaptiste11• 16 years ago

Many thanks for the insight. Lot of it detailed here too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551868 Sadly, my blog is on mediatemple, so I can't change a lot of the good Apache stuff. I may switch to the semi advanced setup I have running for Cloudomatic (rackspace cloud).

kaib• 16 years ago

I think the article has a great set of ideas but if you follow this advice blindly you might risk flailing around doing everything badly instead of doing one or two things really well. As long as you cover your whole customer acquisition pipeline I think it's more useful to focus your efforts on a few of these channels and really push them.

I'm basing this both on observation of successful startups of late, like the experience DropBox had with AdWords, and also on my own limited experience. In my last startup we would probably have been even better off if we had focused more on the things that worked and quickly discarded non-revenue generating activities. In our case AdWords paid handsomely for the time and money invested while PR gave absolutely abysmal results. However, I personally kept working on bad marketing efforts mostly based on the naive view about how things are supposed to be.

jasonlbaptiste11• 16 years ago

Well said and agreed. One size never fits all. I try to present as many choices as possible in an article, and hopefully readers discern what works best for them. Sometimes you don't know until you try either.

il6• 16 years ago

I've had similar results with my projects. PPC was the main driver of sales, and press releases proved worthless. The only successful PR I've done is reaching out to bloggers in the space with a personalized email.

joshbert• 16 years ago

I just want to thank you for this amazing blog post. I was literally having epiphany, after epiphany, after epiphany. Now it's time for me to turn these insights into actionable items. Thanks again!

jasonlbaptiste11• 16 years ago

Wow, you're welcome Josh. It means a lot to me that it's that useful. Feel free to contact me if you have any more questions: j@jasonlbaptiste.com

petercooper2• 16 years ago

FWIW, this page has a very poor reading experience on the iPad. The text is oddly "grainy", scrolling is sluggish, you have to keep scrolling up and down due to the columns, and when you do scroll, the text flashes on and off. I hope Apple gets Safari Reader integrated on the iOS devices one day, Readability isn't quite as good :-)

prawn• 16 years ago

I think they're early issues with Jason's new venture (PadPressed). It's a bad experience on the iPad for me too and I ended up reading it on my laptop instead.

sundarurfriend• 16 years ago

> I hope Apple gets Safari Reader integrated on the iOS devices one day, Readability isn't quite as good

Do you mean you used Readability and it didn't help? In that case, won't Safari Reader be the same since it's just Readability plugged into Safari by Apple?

petercooper2• 16 years ago

I mean Safari Reader looks better. Tweaking Readability on an iPad is going to be somewhat of an undertaking (though possible, I suspect).

smakz• 16 years ago

I don't like articles like this for one reason and one reason only: it's not empirical. It's a long list of vacuous do this do that statements. What I look for when reading articles about start ups is "At start up X we did Y and it caused Z". Those kinds of relationships are helpful to me and help relate to what I'm doing. If you related it to your success at cloudomatic or a previous start up and had concrete results to relate it to I'd be more interested.

I understand these posts may be helpful to others as idea generation material, and obviously the up votes are a sign of that - but for me it's the equivalent of answering a complicated calculus question with a one line answer. Show your work.

lionhearted• 16 years ago

> I understand these posts may be helpful to others as idea generation material, and obviously the up votes are a sign of that - but for me it's the equivalent of answering a complicated calculus question with a one line answer. Show your work.

This comment is entirely reasonable except for one little thing - you just got some marketing advice for free from a knowledgeable guy, and you're here saying it isn't exactly what you wanted and telling him to "show your work". Maybe try saying thanks first?

Really, I'm torn between which cliche to quote - either "You get more bees with honey than vinegar" or "Beggars can't be choosers" - if you got a single valuable idea from this post to try out, then that'd make it worthwhile, yes? I like empirical case-study type works too, but hey, free advice on marketing from a smart knowledgeable guy. That's pretty cool, yes?

api• 16 years ago

Aren't you describing 95% of all business advice?

rwhitman• 16 years ago

Here's my recent philosophy - if you have the time to worry about mailing lists and slow reveal, testimonials and launch date hooha then you're doing something wrong, because in the time you spent noodling around on these things - hyping up internally that which does not yet exist and thus setting yourself up for a harder fall later - you could have launched the thing already and started validating the business model...

paraschopra• 16 years ago

I think the major work after the launch boils down to iterating on the product (incorporating user feedback), doing excellent customer support (generates great Word of Mouth) and releasing new features (to keep the buzz).

Also, once the initial wave of excitement goes down, what a startup needs to find is predictable source of potential customers. The medium doesn't matter as much as finding such a source. It can be affiliates, SEO, PPC or a mix of these mediums.

wensing• 16 years ago

We launched our first publicly-accessible version of Stormpulse in late 2006. Even though we emailed everyone we could think of (as we had time), our traffic stayed pretty flat (0-250 visits per day).

We continued to refine the product, continued "to try to get word out" with simple blogging and SEO, and continued to see a flatline of traffic until August 2008 when we launched our affiliate maps program (map is free to embed on your site as long as you link back). The program took off like wildfire and our traffic six months out of the year is now in the 6-7 figure range.

jasonlbaptiste11• 16 years ago

I'm going to add in another point: If they do come, be prepared to have support protocols in place.

If You Build It, They Won’t Come.

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