Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who-would-rather-be-building-stuff/

by craigkerstiens • 13 years ago

190 37 13 years ago

patio117• 13 years ago

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.

danmaz742• 13 years ago

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?

patio117• 13 years ago

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 responsibility to actually produce meaningful business results.")

klox• 13 years ago

You indirectly mentioned this in your talk: You have users enter their CC details whens starting a free trial on AR instead of when the free trial ends.

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!

orangethirty2• 13 years ago

Everyone who has a startup should watch this at least once a day (me included). This is great stuff, Patrick.

patio117• 13 years ago

Thanks, glad you liked it. What would you like to hear more about? (I'm shamelessly fishing for ideas for this year.)

orangethirty2• 13 years ago

I always get questions relating to email. People have a lot of issues with that. They don't seem to get the value of automated email selling. Or even doing it manually. I, for example, make the most money from email marketing. So I know it works. But Hackers and email marketing are a very weird subject. Your insight might get some of them to understand the true value of it.

jplewicke2• 13 years ago

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 accounting, pass-through vs. corporate taxation, guaranteed payments vs. distributions, finding a good accountant, etc.

- The 8,000 word "stake through Bitcoin's heart", or at least the part that talks about how and why banks are going to stop taking Bitcoin exchanges as clients. There is a surprising amount of doublethink going on to allow people simultaneously believe "Bitcoin and traditional banking are natural enemies", "at least one Bitcoin exchange will always be able to access the banking system", and "the nominal price of Bitcoins can only increase in the long run."

BornInTheUSSR• 13 years ago

I would love to hear more of your thoughts on the process of generating, evaluating and testing saas ideas based on what you know now.

quaffapint• 13 years ago

More on ways to get the word out on your shiny new SaaS would be wonderful.

statictype• 13 years ago

More on selling to enterprises (I know you did a newsletter on this earlier)

How to convince them to use your off-the-shelf product instead of demanding a bespoke solution that requires you to essentially fork your entire code base.

pknerd• 13 years ago

I am sorry if I missed earlier but I need some tips about stand alone softwares instead of SAAS. How one can sell them efficiently?

tocomment• 13 years ago

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?

patio117• 13 years ago

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 was literally as simple as a) write down business, b) write down the calls they make, c) star the ones that sound like money.

I think bitcoin might be another technology that makes big "ripples", no?

We will have to agree to disagree on that one. Bitcoin's core innovation is the distributed self-organizing boiler room. As a transaction processing system it's technically innovative but wildly inferior to legacy payments for transactions which need to touch the real world. (It's interesting for transactions which don't, but could be replaced with a SQL update statement, which would improve upon it in virtually every way.) As a currency/commodity, the arguments in favor of it having a sustainable value north of zero are not credible to me. The main reason I have not nailed an 8,000 word stake in its rotten heart is that I think there's a non-zero risk that people will use every additional quantum of attention given to it as a reason to convince other people to "invest."

euroclydon• 13 years ago

Outgoing unsolicited calls, once removed, might lighten the load of what people are imagining here, unless I'm not up to date on Twilio's TOS.

hiddenfeatures• 13 years ago

My gut tells me, that this is not legal (it would not be in Germany), so I don't advise you doing this before consulting with a lawyer first.

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...

todd3834• 13 years ago

The video was great! It would be nice to hear about how you get people into the funnel so that we could do a lot of the things you recommend. You already covered SEO, do you have any other customer acquisition techniques?

patio117• 13 years ago

SEO and AdWords are my mainstays for my software businesses. This year I'm going to be dipping my toes into a bit of offline marketing, like e.g. going to the (without loss of generality) Omaha Conference For Orthodontics Practice Managers and just talking to people. Given what I currently surmise about the per-account LTVs for higher-end customers of Appointment Reminder, at many plausible guesses for how many conversations I can have per day and how many people I can convert, it might be worth my time to do that. (Step 1: Do it. Step 2: Do it systematically with predictable ROI. Step 3: Pay someone to execute on Step 2.)

ambiate• 13 years ago

I've followed/stalked you for years Patrick. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. You helped transition me from grey to white.

On a side note, if your Vimeo account is Pro/Plus, please check the 'make accessible for mobile devices' option in account settings.

k3n4• 13 years ago

I'm not trying to take anything away from you at all, because what you've provided is very good. However, I'd like to say something about marketing vs sales, in that it seems like your material is more geared towards sales than marketing. I'm going to go off on a tangent here somewhat, bear with me...

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...

ScottBurson2• 13 years ago

Hi k3n, I would love your feedback on a project of mine. It's not a FOSS project, but is related to them. You'll see more about it in my profile. If you're willing to help me out a little, please contact me (my email address is in my profile).

k3n4• 13 years ago

Hi! I'll preface this by letting you know that I'm not a marketing professional -- I'm in development, and so my POV is going to be more technically-oriented, but I did give your site a glance and it's very approachable by my standards:

* a simple, non-distracting design

* text is easy to read and there's no feel of keyword stuffing or buzzword bingo

* you define the problem and offer product differentiation both in the first 2 sentences (can't get much better than that IMO)

* you have both an "about" and a FAQ

* terms are easy to find

The main thing I'm seeing that you're missing are more of what the OP talks about, in the sense that the 'call to action' seems weak. There's the "for developers" part, though nothing for the "for users". If I understand correctly, perhaps you could link to /browse for the users? Or conversely, if the "for developers" is the meat & bones and there really isn't too much for users, I might suggest making the "for devs" a little more prominent and the "for users" a little less prominent -- such as placing devs above users or something... not sure, but it does seem that your site has a strong opening and good content, but is lacking somewhat in guiding users what to do next. For instance, I'll keep it in mind incase a need for something like this ever makes itself apparent, though if it a list of projects involved and recognized one I use, I might dig in further to see if I wanted to pledge (I do realize this could be the chicken & egg problem if it's a new site).

tptacek• 13 years ago

Four classic functions of marketing teams at product companies:

* Product management: the feature/function/benefit of the product and (most important function in all of marketing) pricing/packaging.

* Marketing communications (marcom): what you've defined "marketing" as: promotion, promotional writing. Also, advertising.

* Sales support: awareness campaigns and events and, particularly, lead-gen. This is what the CEO see as the most important function of "marketing".

* PR/AR: relationship management with publications and analysts.

k3n4• 13 years ago

Thanks for the info. I was mainly speaking of the audience that the OP was addressing, i.e. engineers who likely haven't had much if any formal marketing training (I've only had 1 semester worth), as they are the ones on small (or solo) teams that are likely to not pay much attention to any sort of marketing. It's good to see a top-down perspective from a large organization like you've laid out too, though.

ComputerGuru2• 13 years ago

Hey Ken, can't find a way to contact you but drop me an email at mqudsi@neosmart.net - you seem to know what you're doing when it comes to actual marketing (and sales) for products, there may be something we could work on together (and you'd be well compensated)!

EDIT: Anyone else that would consider themselves to be the equivalent of a (to use a very-much cliched term) rock-star hacker in the field of sales, PR, or marketing: please drop me an email!

k3n4• 13 years ago

I'm flattered, but I'm really not into marketing or sales at all, just a developer that reviews many poorly-marketed projects. So, I'm not really qualified to do much more than rant about it here on HN :) Thanks though, perhaps the OP would be more than willing to help you out as he definitely sounds like he specializes in it.

mdlthree• 13 years ago

I am having trouble processing some cognitive dissonance when comparing your parable of the "Crazy Egg Enterprise Edition" but then using pricing strategies to take advantage of the sane kind of managers. While, I understand the concept of feature segmentation, I supposed should not be concerned with how other people run their business. I only need to focus on my profitability and not being a sucker.

coopdog• 13 years ago

I suppose it's all in the wording. Have the cheaper options but don't call them enterprise, and then have the really expensive enterprise option for managers for who the pain of being called anything but is more than a slight blip in the budget.

Giving them ways to pad their budget was also an eye opener for me. The idea that they might not even be conforming to our rational actor model of balancing cost and value opens up new pricing considerations. I wonder if a monthly 'flex' option where they can temporarily boost their budget to some ridiculous figure would work. The engineer in me does cringe at the thought of it though

ComputerGuru2• 13 years ago

I'm super sorry to have just learned about microconf only to find that it is completely, totally sold out for this year (plus being only a few days away).

Any other good conferences like this one? From what I can see, this is all content and zero fluff, not cheap but not outrageously expensive either. I'm more than ready and willing to book even if it's a few hours from now for something like this. Share your thoughts, guys!

patio117• 13 years ago

BaconBizConf and Business of Software are the other two software business conferences that I'd fly to America to attend even when not speaking.

krallja• 13 years ago

I can recommend Business of Software. patio11 has spoken there, as have many other HNers, Seth Godin, Richard Stallman, etc.

biot• 13 years ago

My $0.02 worth:

  For many of you, assistance directly from the CEO in integration is a really
  compelling offer, because wow, you can’t get that anywhere else. [...]
  We’ll do the copy‑pasting for you ... and it will actually be done by a freelancer
  that we’ve hired and told them how to FTP stuff.

If one claims "assistance directly from the CEO", I would be disappointed to learn that access credentials to my website were handed out to some third-party freelancer who performs the integration rather than being handled directly by the engineer-owner. If you mean something different such as "our CEO ensures the job gets done to exacting standards" then that's freelancer-compatible as the statement makes no claims about who provides the assistance.

Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It

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