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.
If you want to do naughty things then by all means do them. There's not much harm done when people are slightly deceived into clicking onto a legitimate product. Big deal really.
Just for the love of god don't lie to yourself about it or try to rationalize it.
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?
I grew up in Texas. I've been hunting and fishing since I can remember anything. When I couldn't walk through the marsh because I was too little for the sucking mud I'd float on top of a mesh bag filled with plastic duck decoys.
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.
You could almost say it has a 'hardcore' edge to it. Seriously, you would always be in the shadow of Hustler magazine in terms of mindshare. Just do a quite Google search for hustle magazine (no quotes) to see where they would be starting off from a branding perspective.
Not worth having that kind of initial hinderance to overcome.
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.
Stop reading my marketing plan! ;) I'm hoping for a rocking campaign in the run up to Thanksgiving to get all of our young geeky users to teach their parents so they'll spend less time searching for flights/hotels and more time for pie!
