Why I’m Dropping InstantSlideup Like a Hot Potato

This is one of those minor personal rants that come up from time to time.  What good is having a blog if you have to be all serious and to the point all the time?

I recently had tried a little piece of software called “InstantSlideup” (not gonna link to them as I don’t want to help their link authority).  It’s purpose is to offer a slide up message (can be advertising or anything you like) at the bottom of a web page.  It’s unobtrusive in the sense it doesn’t block much of anything, yet it catches the eye a little bit.  That’s my preferred method for these sorts of things.  Popups that totally stop you in your tracks really bother me, although I do understand their efficacy.

In any event, I had it up and running on my CNC Machinist’s blog and all was well.  That site is one I use both for my hobby/passion around machine tools, as well as to run a small microISV business, and just generally to test out various online marketing concepts.  InstantSlideup is in the category of “nice to have”, but not “must have”.  A must have for me would be SEOMoz (see, I gave them a link).  My experience with InstantSlideup is that while it helped a lot more people to “discover” my product home page on the site, most of the new audience weren’t interested enough to convert.  Net net I was ahead on conversions, but by a lot less than the traffic would imply–gotta analyze yer analytics carefully!

Anyway, I liked it okay, a bit expensive for what I was getting, but I decided to hang in there with it.  Until now.

I’ve been pretty successful with this site, digital marketing works and works well given the right strategies.  I’ve put together a very analytics-driven approach (call it Big Data for Small Business, if you like) and have been tuning it up for about 3 years now.  I get circa 1 million uniques a year roughly doubling every year, which is very good compared to my peers in this rather odd niche space.  Unfortunately, this also led to the undoing of InstantSlideup.  The thing is, their SaaS version (and I always prefer the lower hassle of using SaaS to installing it myself), was a one size fits all that only allows 100,000 impressions per month.  Here is the kicker:

When the 100,000 impressions runs out, they don’t just stop running your slideup ad, they start running THEIR slideup ad on YOUR site!

I couldn’t believe it when I saw this was happening.  I guess I should not have been surprised.  We live in a world where most businesses take the liberty and ask forgiveness later.  Even a casual look at all the privacy controversies we’ve seen swirling so far this year should make that clear.  Yet somehow, this just seemed beyond the pale.

There is that certain kind of marketing that’s all spam all the time.  Shoot the prospect into a landing page that has no navigation so they can’t escape.  Don’t give them too much information because Heaven forbid, they might stop to think instead of filling out that contact information.  Get on the phone and machine them into the purchase any way possible.  The darned thing is that it works.  It even works pretty well.

Seth Godin is one of my marketing heroes, and he thinks there is a better way.  Aside from the digital marketing, Seth’s approach of building a Tribe, is more what I’m after.  I think it works as well or better than the all spam all the time crowd, although it is more work.  Yet even Seth acknowledges that the all spam all the time approach often beats us down.  Well I’m feeling feisty this morning, and InstantSlideup took one too many all spam all the time liberties.  So I gave them the boot off the site and off my credit card and I’m letting folks know exactly why that happened here.

Eventually, I will stop and write the little bit of code needed to do a slideup and the site will have slideups again.  Maybe I’ll just open source that little bit of code so others can do likewise.  OTOH, this feisty feeling can only last so long and I have a lot of other things to do first.

For the record, here are some things I would have considered doing instead were I running InstantSlideup:

-  Send a message well in advance, not at midnight when the impressions ran out, reminding the user that based on history they’re within a few days of running out and tell them how to deal with it in just a few clicks.  Perhaps they’d like to just temporarily no show the slideup.

-  Tell the user they’ve exceeded the impressions but that you’re going to comp them another 10,000 impressions on a one-time basis.  Present them with the immediate opportunity to upgrade to 200K impressions for a slight additional charge.  After all, a site exceeding impressions ought to be one of your star customers.  Why not treat them as such and make them feel special?  I’d have not only paid at least 1/2 of another license for the impressions but I would have written here about this kind of treatment instead of doing the blog post I am.

-  Send the message, but just make the slideup go dark until the impressions are reset for the next month.

See how much nicer not being all spam all the time can be?  Isn’t that how you’d rather be treated by a vendor?  Shouldn’t a vendor of marketing tools, of all possible businesses, be more sensitive in these areas?

Cheers!

The Two Most Desirable Features of a Platform as a Service

Big Data?

Multitenancy?

Uber DB scaling?

Mad Hadoopishness?

Faster app development?

Universal Social Connectivity?

Not so much.  Some platform or other claims all of those things, but the two most desirable features of a PaaS appear to be revenue generation and commodity pricing, not necessarily in that order.

Let me first say that I’ve come to view AppStores as PaaS offerings of a sort, and their ability to generate revenue for developers drives those developers into their arms.  This also applies to more traditional PaaS offerings such as Salesforce’s Force.com.  As nearly as I can tell talking to folks and scanning the blogosphere for activity, people write for Force.com either because they need to integrate with the Salesforce CRM app or because they want the revenue tailwind you can get via Force.com.

The commodity pricing piece applies to what many prefer to call IaaS, or Infrastructure as a Service, with  Amazon Web Services being the most widely used example so far.  Let’s go ahead and keep them in our PaaS list for this discussion and ignore the IaaS moniker.  If we start cutting out things like Amazon and Force.com for various reasons, there is so little left it’s hard to talk about it.  I would submit we may have divided up the market into too many A-A-S’s a little prematurely without waiting to see what would stick.

This is the gist of my problem, BTW.  There’s been plenty of time for PaaS to get big, but it is kind of lumbering along.  Yes, we get things like Heroku.  Doesn’t that qualify largely under the Commodity category though?  Force.com we’ve already talked about and Amazon too.  But in this Cloudy-Cloudy-*aaSy-*aaSy world, what else is flying high?  There’s room for a ton of things, but you have to solve the revenue and commodity checkboxes first.

Here is the problem for all you would-be PaaS vendors out there–it’s darned hard to get design wins if your platform involves heavy lock-in, heavy rewriting, too much cost, or isn’t otherwise a requirement for a Minimum Viable Product.   Yup, there’s that darned MVP concept rearing its ugly head again.  The trouble is, it’s no longer just something the Cool Kids bandy about while sipping lattes.  It’s become something of a requirement for survival and an article of How Things Are Done In The Valley.  You can’t get capital to fool around with fancy products any more, so you have to go MVP all the way because you’re likely starving on your own nickel until you do.  In addition to the VC’s, Agile thinking and a general suspicion of Premature Optimizaton have really made it hard to sell Feature Density.  The trouble with that list of things at the top is they’re either not that commonly needed, they involve dealing with scale you should be so lucky as to get to (and are therefore not MVP material), or they solve problems you’re convinced you can easily solve as you’re starting your journey (e.g. multitenant).  Yes, those problems are harder than you think, but it doesn’t matter.  They don’t look harder when you’re eyeing what it takes to get an MVP off the ground.

PaaS vendors, you have a couple of choices available to deal with this.  You can ignore it, argue that it’s early days yet and your time will come.  It’s pretty hard to dispute that because it is early days yet.  But don’t get too target fixated at such an early stage either lest some upstart take the early days away.  You can still be Zucked pretty darned easily precisely because it is early days.  Note: To be “Zucked” is to be treated to the same fait Facebook dished out to MySpace.  Call it Fast Follower on Steroids with a Heavy Case of Rabies.  It’s not a pleasant thing to happen to your life’s dream.

Okay, so what’s the alternative for would-be PaaS Masters of the Universe?

Hey, this is a good time for the Cloud.  You know that.  We hear less and less whining about security and all that.  Clever marketers are even now letting IT get just a little bit infected with “Private Clouds”, a potent Trojan Horse strategy to win over their hearts and minds.  Whatever it takes, resistance is futile.  Once their apps and data are on my servers it’s only a matter of reconfiguring the subnets and voila!  All your Apps are be in my Cloud!

Given that is the case, there may be some first mover, network effect, and momentum issues to think about.  In other words, stop being so darned pure to your vision and line up as many customers as you can as fast as you can.  That’s how we win in this part of the Bubble, um I mean Business, Cycle.

What the heck does that mean?

I’m glad you asked, but it should be obvious:  PaaS vendors need to embrace these two desirable features and nail them before worrying about much else.  There are two simple questions:

1.  Are you directly delivering revenue producing traffic to your customers by virtue of some aspect of your PaaS?

2.  Do you have an offering that lets people buy into some commodity-priced-let’s-get-started-without-boiling-the-ocean version of your PaaS?

If you do, Hallelujah Brothers and Sisters!  You have a shot at the promised land and you can now start looking at more potent differentiation rather than table stakes.  If you don’t, back up and let’s figure something out, because this PaaS stuff can turn into a Darwin Test if you’re not careful.

There is room for innovation on the commodity side, but it’s getting harder.  The days may be gone when you can deliver commodity infrastructure.  Storage and CPU like S3 and EC2, in other words.  If you aren’t already spun up and doing good things, you need to start skating where the puck is going to be.  I have offered up my PaaS-as-bite-sized-pieces strategy before (Sell the Condiments, not the Sandwiches).  Check it out.  Lots to commoditize there.

There is also room for tons of innovation on the “delivering revenue producing traffic” front.  We’ve seen it for mobile platforms, in fact, one could argue the appstores are the defining element there coupled with the relative desirability of the platforms to their users.  The participants seem to be pretty mercenary about those two related dimensions.  I am mystified about why Amazon, which ought to understand App Stores better than anyone, is not doing so great with their Android App Store and doesn’t appear to have one at all for Amazon Web Services.  The latter is inexcusable.  There’s got to be all sorts of opportunity to create an App Store there.

Salesforce keeps wanting to be a major PaaS vendor, but they somehow misunderstand the data they were among the first to collect.  Yes, they do have the revenue producing traffic piece nailed.  But, they seem to be very much in denial about whether that is the main reason people will use Force.com, and totally opposed to solving the commodity issue.  Every time I talk to an entrepreneur or investor that wonders whether they should use Force.com or one of its offshoots, I ask them to consider a simple thought experiment.  Look up Salesforce’s current cost of service as a percentage of revenue.  Take the cost they will be charged to use Force.comand divide by SFDC’s cost of service.  That number is what they must charge to have the same margins as Salesforce, and that assumes they don’t spend another dime on anything else to deliver their service.  Most of the time that makes for a short conversation.  Oh, I didn’t think about it like that.  There’s no way we can be competitive if we have to charge that much.  And so it goes with a lot of other PaaS offerings too, BTW.  Perhaps Heroku is their way of covering both bases and a sign that they do understand.

For other PaaS vendors, maybe there is a sliver of hope.  If you can change that cost of service to be cost of service plus some cost of marketing, because the PaaS will deliver revenue producing traffic, you can afford to pay more.  Heck, Steve Jobs gets 30% just for delivering the traffic and not helping you in much of any other way.

The revenue producing traffic is by far the hardest thing to do.  You can’t materialize it out of thin air.  You either already have a solid traffic stream you can repurpose (that’s what Salesforce did), or you may have to look at partnering opportunities.  For those that have a stream, now is your chance to enter the PaaS business in an interesting way.  Casting eyes around, Adobe is well positioned for this.  Get an AppStore together, Adobe, and link your dev tools and *aaS efforts to it.  There are bound to be others too.  Open Source vendors in the tools business, maybe you have this sort of opportunity as well.  IBM, Oracle, HP, and whomever else this is a huge opportunity for you.  Maybe Cisco too as I think about it.  Trouble is, your Big Sales Force may think it hampers them in some way.  Ignore their parochial interests and charge ahead.  This is a Silver Bullet for PaaS and Cloud ascendancy.

Give it some thought.  It’s high time for some break out PaaS action.

There’s a New Sheriff in Town and His Name is “Content”

Just read a great top-level overview of Google’s Panda on SEOMoz.  If you haven’t been following Panda, or you’re not involved with marketing much, it is Google’s latest algorithmic attempt to minimize the ability to game search results.  This article is at a good level for CEO’s, Board Members, Investors, and other Interested Parties to understand the flavor of this huge watershed event for marketing on the web.  I’ve talked to a number of companies that were impacted by Panda.  In most cases, the impact hurt their search traffic because they’d been relying on SEO games to get the job done.  In a few, it has transformed their search traffic for the better.   Those few are companies that had been almost overly focused on content.

Google wants to interfere with the SEO strategy of manipulating search results mechanically by delivering search results that searchers actually like.  Towards that end, Panda lets Google blend in subjective evaluations of search results to tune up their search engine and start to de-emphasize those sites we all come across that aren’t really that enjoyable or even informative despite great search ranking.  This is mainstream when you start to see Dilbert cartoons about it, and it is life threatening for Google when we read that measurable amounts of web traffic have left the general web and gone to sites like Facebook.

Marketers should expect a lot more of this sort of thing over time.  It will be increasingly important to quit worrying about SEO voodoo and start publishing content people are delighted to find.   I have been saying to everyone that will listen:  Marketing is a Product.  It has a User Experience.  Make sure yours is one that delights would-be customers lest they not only tune you out but have an increasingly difficult time even finding your content.  First impressions will matter more and more as feedback loops like Google Panda and Social “Like” buttons that affect search results are not going to give you a second chance if you blow the first one.

If you’re running an established business that focuses most of its efforts on SEO manipulation, start thinking about how to ramp your content quality up quickly.  If you’re an entrepreneur thinking about bootstrapping a business or an investor wondering where to invest, you need to add another couple of tests to your framework for evaluating potential ideas:

-  Is this space crowded and noisy due to an abundance of great content, or is it one where there is a tremendous hunger for scarce content?

-  Does this company already have a track record for producing differentiated content that is driving traffic?

-  Does the company have content creation talent on board and does it understand how to use content effectively?

You want to be a big fish in a small content pond when you’re starting out if you expect to be noticed.  And importantly, it’s hard to farm out the best content until you have a critical mass of folks familiar with your market and products who want to contribute.  Make sure you have the ability to operate with great content until you’ve spanned that gap.

There’s a new sheriff in town, and his name is Content.

Related Posts

Small Businesses Need a Minimum Viable Marketing Strategy

Pitfalls of Free Content and an Inbound Marketing Strategy

The Bubble Has Begun With the Most Expensive Stock In America

It’s official, the current Bubble has begun with LinkedIn’s IPO.  It was declared the most expensive stock in America even before doubling which means its now clearly way past Bubble territory.  Exciting stuff!

LinkedIn’s PE is 62 times Apple’s, 50 times Google’s, but less than 4 times Salesforce.com’s.  Wow, AAPL and GOOG look like Value Stocks!

Stay tuned for more Bubblemania.  After all, Facebook and other high flyers are still sitting on the sidelines.  I wonder if anyone has ever calculated the amount of money on the sidelines at the beginning of a Bubble that is available as Bubble Fuel?  With the kinds of market caps these companies will get, you would think it will use up the fuel quickly.  Of course there will be some tendency to self-fuel as speculators jump in and out of these stocks pocketing profits and reinvesting in new securities that are earlier on the Greater Fool timeline.

How will we know when the Bubble is bursting?  Well, they always burst and the bigger they are the harder they burst, but you’d like to know just slightly in advance, no?

I remember the original dot cum bubble bursting.  I’d call the day it burst the day Webvan IPO’d and the stock went nowhere.  I had been given some IPO stock by my broker and it was flat to down.  It had all the right things in place for a Bubble IPO, Goldman backed it, yada, yada.  Just no profits and no real business.  At least LinkedIn has some profit this time.

Pitfalls of Free Content and Inbound Marketing

Let me start this article by saying it’s not intended to be a negative article against free content or inbound marketing.  Rather, I want to talk about some of the strategic considerations when you use these tactics.   I believe wholeheartedly that, properly employed, there are no better tactics for building your customer base and getting the word out.  Let’s also define “inbound marketing”, at least for purposes of this post, as follows:

Inbound Marketing is giving away valuable content for free in order to attract an audience and earn the right to sell them something.

This may not be exactly what firms like Hubspot who are experts on the topic use, but it is how I think about it and it will work well for this discussion.

This post was motivated by some thinking that’s been going on in the back of my mind about inbound marketing that all bubbled to the surface when I read John Jantsch’s “When Free Becomes Free For All — 5 Reasons Free is Hurting Us All“.   Along with Seth Godin, John Jantsch is one of my top two favorite marketing bloggers. But, with this latest post, I think John has missed some key points and gone off the track.  Rather than debate his 5 points up front, I want to drop back and paint a more strategic backdrop for understanding the value of free and I also want to call attention to the alternatives.  To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous quote about democracy:

“It has been said that free is the worst form of marketing except all the others that have been tried.”

Let’s start from that premise when considering John’s proposition that too much free is damaging by asking, “What are the alternatives?”

Just enough free to get the job done and charge for the rest?

Pay walls?

Intangible costs and friction like registration landing pages you go through over and over again to get one white paper, webinar, or slide show at a time?

I’ll bet John will have a hard time defending those alternatives, I know I would.  As an aside, ironically, I had gotten a new Hubspot email (one of two this morning, easy there boys) offering me a white paper that looked valuable.  I clicked to the landing page and was immediately presented with an old style fill in the form to get the content.  Now I know you want to capture the individual’s contact information, get them on your house list, yada, yada.  But I’m on Hubspot’s list–they’re emailing me for cryin’ out loud and I haven’t opted out. They can tell I’ve clicked through with silent instrumentation.  This is an artificial and annoying barrier that cause me to think them slightly less enlightened and to click off the page and go on about my business.  They either did it that way through sloth or because they are trying to “qualify” me by making me do the work of reentering my information.  Either way, it cheapens the Inbound experience.  If you’re going to be Inbound, be inbound.  Once you get someone’s information, treat them as you would want to be treated.  End of rant, these guys should know better.

Distracting as it may be, the anecdote relates to John’s complaints about free.  Let’s talk about the 5 things he worries about (paraphrased):

It doesn’t hold the content consumer accountable.  

If it’s free, they can sign up and then no-show.  This is a variation on the VP of Sales contention that you have to charge a lot or the customer won’t respect you.  My problem with this perspective is it reflects artificial scarcity and a presumption about the stage that the prospect has reached that isn’t justifiable.  When you’re engaging in Marketing, you’re not yet at the stage where you’re entitled to demand a price.  You’re not ready to close a sale.  You’re earning the customer’s trust and any artificial scarcity or cost interferes with that trust, just as my experience with Hubspot made me trust them a little less.

With respect to artificial scarcity, the history of any market is a march to commoditization unless the participants find a way to create defensible unfair advantage that limits competition and creates artificial scarcity.  Other than via legal entanglement, content is not amenable to unfair advantage through limited availability because it can be reproduced and communicated too easily. Your only opportunity for unfair advantage is to make your content better than the other guy’s.  Leaving aside all that, think about monopolies, patents, record labels and other cases of successful artificial scarcity.  Do you want your marketing to reek of that?  As I said, you’re earning trust, not selling patent-pending titanium toilet seats to the Air Force.

It would be awesome to see my two marketing blogger idols, John and Seth Godin, debate this proposition.  My impression from Godin’s writing and tactics for self-promotion is that he totally gets this business of creating unfair advantage through better content and then making it even more unfair by aggressively giving it away until it goes viral.

Let’s turn this one around from a unpleasant problem to a prescription for success:

Make sure you are accountable for your content and it is so good that it is irresistible.  And then give it away.

That formula will knock the cover off the ball of Inbound Marketing every time if you can deliver.

Eroded Value

John’s description of this point is worth repeating:

When content is consistently given away it loses its value–not only for the producer, but also in the eyes of the content consumer. How good can something that’s free really be?

This lumps thoroughly researched, well-presented, useful content in with shoddily veiled pitch fests.

My problem with this argument is two-fold.  First, it goes down the traditional Mad Men marketing and sales path of assuming consumers are sheep.  I know it can be easy to fall into that trap, but John knows better.  Consumers are better judges of your content than that.  The ones that matter know a “shoddily veiled pitch fest” from useful content.  Go back and read the endless admonitions to content creators for Inbound Marketing about delivering value.  If you’re not delivering enough value that it’s obvious to consumers, you may have accidentally produced a pitch fest.  Blame yourself, not the consumer.  Value is in the eye of the beholder, not the author.

Finding great content is hard.  If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be so much controversy over search, there wouldn’t be so many bookmarking services, and there wouldn’t be a long tail.  The great content would be obvious, plentiful, and easy to come by.  Instead, there are relatively few Duct Tape Marketing or Seth Godin blogs, so we read them incessantly and don’t take them for granted.

This brings me to my second point–be aware of the state of the free content ecosystem in your space.   John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing content plays in the most crowded on-line space that there is for great free content–marketing.  The bar in that space is absolutely sky high–so high there is almost no oxygen up there.  Social Media, Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Affiliate Programs, on and on.  There is lots of great marketing content available free.  Whenever a content market gets that big and there is so much great content available, value is eroded.  You can’t take it back by deciding not to give it away.  There’s too many struggling for competitive advantage by giving their great (or even pretty good) content away.  Markets are eating their own dogfood, drinking their own champagne, and practicing what they preach.  It’s tough love, but you better get over it.

I’ve come to believe this is a key strategic point for entrepreneurs to consider.   Not every space is as crowded as the Marketing space.  In fact, very very few are.  Most spaces are still very much starved for great free content.  For entrepreneurs, when you’re evaluating a space, do a careful evaluation on your chances of becoming an early Thought Leader there through your content.  You want to be a big fish in a small pond where the bar is set extremely low for your content.

Lowered Expectations

John says:

This creates an atmosphere where content producers can simply slap something together with little value because, “What are they going to do, ask for a refund?”

I’ve nothing new to say here other than that you are accountable for your content and you have to make it so good that it is irresistible.   If you don’t and you’re in a crowded content ecosystem like marketing, you’ll never be noticed.  May as well go buy banner ads on AOL or Yahoo.   If you don’t and you’re one of the first fish in a small content pond, you’ll be noticed but vulnerable to a fast follower.  You will also miss igniting the level of passion for your content that you may otherwise have had, which will slow people passing on and talking about your content and prolong the window for the fast follower to take you out.

Blocked Revenue

“When the expectation is that all of your content, speaking and presenting will be made available at no fee, your business’ greatest potential asset is cut off.”

First, if your only business is content, you need to think carefully about your strategy.  In the ideal case, you have something else you’re making the money on besides the content.  Inbound Marketing is a wonderful no-brainer if you do have something else to sell.

Second, even if you don’t have anything but content to sell, who says it’s all or nothing?  Will they pay to see you deliver your content directly?  Will they pay for you to apply the mind that produced that great free content to their problem?  Will they tolerate ads in the content?  Will they pay to have your content in a different format, perhaps one that’s easier to consume or more compact?  Thinking of books that are compendiums of content that already exists where curation and packaging is the value.

Seth Godin is a master of this.  He gives away books he’s actively selling.  He encourages buyers to give their book to someone else when they’re done reading it.  It works for Godin, why not others?

Community Buster

Having spent a fair bit of time in the Social Web both personally and professionally, this is one I totally do not understand:

When people are invited into a community where everything is free, there’s actually less chance of building a strong community. Community builds when there is value.

That has not been my experience in the least, and I’d like to see such a community to understand what it’s real underlying problems are, because they’re not due to “free”.  Let me give two strong examples:  Stack Overflow and Quora.   Everyone reading this must have heard of one or the other.  They’re completely free, they are strong communities by any measure I have ever seen, and they deliver huge value.

Free has some really odd dynamics where behavior and community are concerned.  People will polarize around and defend free in ways that you just don’t see for things people pay for.  Try to make your living attacking virtually anything Open Source and you will see.  Free begets fanaticism because it creates obligation.  If you give somebody something for free, they feel an obligation to reciprocate in some way.  If they pay you, however little, they have discharged that obligation.  This is problematic for companies that want to be the cheapest offering in their space.  To me, they attract the worst of all worlds.  They don’t get the fanatical support of free, and they’ve attracted a legion of penny pinchers who feel no obligation and who are ironically much higher maintenance than the sort who buy premium products.

People generally have good intentions.  Give them a lot of valuable free content.  Set them up in a free community where they can get free help and give free assistance and I have seen magic happen multiple times.  If you find yourself in a space where no such resource exists, stake it out quickly–it will turn into a gold mine and you won’t be sorry.

Conclusion:  Marketing is a Product that has a UX and Competes Like Any Other Product

It’s easy to forget because we don’t charge for it that Marketing is a product too.  In particular, online marketing is increasingly indistinguishable from an online software product.  It has a User Experience that we want the consumer to be delighted with.  It has Business Logic and is the System of Record for critical Enterprise Value if you want to get all Enterprise Software about it.  Think about Marketing as a Product and you’ll find some breakthrough insights.

And don’t assume you don’t charge for marketing either.  You’re charging your customers the highest price they pay for anything you sell–you’re asking them to give you their trust.

Efficient Marketing Means Doing Something Different

Startups have to solve three problems to succeed:

1.  They need a great product.

2.  They need a business model that results in profitable growing revenue.

3.  They need an efficient marketing model that results in a profitable growing customer base.

As Om Malik’s great post on business models and Twitter points out, too many companies are exclusively product-centric.  They’re focused on #1.  But just adding #2 isn’t enough either.  You also have to get the word out, and as a startup, you can’t afford the luxury of advertising as your medium.  You need Efficient Marketing.

By “Efficient Marketing”, I mean marketing that doesn’t cost much in relation to the value it delivers.  It’s marketing that is profitable from day one.  You know, the kind of marketing startups and bootstrapped companies have to do, but also the kind of marketing larger companies want to do.

Efficient marketing only happens when you do something different.  Something the rest of the crowd isn’t doing so much of.  Marketing is about standing out and getting noticed, and that’s hard to do if your marketing plan is the equivalent of standing in the middle of Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve and trying to make yourself be heard.

What are some examples of Efficient Marketing, and what are the ramifications of thinking about “Doing Something Different?”

First, on doing something different.  It’s ironic that most of us go through life studying what successful folks did and trying to emulate that success by doing the same thing.  The irony is that most of the time, when the successful folks did it, they were doing something different.  By the time we get around to copying them, it’s no longer unique, but we still wonder why copying their formula verbatim doesn’t work.  In this case, the old saw about insanity being the expectation of a different result when we do the same thing tells us that Marketing takes a little bit of craziness.  We expect the same result when we do the same thing, but we should be doing something different to get that successful result!

Assuming that last bit hasn’t gotten you completely confused, let’s delve into Marketing Differently.

As my loyal readers know, I am a huge proponent of Content Marketing.  Content Marketing is still relatively rare, though it is rapidly gaining in popularity.  It is a sub-genre of what Hubspot calls “Inbound Marketing.”  If you make the decision to lead with Content Marketing, you’re already doing something different from the masses.  But, consider how much further you might take it.  Instead of leading with a conventional corporate web site that’s all about you, how about leading with your content that’s all about delivering the value of the content free to people who might one day become your customers?  That’s pretty different, and you can go much further down that path than the Carbon Fiber Gear folks.

If you’re going to focus on Content Marketing, you’ll want to make sure your content has the opportunity to be different.  Are you in a space where there isn’t a lot of quality content available?  Some markets are better about that than others.  The first one to bring premier content to a market lacking in good content will be a big winner that’s hard to unseat because they have the benefit of inertia (they’re in everyone’s blog readers and already receiving the newsletters) and network effects (everyone is already referring others to this wonderful source).  So in the spirit of the 3 problems a startup must solve, check into whether your proposed business has the opportunity to excel with content.

As I have mentioned in the past, App Stores are another way to market differently or market different, as Apple might say.  But not all app stores are equal.  While they are relatively new, and a lot of companies have benefited by being early to the App Store craze, some are getting very crowded.  You’re no longer doing something different if you’re counting on a listing in the Apple app store to get your product noticed.

What to do?

Check this great article on how one game developer is finding the Android store to be more profitable than Apple (thanks Techmeme for bringing me this one!).  According to the article, “Spacetime, which is supported largely by in-app purchases, says its Android users generate 30 to 50 percent more revenue than its iOS users do.”  30 to 50 percent is huge, but why does it happen?  I love the money quote from Gary Gattis, Spacetime’s CEO:

“Android’s a smaller pond for apps right now,” he says. “The support on the Google side has been much more tangible — they’re really trying to nurture the gaming community.”

Bingo–right now, being on Android is doing something different.  As a result, Gattis says Spacetime has stopped advertising on Apple entirely and thrown their whole marketing budget behind Android.  That too is something very likely different.  Most companies love the idea of balanced scorecards–a little bit here, a little bit there, spread the risk.   Unfortunately, where marketing and a lot of other business is concerned, unless you’re already big and protecting your position, spreading the risk isn’t your job.  Take exceptional risk by doing things different and doing them big.  Double down on what works and try another experiment when it doesn’t work.

We’ve got Content Marketing, choosing the less popular App Stores (and potentially platforms), what about some of the common patterns?  For example, stealth launches.  I’m not a big fan.  First, you should be building content day one to attract the audience who will eventually buy your products.  Second, it’s been done to death.  There’s even a service now to automate it for you. With respect to Scoble and LaunchRock, how much is your startup going to accomplish if it does the same thing the last 1000 startups have done and uses a service to homogenize the experience on top of it?

Let’s try some more, rapid fire bullet style:

-  In an age where business views customers as “people with our money in their pockets”, what happens if you take a different and refreshing view of your customers.  By now you must have heard the Zappo’s story of exceptional Customer Service.  Others are catching on, but there’s still plenty of opportunity to be different in how you treat customers.

-  Advertising:  If you must advertise, you’d better do it where others aren’t.  That means finding the long tail keywords if you plan to use AdWords.  Keywords that others haven’t discovered so your ads run where they’ll be noticed and can be placed very cheaply.  How about advertising in specific online forums where your tribe may be found?  This can work if your tribe is focused and there isn’t already a ton of advertising there.  Running a bunch of ads on Facebook probably won’t quality.

-  E-mail campaigns:  Not a big fan of email to get noticed.  In this age of Spam, it’s too easy to do yourself more harm than good.  As a tool to nurture your audience after they’ve asked to be on the list and could opt out at any time, it works.  But look for ways to make your mailings different in some way.

-  Social Media:  Yeah sure, but the opportunity to be different is fast dwindling as everyone gets focused on the new new thing and it suddenly becomes the tired old thing.  As with email, figure out how to be different with Social Media, and realize that folks on the receiving end are even tougher about Social Spam than Email Spam.  What can you offer that is genuinely fresh and isn’t just gaming the Social Web?

-  Snail Mail:  Marketing moves in cycles as the herd seeks to do something different to improve response rates and cut costs.  Snail Mail direct marketing has been around forever, so it has probably seen more of these cycles than any other venue.  If you can strike at a time when the Snail Mail Direct tide has ebbed, you can stand out.  You’re going to have to do something different with the piece you mail and you’re going to have to test it to see whether there has really been an ebb and you can stand out.

-  Viral Marketing:  Everybody loves the idea.  It’s so compelling.  And so hard to realize when it’s your turn to try.  It may be too late to catch this train, unless you can come up with something that is different.  Many people are starting to complain they’ve hit the wall with viral signups.  Many platforms no longer make it easy to go viral on their coattails.  Find a way to be different if you want to succeed here.

The next time you’re sitting in a meeting, hashing through marketing programs, ask, “What’s different?”  If the answer is, “Well this worked for XYZ, they got really big on it,” ask yourself whether it’s too late to jump on that bandwagon because what XYZ did is no longer different.

Ask, “What are we doing to be different?”

Who is Your Chief Content Officer?

Who do you see when you look around the table at your fresh young startup?

The usual suspects are likely all there.

A set of executives that likely includes a CEO, a VP of Engineering or Products, a VP of Marketing and / or a VP of Sales (not all startups have both, but most have at least one).  Gotta have some software developers to build it.  There is someone charged with the product vision.  It could be one of the Execs or perhaps a Product Manager.

At the very early stage, that almost everyone you really need.  QA, operations, Tech Support, more sales people, help for marketing, and all the rest can come later.

One thing that shouldn’t come later is content.  When you look around that table, who is your Chief Content Officer?  Who is responsible for making content happen, and just as importantly early on, who will write the majority of your content while everyone else is busy with other things?

In a modern web-based startup, content is King.  You can’t do without it.  Content trumps SEO and Links for marketing.  Content lets you start building a following before you even have a product.  Content will be your most powerful marketing tool when you’re ready to start selling.  Content can be a powerful differentiator against competitors, and it is content even more than product that will establish you as the Thought Leaders in your market.  Even if you’re a company focused on direct selling rather than selling on the web, you still need to arm your sales people with good content.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a startup stop and think about the idea of a “Chief Content Officer?”  Forget about actually giving someone the title, though that might be an important symbol.  Very few think about the job itself and getting the work done.

That’s a shame because it really is critically important.  Not only is content a potent marketing tool, but it’s also a potent feedback tool.  Most followers are lurkers.  Quite a few will respond to your content.  Very very few will step up unasked. 

Figure out who your Chief Content Officer will be and getting going on producing some content!

Bootstrappa’s Resources

Links to the Bootstrappa’s Paradise blog series as well as other useful resources for Bootstrappers.

Bootstrappers: The New is Not for Everyone. Pass the Others By.

Seth Godin touches on one of my favorite themes today.  Here is the money quote:

Experienced marketers and artists and those that make change understand that the new is not for everyone. In fact, it’s not even for most people. Pass them by. They can catch up later.

This is some of the best advice for startups you can ever get.  A great corrollary came from a TechCrunch post on Saluto:

There’s a saying: “if you’re 100% certain it can be done, you’re probably not far enough ahead of the competition”.

And that one is followed closely by, “If 100% of the world wants it, you’re probably too late to do it as a startup.  Somebody big will come in and take it away from you.”  That’s right, startups actually may want to be left alone to grow for a while before everyone “gets it”.

At a startup, forget about selling your customers.  Assume you can’t convince them of anything.  It isn’t that you’re not great salespeople, it’s that you don’t have the resources to convince everyone of everything.  Startups are weak, like newborn babies.  If you set out on the road of convincing everyone you encounter on your path who may disagree, you will quickly get bogged down and you have a long journey ahead.  Pass them by.  They can catch up.

That doesn’t mean you don’t market or sell, but it means you need some different tactics.  Create your content from the perspective that your likely customer wants what you have, they just don’t know who you are or that you have what they want.  You’re getting the word out, not converting them to a new religion.

I like the concept of self-selection.  Create a marketing presence where those who are pre-disposed to love what you offer find the path of least resistance.  Make the ones who will take the most convincing encounter quite a lot of resistance.

Consider a simple example.  Your web site will have a certain look and feel.  It could be anything from seriously buttoned down corporate to more playful and points in between.  This isn’t a B2B vs B2C issue.  All three sell their product to businesses.  It’s an early adopter versus late adopter issue.  Late adopters will hate GetSatisfaction’s playful theme, and will probably dismiss it as too unprofessional for them.  That’s fine, they were not good candidates for the very webby forward looking social customer service solution anyway.  SaaS is a lot further along than Social CRM, so Salesforce wants to be less playful, but at the same time, it’s not ready to be hardcore buttoned down like IBM.

That’s an example of using very subtle cues to get your audience to self-select.  You can certainly be much more explicit too.  If you’re doing something that incites passion, there will be passion on both sides of the argument.  You know what you need to do–fire up those on your side and piss off those on the other side.  Larry Ellision and Marc Benioff exchanged this kind of repartee around the Cloud this week as a result of Oracle Open World with such memorable quotes as:

“We come in peace. We’re the cloud people. We are the peaceful people.”

You can decide for yourself who won the match, but the reality is that the winner will largely be a function of who self-selected to the messaging.  Those kind of lines aren’t meant to change anybody’s mind about anything.  Instead, they strengthen your conviction that the speaker is already in your camp, and hence that you should do business with them.

Content Trumps SEO and Links

For marketing, content trumps SEO and links back to your site.  That’s not to say there is no value in SEO or links, just that if you have to choose or prioritize, content is at the top of the heap.  If you’re a big company, you can probably choose to invest in all with far more resources than perhaps are even needed.  But the smaller your budget, the more likely you had better choose and make the right choice.  Pssst: the right choice is Content!

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks.  Several great articles came out that reinforced my gut feel about content, or raised the question in other forms:

- Leo Laporte’s BuzzKill post wasn’t the first thing I read that start the juices flowing, but it was the one that made me realize I had to write a post today.  What happened to Leo is that his Buzz feeds to Twitter quit working because his blog feeds to Buzz had quit working.  And nobody noticed.  Leo realized the real value was in the content he produces on his radio show and blog, because people notice immediately when he is absent there.

- Paddy Moogan suggests that the cornerstone of getting people to link back to you is creating content similar to what they already like and link to.  So even if you wanted to focus on links, the way to do so is through more and better content.

- Paul Carr, after reading Leo’s post, discovered that Twitter is no substitute for real content.  He compared his pre-Twitter blog posts with the combination of Twitter and later posts.   Lo and behold, the quality later was much lower.  The reason?  It takes time to Tweet, time that takes away from producing content.   Paul (and Leo reports much the same) had unconsciously made the prioritization decision I refer to above.  Making decisions without realizing you’ve done is usually a bad idea in business, but focus on this idea that your time and energy are zero sum games.  The time you spend on Twitter is not available for creating content elsewhere.  The same is true of any other service.  Facebook is much the same lots-of-not-enough-content posts.  Are you getting enough time to produce great content?

- RedMonk (thanks Cote!) writes about documentation as a source of sales leads.  There is a link back to the original Forbes article that actually did less for me than the little blurb from RedMonk.  The reason is that my own bootstrapping experiments have shown me full well the value of online documentation for lead generation.  It really works well, as a matter of fact.  This is real authentic content, not marketing spam. Why are we surprised that someone out there is searching for it.  When they find it, they are hooked.  I’ll have more to say about sources of great content in a future post, but for now, let me tell you that product documentation, change logs, and a host of other things you would have thought were only interesting to folks who are already customers are dynamite lead sources because they’re interesting content.

-  Should you trust a blogless marketer?  Something I’ve wondered about for a long time.  If, in the Internet marketing era we live in, producing content is King, what do you do with marketing people who don’t love producing content?  One answer comes from Seth Godin.  Great marketers have limitless content about whatever they’re selling.  They’re passionate about it and know it deeply.

-  Apropos in some way I am not completely able to articulate, Dan Zarrella discovers through blind testing that people want to Retweet something new and fresh.  They want to be first to discover the content.  They are not just lemmings (kind of refreshes confidence in your fellow man) looking to Retweet only what others have made safe by Tweeting ahead of them.  It’s hard to be first and fresh unless the content is new and fresh and worth Tweeting about.

-  Rohit’s #1 bullet point for Social Media Optimization:  The better your content is, the more people will want to share it with their entire social networks whether they link it, like it, dig it or share it.

- Rob Cottingham at RWWeb asks who would win if you had just SEO or just Content.  His cartoon at the end makes the answer clear to me, at least.

- From Hubspot’s 12 Amazing SEO Infographics:  First step for SEO–content quality and value. 

- Do you think Seth Godin’s internal monologue would choose SEO or great content?  As a loyal reader, I have no doubt which way he would swing, but if there is any doubt, he says SEO isn’t worth the money.

I could go on like this for a long time.  I read a lot of blogs, but I have not cherry picked these examples.  The world is discovering what Leo Laporte experienced first hand:  content trumps SEO and links.  Suppose you’re fantastic at SEO, but you have nothing to say.  No content.  You own tons of top slots for searches people do every day.  They’re clicking that first result like crazy, and coming to your site in droves.  But there’s no content there.  The crowds are massed to watch the Emperor parading with No Clothes. 

Now look at  your own organization’s content.  Do you have a resource that anyone interested in the space (forget interested in your products) would want to be aware of?  Or do you simply talk about your products and expect that people who come there are only interested in you?  It’s pretty amazing how poor most marketing content really is.  When was the last time you found a press release that was really interesting and worth passing around to your friends?  When was the last time you saw an ad that qualified to be passed around because of what it had to say about the products or an industry (not just because it is funny in an unrelated way like Old Spice)?  You’re going to have to figure out how to get around that. 

If you’re a bootstrapper, this realization is particularly urgent for you.   You don’t have the luxury of dabbling in a little bit of everything.  You have very few resources and no money.  Yet, you need to get your idea discovered fast.  You need to produce great content. 

Look at some of the premier bootstrappers like 37Signals.  They probably wouldn’t like it put this way, but 37Signals is almost better at producing content than products.  They created Ruby on Rails and gave it away.  That’s content.  BTW, it has nothing to do with project management software like Basecamp, it’s just great content.  They have written best-selling books on Bootstrapping.  That also has nothing to do with Basecamp, it’s just great content.  They take interesting stands on issues while blogging.  Most of the time it has nothing to do with their products, it’s just great content.

Apparently, you don’t even have to write about your products so much as create a community (what Seth Godin will call a tribe) that wants to connect with what you have to say, and hopefully with what you have to sell. Boostrapper’s, you got time to produce that great content while you’re building your product.  Get on with it!

What’s your strategy to produce great content for your business?  Who will create that content?

Bootstrappa’s Resources

Links to the Bootstrappa’s Paradise blog series as well as other useful resources for Bootstrappers.

Bootstrappin’ the Buzz

How do Bootstrappers get the word out to customers that they have a better mousetrap?

They have little money to spend and little time to invest.  Yet there are ways.  Consider my humble experiments to see what one man can do as a bootstrapper during my current jaunt between day jobs.

Let me summarize the different means by which I have attracted folks to discover my site and my product, a specialized calculator for CNC machinists:

-  SEO:  Whereby folks searching for various topics on their favorite search engine (okay, 90% come via Google).

-  Referral:  Whereby some other site links to my humble site and folks eventually find their way to my product page.  In many ways, this corresponds to what Old School marketing would’ve called PR.  On the web, PR manifests itself as people linking to your site and helping to tell your story.

-  Direct:  Whereby folks type the URL into their web browser or have kept a bookmark to it.  Heck, I don’t know how they found me.  Not all things are knowable, but we sure do try to understand those things that are tragically knowable.  This could be another form of Customer Referral, word of mouth or whatever.  Think of it as Lead Nurturing as well.  Folks keep coming back for another bite at the Knowledge Apple until they understand what you’re up to.  It sure do help to have a whole tree full of Knowledge Apples.  Pass me another helping of content, Bootstrapper!

-  “Social” Referral:  Whereby I participated in some Social Web Site or another and by virtue of said participations, peeps thought they’d come check it out.  Yo!   In one case, I actually created said Social Site and only made it available to a Closed Community.  Somehow that only made peeps even more curious.  Do tell?

-  Pay Per Click:  Whereby after considerable deliberation on my financial status, I ponied up the princely sum of $30 a day for about 6 weeks to see what could be done with Google AdWords.  Yes Virginia, even a Bootstrapper can afford that potent marketing budget, perhaps by combining all Founders’ pocket change instead of throwing it into the Starbucks tip bucket.  I admit, I do consume a lot of Mochas.

-  Customer E-Mail Referrals:  They say you have to ask for the sale.  The corollary is you have to ask for the referral.  BTW, if you ask, they will come.  Cool beans!

At the proverbial 100,000 foot level, there are three high level conclusions I have reached after all this falderall.  

First, it is possible to bootstrap considerable activity with minimal cash outlay if you have the time, the energy, and the ability to do it yourself.  Remember, Bootstraps need Starters!  If, OTOH, you have to go hire an SEO firm, a web design firm, a product marketing consultant, an outside tech writer, a photographer, a Best Boy, a Gaffer (I dunno, but I see them on movie credits a lot), a caterer specializing in wholesome organic vegan menus, and a mural painter, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to Bootstrap.

Second is that content precedes everything.  Without content, none of this would have been possible.  Even content that is presented in the fairly amateurish way mine was (hey, I’m no web designer, I did it all in my spare time in Dreamweaver and Photoshop, and it shows!) can get some pretty surprising results.  The website I used for these bootstrapping experiments is focused on the CNC machinist’s world.  That world tolerates my level of commercial fit and finish.  Others may not.  If my Bootstrappin’ gets far enough, I will seek the services of my favorite Graphic Designer (Duke, you know you want to, I just can’t afford you yet!) to “Dukify” (yes, he is the Duke of URL) things a bit.  I know looking at it today would make him blind in one eye and wish he couldn’t see out of the other.

Third, this stuff can be optimized, but if you optimize the wrong metric you will get completely useless results.   It is impossible to navigate unless you can see the whole sales funnel all the way through to your closing event.  In fact, you’ll see over the course of the Bootstrapper series, the many ways I optimized to get better results.  When I get to telling the details, you will be amazed at how often the various metrics want to fight you on doing the right thing.  Speaking of which, I’m using Google Analytics and AdWords for my metrics, just as I discussed already.  I get a lil’ help from a few other goodies and a lot of Excel analysis elbow grease (hey, I can run a spreadsheet, I invented the notebook tabs on them) that I’ll get to in the later posts.

Okay, let’s peel back the onion a layer (not much oxygen at 100,000 feet anyway) and start digging into the data to see just how much activity was bootstrapped.

In a relatively short time, acting entirely on my own (sole founder, floor sweeper, web designer, developer, executive, and court jester of the whole shew) and with minimal cash available, incorporated and deposited a check for $5000 in the company bank account (and plenty still left for more Mochas!), we (must be the Royal “We”) have accomplished the following:

- Created a thriving community of not quite 2000 machinists using the product in less than 12 months.  That community is doubling approximately every 3 months at this point.  At some point that will certainly slow down, but there is decent momentum.

- 16.4 million hits on the product’s crazy name “G-Wizard” if you search Google.  Of course that nutty DJ guy is in those results too.  I get 1.3M hits for “G-Wizard Calculator“, a little cleaner search.  For comparison, top-tier CAD/CAM vendor Gibbscam gets 277K hits and Surfcam 346K hits.  Peeps sure are talking about it.

- Gotten more traffic to the web site that some of the leading CAD/CAM vendors get to theirs.  See these Compete.com results for a comparison against Surfcam and Gibbscam.  I’m even beating #1 market leader Mastercam, well over $100M in revenue, by a whisker.

- Since most readers are probably not too familiar with the online landscape for CNC machinists, let me tell you it’s smaller more insular world than Social Software world.  Techcrunch and Mashable don’t write about it, so there isn’t much of the Echo Chamber effect to magnify your impact.  Even a relatively less noteworthy (i.e. not Google, Facebook, or Twitter) like a Xobni handily crushes my web traffic.  OTOH, I like it that way.  The Bootstrapper wants to be a Big Fish in a Small Pond and not have to compete against every Boy and his VC’s.  At this stage, CNCCookbook gets just about the same traffic as PeerIndex, the last startup Fred Wilson wrote about as I write this.  I think if Fred wrote about me it might just double my traffic with one blog post, LOL.  I’ve done considerable investment-related research on Vertical SaaS Companies in the past, and noted that they tend to spend less on both R&D and Sales and Marketing to generate their revenue than broader companies like Salesforce.com.  I think that’s a beautiful thing for Bootstrapping.

-  The site actually gets quite a bit more activity than Compete.com reveals, but if you’ve ever used a service like Compete to look at your own site, you know that.  It is more of a comparative tool.  As I write this, I get about 40,000 unique visitors each month to CNCCookbook.com.

Okay, and what haven’t I accomplished?  In the spirit of full disclosure, I haven’t yet charged a single cent for the product.  It’s coming, but for now, the product is in Beta test and is free to anyone who’d like to register.  I have announced pricing in the private CNCCookbook User’s Club Community.  Kinda makes you want to register just to go check that out doesn’t it?  Hmmm, could be there’s a plan there somewhere.  Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, a good deal of CNCCookbook existed before I undertook to Bootstrap.  I was using it as a vanity blog while I was learning the CNC business.  I’d been involved with it way back in college days, but a lot had changed.  FWIW, knowing how much time I have spent on that site pretty closely, I estimate it represents about 1 Bob Year of 40 Hour a Week Time. 

Can you do something similar?  I dunno, that’s why I called it a Bob Year.  I don’t even think you need that much content given what Google Analytics tells me about how it is consumed.  But I do know startups are often quiet while building a product for some months, and during that time you and all of your Bootstrappin’ Cronies had best be cranking up the Content Machine.  The other thing I know is that site is a Heck of a lot more interesting than most Corporate Web Sites because most of the time it isn’t trying so hard to sell you something. 

In conclusion, I am measuring success in terms of machinists participating in the Beta test and my ability to efficiently get more to join in.  Next post, I will drill down into how successful each source of traffic has been, and what some of the most successful types of content have been.  Eventually I’ll do a post about how to evaluate ideas for a Bootstrap, but my writing has to go with what I’m thinking about when the muse strikes, so this series is kind of out-of-order.

Bootstrappa’s Resources

Links to the Bootstrappa’s Paradise blog series as well as other useful resources for Bootstrappers.