

You're a little company, now act like one - lrm242
http://blog.asmartbear.com/blog/youre-a-little-company-now-act-like-one.html

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sh1mmer
A bit of meta-commenting but the "Welcome HN" banner which encourages us to
upvote the story put me right off. I'll vote it up if I like it, not because
you customized your site to "Welcome" me because I read HN.

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Alex3917
For every 100 people who read HN, my guess is that 10 upvote stories and 1
comments. I bet that more than half of regular HN readers don't even know that
the site is powered by voting despite the little arrows next to each story.

If people knew to upvote stories they liked on their own then the average
story would have something like 800 upvotes. I agree with what you're saying
because if everyone did this it would be really annoying, but certainly most
people don't upvote the stories they like.

~~~
tptacek
I might vote on 1 out of every 100 things I read, and usually it's not because
I like the story, but because I want it to get more comments.

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donaq
That is, of course, until the present batch of small companies grow big (or
die) and all the big companies are putting words like "suck" and "cool" on
their corporate blurbs. Then the next batch of small companies will ape them
because people never change, and then early adopters will start looking out
for companies with "people who care enough to sound professional" (excerpted
from the future version of OP).

And when that happens, I'll be ready...

~~~
donw
It is possible to sound professional without sounding boring, and I'd also
argue that being honest about the scale and capabilities of your company is a
big part of professionalism.

"UberSoft is a leading provider in synergistic data-driven technologies
focused on improving ROI through market-driven analytics. The UberSoft Team
has over twenty years of experience in delivering proven solutions to our
corporate partners." is fluff.

"Spend less time marketing, and more time watching hockey. UberSoft makes
marketing easy, because we've got a really great way to link statistics from
news feeds into your existing analytics." is honest, and a lot more memorable.

~~~
mitjak
Dead on. As tired as I am of all the friendless as well, there are shades of
gray in the between. Take even the balsamiq example the article uses -- the
website doesn't jump in your face; it simply tries to be more honest and not
present itself as a Fortune 501 company.

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stevoski
My favourite "pretending to be big" line I see little guys using is: "With
more than 20 years experience" based on 4 guys in the firm, each 5 years out
of university.

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josefresco
20 years of 'collective' experience is the key word that needs to be there to
make it (slightly) less of a complete bullshit line.

But that's the least of the problem with false claims ...I recently met the
owner of another local web firm who was telling people they've been 'in the
business' for 30 years. I don't think I need to point out the error in math
there.

~~~
pxlpshr
Right, distinction is important. We use "combined experience" to call out the
width of our expertise, not depth, on our publishing _services_ page for
mobile development. I think it helps reassure some prospectives that while
young, we have a broad range of experience in multiple industries.

Getting sign off on a ~5-6+ digit _services_ project takes a fair amount of
work, and more so without a thick portfolio. Vertical software sales benefit
from tech diligence and product demo as part of the buying decision.

~~~
brk
_helps reassure some prospectives_

In reality I don't think it works as you expect. Most people have come to see
these "collective experience" lines as excuses for not having anyone on the
team with more than a few years of experience.

Would YOU want to get a heart transplant from 5 medical students with "10
years of collective experience"? The reality is that this collective
experience is not really additive. If you have 1 person with 20 years of
experience in some area, they've seen a couple of cycles and progressions of
technology. No amount of people with 3 years of recent experience can ever
really match this.

~~~
pxlpshr
The mobile software market is young (relative to it's tragic past) and we're a
small shop of mashups => advertising/web/software engineering. I have roughly
10 years of experience but it's not about me, it's about us and when combined
— we have a lot to offer as a young company that's trying to get off the
ground.

I'm very transparent when communicating our strengths and weaknesses to make
sure the project+expertise = good fit on both ends of the deal. I agree with
your point about wisdom, but heart surgery is rather linear and you better be
highly specialized in your trade for that line of work. :)

ps. It's not that I disagree with ASmartBear, I just feel the post is a bit
generalized in its advice. Selling client services does not benefit from a
prebuilt software product that can sell itself.

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rubinelli
Putting aside the corpspeak fluff, I wonder if this advice is valid for SaaS
as well. I understand managers won't feel nervous after buying a mockup or
code review tool from a small supplier, but would they be as willing to put
business-critical data into a small company's servers? Would you let a one-man
shop run your CRM?

~~~
sh1mmer
I think that depends how transparent you are on your business practices.
Running anything on a single server is dumb, but if you are one man shop
running on EC2 and you are clear about that I don't think it's a big deal.

Explain what you do, and why it's good. Explain how you've thought about BCP
and making sure everything will stay up (essential for a service).

Companies routinely hire individual consultants at $2k/day and follow their
advice. I don't think that trusting a well respected individual in the
industry is so much the problem, as trusting someone who's capability is
unknown.

If you show the capabilities of you and your systems up front, without BS,
then people will take you on for projects that are appropriate to that level
of risk. Which may be quite as much as you can handle.

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tsestrich
I love the advice given in this article. In working on putting together a
little company of my own, I often find myself looking at what seems to be
"accepted" and trying to steer in that direction. This creates a lot of fluff
in my language and, honestly, I end up with something that I don't think I'd
even be interested in trying.

Keeping it simple and honest always sounded like a good idea, but the fact
that people have shown that it can work is a big confidence booster.

~~~
patio11
You want a simple recipe for eliminating fluff and connecting with your
customers? Talk less about we/us/I and talk more about you/your.

When you're talking about "we", you're almost certainly talking to hear
yourself talk -- "We have an industry-leading solution with years of YOU DON'T
CARE ABOUT THIS."

When you're talking about "you", you're probably addressing the customers
needs and ways to get those needs satisfied. (" _You_ can use Widget to
flangle a foobar in less than 30 seconds, saving _you_ time and getting _you_
home to _your_ kids faster.")

~~~
donw
Good advice when Dale Carnegie put it in his book, still good advice today.

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dpcan
As a developer, I have no problem buying development tools from one-man-shop /
small company.

When it comes to software for my other business needs however, I wouldn't use
a hosted SaaS service if I didn't think it was backed by a lot of people, has
a lot of customers, and isn't going anywhere.

As a provider of hosted business tools, similar to the ones I wouldn't buy
myself, I find that showing the small size of my company is a huge problem.

I'm actually finding that the customers that won't host their data with a
small company would be more than happy to buy a version they could install on-
site.

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arohner
Excellent advice. In a related note, why do all those Enterprise Software
Startups appear to have the same website? The one that has different links
about how FooSoft can help for each different industry, and you have to go to
wikipedia to find out what the product _really_ does?

The only thing I can come up with is _someone_ must like those websites that
contain zero information, but who is it, and why?

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edw519
"...someone must like those websites that contain zero information..."

My guess is that the less you say about yourself, the less corporate drones
have to eliminate you in their RFP process.

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tptacek
Going cold through an RFP process is playing to lose anyways, edw519.

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edw519
Right. Just like posting a website with zero information.

I don't know why anyone would do either.

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there
i think it's certainly possible to make your company's image look professional
without all the corporate speak, buzzwords, and stock images.

my company is mostly just me (unless i sub out parts of a project) and i
usually use "we" when talking to customers. many of them know the company is
just me but they are already my customers. a potential customer might not even
consider calling me in the first place if my website said i'm one guy. if they
have a big project planned and _they_ think it needs a whole team, would they
even consider asking a one-person shop for an estimate? maybe not.

~~~
patio11
I think the choice of "we" versus "I" is bicycle shedding for copywriting.
I've seen software developers paralyzed by this decision. (No, really. It used
to come up with some regularity at the Business of Software boards.) They've
both got merits -- pick whichever sounds good to you and get back to stuff
which matters.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Perhaps We shall settle upon the Imperial We in the future.

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tptacek
Love this post. This has been our standard marketing tack for years, and was a
real conflict early in the company.

How are we doing? Check out:

<http://runplaybook.com>

Do we sound like VC-funded 6-person-marcom team boring jerks, or just the real
jerks we actually are?

~~~
Andys
FWIW, Your site didnt seem very professional until I got to the pricing page.
Both the content of this page and the pricing level of the product sent a
clear signal that this was a "serious", enterprise-aimed product.

The rest of the site made me confident in your technical abilities but not the
longevity of the company. The pricing made me feel more comfortable that you
would be around for a while yet.

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spencerfry
It's always odd to me when a company spends more time trying to market the
people behind the product rather than the product itself. The marketing of the
product should be in the forefront across all pages and any mention of
yourselves should be short and to the point. You don't even need to mention
the people behind it (although, we do, but only our names and links to our
websites/blogs).

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jpbutler
I entirely agree with this. I wrote Serendeputy's about page in my own voice.
I did it partly to separate myself from the my more corporatey competitors,
but mostly because I despise the way I sound when I try to speak corporate
droid. It makes me want to cry.

That might be my number one reason for doing a startup: the ability to avoid
doing things that make me want to cry.

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steveblgh
On a slightly related linguistic note, I find the following sentence annoying:
"Put yourself in the shoes of that Early Adopter. Does _she_ want to see
useless garbage phrases or does _she_ want to hear about how you totally
understand _her_ pain?"

It's safe to bet that among the early adopters of a version control data
mining tool there are overwhelmingly more males than females. Probably the
poster feels that using _she_ will somehow compensate this inbalance. I see
the he/she problem as a bug of English, but using _she_ in all technical text
where a _he_ would be more probable is just fake.

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jcromartie
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I've worked with 3-person operations
that claimed to have "teams" and double-digit employee counts to clients. Why
not just be honest? It's like black-hat SEO for your HR.

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oink
Why does hitting <ESC> take me to a login page? That was odd.

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smartbear
I guess the Squarespace blogging platform just does that automatically. Agreed
it's odd.

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edw519
_...is the leading provider of..._

Unless you're McDonalds, Microsoft, or Walmart, this is guaranteed bullshit
that just makes you look stupid.

For many cases, OP provides great advice. While some customers feel more
comfortable with the stableness of a large institution, just as many feel more
comfortable with the attention they'll get from someone small and hungry. For
many of us here, we should use that to our advantage.

~~~
sfphotoarts
not necessarily, there are a lot of niche products where there is a small
company that _is_ the leading provider. Leica, for example, the leading
provider of rangefinder cameras since the 20's. A perfectly true statement,
but you won't find them in the fortune 50. There are many many more examples.

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donw
I agree wholeheartedly. Writing corpspeak on your website may be 'safe', but
it's not only boring -- it's totally unmemorable. Even if people hate your
corporate image, if they remember you, you've already made a significant step
in the right direction.

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johnnybgoode
Yeah, but a lot of companies seem like they're overcompensating to me. I mean,
even if I met these people in person, I know they wouldn't sound as "forced-
casual" as they do on their website.

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michaelcampbell
Very enjoyable read. I twitterfollow a number of local startup cultists, errr,
"enthusiasts" that I think would be wise to consider some of this.

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polos
It has always been known that:

Lying may(!) bring you some advantage, _short-term_ only; but you _always_
have an alternative way: you can tell something great, without lying, but you
need your phantasy for doing that.

So, my dear friend, do you simply lack phantasy?

;)

