
 Startup School, DHH, and the Missing Marketing Piece - kschrader
http://kurt.karmalab.org/articles/2008/04/21/startup-school-dhh-and-the-missing-marketing-piece
======
mhartl
David's point was well-made, but this post makes a good point as well.
37signals has huge structural advantages because of the popularity of Rails
and their blog's huge audience. When you can push out your announcements to
over 80,000 feed readers alone, you have an advantage few others can match.

The bottom line is that _getting distribution is hard_. Those who have it
often forget that.

~~~
cedsav
Sure they can roll out new apps to a huge audience now, but they did not start
with 80k readers. It took them years to transition from a consultancy to a
SaaS model, and years to grow Basecamp and Rails. Getting distribution is not
that hard, but it takes a LONG time (talking from experience).

~~~
mhartl
I agree, though 'easy things that take a long time' fall into the 'hard'
category as far as I'm concerned. But maybe I'm just impatient. :-)

------
edw519
Good point.

So I won't try to market my line of small business software.

Instead, I'll just promote the fact that it's so sophisticated, it could only
be written in a brand new language that I had to create myself:
eJavaLisPython++.

~~~
thaumaturgy
So /that's/ what the edw519 t-shirt was all about.

I kept seeing you that day and wondering what in blazes edw519 was.

~~~
Xichekolas
"edw519" is the source code for a Lisp interpreter written in eJavaLisPython++
... it's a terse language.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I will soon release a new module for eJavaLisPython++. Its source code will
probably be, "jjl43", but I'm running some unit tests to see if I can get
measurably better performance out of "jjm4".

------
sant0sk1
While this point is true, it is moot to DHH's advice. Why?

Because marketing plays the same roll whether you are trying to build the next
Facebook or simply gain a couple thousand paying customers. It has to be
there, and its gonna take time and effort.

As DHH points out in the comments of the post, the final line references a
mathematical error and not a fantasy world .

------
dnaquin
Misses the point.

Ultimately, we as internet developers need to start thinking about charging
customers. I'm always talking with friends about how applications are moving
from the desktop online. And some of those applications best fit some sort of
pay for use model. How to get users is one thing, but that wasn't DHH's point.

~~~
attack
The idea of charging for web apps has been tried to DEATH. This "revolutionary
idea" has come and gone 50 times over. It is extremely hard to make _more_
from this model than through advertising, being strategically aquired, or just
about any other model. I personally have tried, hard.

If people aren't in the spending mode when they go to your site then just
forget it.

~~~
dnaquin
You're forgetting the second point DHH made. Target small businesses. They're
a little more likely to spend money to improve performance than your average
Joe internet user.

------
rufo
I'm unsure how this is different than any other business, whether online or
brick-and-mortar.

He says right in the presentation: this is not guaranteed to work. You still
have an uphill battle; the general wisdom is that three out of every four
businesses started in the US fail within their first year.

However... your odds of creating a profitable company based on a sound
business model are far better than the odds of you building a startup with an
insane burn rate and surviving long enough (and creating a service useful
enough) to have a liquidity event.

------
run4yourlives
Um, those weren't 37Singals' numbers he was putting up on the screen, you can
bet on that. The difference between that and what 37 Signals makes is what can
be attributed to marketing, yes.

Saying that they are wholly dependent on marketing to be profitable at all is
a little much though.

~~~
attack
That numbers game he was playing is equivalent to the classic flawed thinking:

> If we just get 1% market share of this billion dollar industry then we'll be
> rich! 1%, that's tiny! This will be so EASY!

Just 500 customers! How easy! Give me a (*(&#$ break...

~~~
jimbokun
I'm pretty sure he said getting 500 paying customers is still pretty hard.
Just not as hard as getting the millions of customers needed to "be the next
Facebook."

~~~
attack
He was definitely making it out to be "obviously" way easier. It's not.

~~~
run4yourlives
It is way easier - than becoming the next facebook. He's right on that point
too. Were you not listening to what he said?

He also said pretty clearly - getting the 500 users is still pretty hard. I'm
pretty sure he even had a slide that said "It's still pretty hard".

