

How I Market Feedback Army - raffi
http://blog.feedbackarmy.com/business-musings/how-i-market-feedback-army/

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webwright
Great post... Repeating theme here is "... I decided I couldn't afford the
time/cost of [insert scalable marketing option] because our price point was
too low."

This is something 95% of b2b startups don't consider (we certainly didn't).
The epic win in b2b software is finding a SCALABLE way to generate leads. Word
of mouth and PR are awesome, but they don't scale in the sense of "insert $1
in marketing spend here, out comes $1.10 in profit". It isn't sexy, but the
scalable stuff includes cold calling, list buying, adwords, etc.

My gut tells me Feedback Army ought to raise their prices so there is room for
them to still make many when they pay for leads. If they want to grow FAST,
that is. Word of mouth can fuel pretty solid growth-- but you can't scale it
on demand.

Related: $15?! That's crazy low. The author needs to A/B test pricing and read
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

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acangiano
I agree with everything you said, except for list buying. That's pretty much
spam. List renting may be OK, but I would still avoid the practice. It's easy
to damage one's brand with accusations of being a spammer.

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webwright
It's all in how you do it. I know plenty of businesses that have gone nowhere
but up buying good lists and emailing them in a personal-feeling manner (with
clear unsubscribe instructions. It's not legally spam-- and if your audience
isn't geeky, it's not generally going to piss them off.

I also once heard that the thing that made Art.com into a huge business was
buying the pottery barn list, cross referencing it with new home buyers, and
sending catalogs to the resulting list.

We've never done it-- but I don't think it's universally a bad business
decision.

