
Marketing Software, For People Who Would Rather Be Building It - craigkerstiens
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2013/04/24/marketing-for-people-who-would-rather-be-building-stuff/
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patio11
I fly out to Microconf 2013 in approximately 20 hours and haven't finished my
presentation yet, so I thought I'd procrastinate by finishing the editing on
this transcript of my Microconf 2012 talk. Also includes slides/video.

Feel free to ask questions if you have them.

~~~
danmaz74
Excellent advice as always. One question: When talking about marketing for
internet businesses, I don't remember you mentioning branding much, if at all,
mostly direct response marketing stuff. Is this by choice? Have you got an
opinion about branding for internet startups - eg how many resources they
should devote to it compared to direct response marketing?

~~~
patio11
Most of my businesses are aggressively unbrandable (with the debatable
exception of myself personally). Branding strikes me as not really playing to
my strengths and not being maximally compatible with the sort of time and
resource constraints most small businesses / startups are operating under. (If
I were in a confrontational mood I'd also describe it as "A great way to spend
a lot of money while avoiding any responsibility to actually produce
meaningful business results.")

~~~
danmaz74
I suspected something like this :) I come from a technical background too, but
I think that not thinking in branding terms is very often a big weakness of us
technical founders - one of the reasons why inferior products often have the
upper hand. I'm also trying to make a business out of this realization, but
I'm not there yet and for now I'll just try to sow the seed of doubt here.

By the by, I also think that a lot of what you suggest for direct response
marketing also has branding effects - just think about educating people by
email for free - so the two things aren't necessarily in contrast. And I don't
think that there would be much to debate about the value of your personal
brand here (meaning no offence - if you don't like the word brand, just
substitute "reputation" to it!).

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biot
My $0.02 worth:

    
    
      For many of you, assistance directly from the CEO in integration is a really
      compelling offer, because wow, you can’t get that anywhere else. [...]
      We’ll do the copy‑pasting for you ... and it will actually be done by a freelancer
      that we’ve hired and told them how to FTP stuff.
    

If one claims "assistance directly from the CEO", I would be disappointed to
learn that access credentials to my website were handed out to some third-
party freelancer who performs the integration rather than being handled
directly by the engineer-owner. If you mean something different such as "our
CEO ensures the job gets done to exacting standards" then that's freelancer-
compatible as the statement makes no claims about who provides the assistance.

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ambiate
I've followed/stalked you for years Patrick. Thank you so much for sharing
your knowledge. You helped transition me from grey to white.

On a side note, if your Vimeo account is Pro/Plus, please check the 'make
accessible for mobile devices' option in account settings.

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ComputerGuru
I'm super sorry to have just learned about microconf only to find that it is
completely, totally sold out for this year (plus being only a few days away).

Any other good conferences like this one? From what I can see, this is all
content and zero fluff, not cheap but not outrageously expensive either. I'm
more than ready and willing to book even if it's a few hours from now for
something like this. Share your thoughts, guys!

~~~
patio11
BaconBizConf and Business of Software are the other two software business
conferences that I'd fly to America to attend even when not speaking.

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k3n
I'm not trying to take anything away from you at all, because what you've
provided is very good. However, I'd like to say something about _marketing_ vs
_sales_ , in that it seems like your material is more geared towards sales
than marketing. I'm going to go off on a tangent here somewhat, bear with
me...

To explain in my eyes, I see marketing as everything you do to promote your
project (i.e. brand/product/etc.), which may not always have a direct
financial payout tied to it. For instance, FOSS projects have their own
motivations for gaining usage and popularity, and revenue may be tied to that,
but they're not explicitly selling anything. But, they do wish to get noticed,
to have people try them out, etc. and so they are selling the idea of their
project even though they're not actually ringing anything up at the register.

On the other hand, "sales" is much more closely coupled with driving a user to
purchase (or maybe even just 'sign-up' for) your service or product. This is
what I'm mostly seeing in the slides: pricing, email campaigns, conversion
rates, etc. These are all pretty exclusive to making a _sale_ , and while they
do embody marketing concepts, there's a lot more to marketing than simply
corralling the customer to the register.

Why am I droning on about this? I'll admit that it's for selfish reasons; I
was hoping to see some marketing guidance for the page itself. I review lots
of projects, and a majority of them that are created by engineers fall into
one of the following buckets:

* zero marketing whatsoever, possibly only a github page with a couple sentences in a readme

* poorly-constructed marketing, such as using lots of buzzwords and generic phrases without actually telling me anything at all about what the project actually is or does; for instance, many times the only blurb given is akin to "cures what ails you"

Now there are some that get it right, though I suspect that many of these
either have someone with marketing skills on the team, or they've had an
actual marketing guru help them out. That, or they're generally really
observant and pick-up on it without having to study.

Either way, when I review a project, it's a shame that the basics are so often
neglected:

* problem definition: in explicit terms, what problem(s) does your project solve?

* product differentiation: if yours is "the best", "an alternative", "the new way", etc., then why do you think that? Why should I choose yours over X? If you can provide some concrete examples here, all the better.

* product demo: if it can be demo'd, then please at least create a simple working demo. Note: I don't consider projects that include demos as a part of the source code, which must be downloaded, built, and configured as a proper demo. I also don't consider any that require you to register or provide an email address as a proper demo, either. Unless it's a very pressing need that I have, I'm not going to spend 5-15m fiddling with your source or giving away my info. Just host it somewhere so that I -- and possibly my CTO/CEO/purchasing agent -- can see it in action.

* licensing, terms and conditions, etc.: make them prominent enough that I don't need to browse your source files or open a support request to find out if I can even use it.

Sorry, this got longer than I anticipated...

~~~
tptacek
Four classic functions of marketing teams at product companies:

* Product management: the feature/function/benefit of the product and (most important function in all of marketing) pricing/packaging.

* Marketing communications (marcom): what you've defined "marketing" as: promotion, promotional writing. Also, advertising.

* Sales support: awareness campaigns and events and, particularly, lead-gen. This is what the CEO see as the most important function of "marketing".

* PR/AR: relationship management with publications and analysts.

~~~
k3n
Thanks for the info. I was mainly speaking of the audience that the OP was
addressing, i.e. engineers who likely haven't had much if any formal marketing
training (I've only had 1 semester worth), as they are the ones on small (or
solo) teams that are likely to not pay much attention to any sort of
marketing. It's good to see a top-down perspective from a large organization
like you've laid out too, though.

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tocomment
Could you post your list of the 400 new things you could do with Twilio? It
seems like there ought to be a lot but I can't think of any.

(Or at least post your process for coming up with them.) I think bitcoin might
be another technology that makes big "ripples", no?

~~~
patio11
_Or at least post your process for coming up with them._

Think of a business. Think of any phone call, incoming or outgoing, which is
sufficiently standardized that you could teach any college graduate to execute
that. That person can be replaced with a Twilio script, at a fraction of the
cost.

My wife is sleeping in the room with my business notebooks so I'll hold off on
finding and scanning it for the moment, but it was literally as simple as a)
write down business, b) write down the calls they make, c) star the ones that
sound like _money_.

 _I think bitcoin might be another technology that makes big "ripples", no?_

We will have to agree to disagree on that one. Bitcoin's core innovation is
the distributed self-organizing boiler room. As a transaction processing
system it's technically innovative but wildly inferior to legacy payments for
transactions which need to touch the real world. (It's interesting for
transactions which don't, but could be replaced with a SQL update statement,
which would improve upon it in virtually every way.) As a currency/commodity,
the arguments in favor of it having a sustainable value north of zero are not
credible to me. The main reason I have not nailed an 8,000 word stake in its
rotten heart is that I think there's a non-zero risk that people will use
every additional quantum of attention given to it as a reason to convince
other people to "invest."

~~~
euroclydon
Outgoing unsolicited calls, once removed, might lighten the load of what
people are imagining here, unless I'm not up to date on Twilio's TOS.

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todd3834
The video was great! It would be nice to hear about how you get people into
the funnel so that we could do a lot of the things you recommend. You already
covered SEO, do you have any other customer acquisition techniques?

~~~
patio11
SEO and AdWords are my mainstays for my software businesses. This year I'm
going to be dipping my toes into a bit of offline marketing, like e.g. going
to the (without loss of generality) Omaha Conference For Orthodontics Practice
Managers and just talking to people. Given what I currently surmise about the
per-account LTVs for higher-end customers of Appointment Reminder, at many
plausible guesses for how many conversations I can have per day and how many
people I can convert, it might be worth my time to do that. (Step 1: Do it.
Step 2: Do it systematically with predictable ROI. Step 3: Pay someone to
execute on Step 2.)

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mdlthree
I am having trouble processing some cognitive dissonance when comparing your
parable of the "Crazy Egg Enterprise Edition" but then using pricing
strategies to take advantage of the sane kind of managers. While, I understand
the concept of feature segmentation, I supposed should not be concerned with
how other people run their business. I only need to focus on my profitability
and not being a sucker.

~~~
coopdog
I suppose it's all in the wording. Have the cheaper options but don't call
them enterprise, and then have the really expensive enterprise option for
managers for who the pain of being called anything but is more than a slight
blip in the budget.

Giving them ways to pad their budget was also an eye opener for me. The idea
that they might not even be conforming to our rational actor model of
balancing cost and value opens up new pricing considerations. I wonder if a
monthly 'flex' option where they can temporarily boost their budget to some
ridiculous figure would work. The engineer in me does cringe at the thought of
it though

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orangethirty
Everyone who has a startup should watch this at least once a day (me
included). This is great stuff, Patrick.

~~~
patio11
Thanks, glad you liked it. What would you like to hear more about? (I'm
shamelessly fishing for ideas for this year.)

~~~
jplewicke
These are a few things off the top of my head that I'd love to read a blog
post on:

\- SAAS Pricing when marginal costs are fairly high. For example, how would
you price a service that offered human translation of a company's social media
posts into N different languages?

\- Accounting / corporate structure for bootstrapped SAAS companies: do you
use an LLC, and if so things to take into account for cash vs accrual
accounting, pass-through vs. corporate taxation, guaranteed payments vs.
distributions, finding a good accountant, etc.

\- The 8,000 word "stake through Bitcoin's heart", or at least the part that
talks about how and why banks are going to stop taking Bitcoin exchanges as
clients. There is a surprising amount of doublethink going on to allow people
simultaneously believe "Bitcoin and traditional banking are natural enemies",
"at least one Bitcoin exchange will always be able to access the banking
system", and "the nominal price of Bitcoins can only increase in the long
run."

~~~
patio11
_Accounting / corporate structure for bootstrapped SAAS companies: do you use
an LLC, and if so things to take into account for cash vs accrual accounting,
pass-through vs. corporate taxation, guaranteed payments vs. distributions,
finding a good accountant, etc._

My accountant, Cameron Keng, is giving an attendee talk on this very topic at
Microconf this year. I'm going to be taking notes. (The cheapest advice from
him I'll get this year, for certain. ;) ) Remind me to post them if he
doesn't.

Noted on the other two suggestions.

~~~
jplewicke
Thanks! I'll look forward to it.

