
If You Build It, They Won’t Come. - jasonlbaptiste
http://jasonlbaptiste.com/featured-articles/if-you-build-it-they-wont-come/
======
patio11
One suggestion: I'd put SEO in the pre-launch box. There are significant
portions of calendar time involved in SEO, so might as well start the site
marinating in the Google juice while you go do other things.

Additionally, there are many, many things you can do for SEO which don't
require your product to exist. You don't have to have a solution available to
show to be able to, e.g., blog about the problem domain, create resources
which solve problems for the people you hope will eventually give you money,
start pushing the emotional buttons of folks in the niche, etc.

AdWords, on the other hand, you can put off until you have reason to suspect
that you'll be able to do it profitably. (If you can't make money with a
customer acquisition cost of zero from organic search, it is unlikely you will
be able to make money on AdWords.)

~~~
il
I agree, with the exception that you should never view organic traffic as
free. Even if you didn't spend any money on SEO directly(e.g. buying links)
SEO can be very time consuming, and you should always consider the opportunity
cost of time spent on SEO versus other traffic sources.

I pay my outsourced employees who do SEO for me by the hour, so maybe I feel
the financial pinch of a large scale SEO campaign more than others, but any
time spent on SEO by anyone in your startup is money.

~~~
patio11
This is a good point. I was trying to talk about unit economics: a customer
from organic SEO is free at the margin, and if you're not able to monetize
them profitably with a marginal cost of 0 then it is strikingly unlikely you
will be able to buy them on AdWords and make up the loss on volume.

~~~
il
That's generally true, but in some cases, particularly in certain niches, that
argument breaks down.

In the past several years I've staked significant money(6 figures) on my
ability to predict traffic quality(how well a traffic source converts) and you
may find that the people who click on ads(sometimes before clicking on any
search results) convert much better than SEO traffic. I've seen 50-150%
difference in conversion rate between targeted free and paid traffic several
times.

This is why many companies bid on their name in their SEM campaigns, even
though they obviously easily rank first for it organically.

This isn't necessarily always true, but it's something to think about.

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smakz
I don't like articles like this for one reason and one reason only: it's not
empirical. It's a long list of vacuous do this do that statements. What I look
for when reading articles about start ups is "At start up X we did Y and it
caused Z". Those kinds of relationships are helpful to me and help relate to
what I'm doing. If you related it to your success at cloudomatic or a previous
start up and had concrete results to relate it to I'd be more interested.

I understand these posts may be helpful to others as idea generation material,
and obviously the up votes are a sign of that - but for me it's the equivalent
of answering a complicated calculus question with a one line answer. Show your
work.

~~~
lionhearted
> I understand these posts may be helpful to others as idea generation
> material, and obviously the up votes are a sign of that - but for me it's
> the equivalent of answering a complicated calculus question with a one line
> answer. Show your work.

This comment is entirely reasonable except for one little thing - you just got
some marketing advice for free from a knowledgeable guy, and you're here
saying it isn't exactly what you wanted and telling him to "show your work".
Maybe try saying thanks first?

Really, I'm torn between which cliche to quote - either "You get more bees
with honey than vinegar" or "Beggars can't be choosers" - if you got a single
valuable idea from this post to try out, then that'd make it worthwhile, yes?
I like empirical case-study type works too, but hey, free advice on marketing
from a smart knowledgeable guy. That's pretty cool, yes?

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il
Great post, but I wish startups,as well as this article, devoted more
attention to SEO and paid advertising like PPC/Social. In many industries,
paid traffic will be the primary driver of signups and sales, and it's a
mistake to think you can replace a large scale media buy campaign with a few
blog posts or tweets.

Groupon and Zynga are excellent examples of this.

Also, don't underestimate the power of affiliate programs. As an affiliate I
have the unique perspective of promoting Zynga, Groupon, Zoosk, and other
"viral" competitors, and I can tell you that they had one thing in common: one
of the main drivers of their early growth and traction was a well-managed
affiliate program, with numerous affiliates pushing thousands of signups a day
to them.

This requires a budget and strong understanding of the affiliate space, but it
can be a tremendously powerful shortcut to success. I think if you're a funded
startup with a clear path to profitability, you should absolutely devote a
significant chunk of your budget to paid advertising(assuming you or someone
you hire knows how to optimize and manage the campaign so you don't lose
money).

~~~
brianbreslin
I'd venture to guess that most startups don't know how to start an affiliate
program. There aren't many simple solutions that they can integrate easily
(via an api or something) and aren't super costly up front (not all startups
have $5k to dump into CJ). Jason's company is touching on this for SaaS sites,
but there is definitely a big hole in the market there.

~~~
klous
<http://zferral.com/> ( _not affiliated_ ) has a pretty decent, simple build-
your-own affiliate / referral program.

~~~
jeffepp
Klous, thank you for the comment, appreciate it. For some reason many startups
do not consider an affiliate program a 'must-have' but it really is an
efficient way to scale.

~~~
il
Zferral looks great, but the reason companies pay thousands for networks like
CJ or tracking like DirectTrack or Linktrust is because these companies invest
heavily in infrastructure, stability, and fraud protection to ensure that
every valid action gets tracked and paid for, and invalid ones do not. At
first glance, Zferral does not inspire the same confidence.

If you just throw up an affiliate script or service without any experience
with the industry, you will get destroyed with fraud and traffic quality
issues very quickly. If you take this route for your startup, be sure to hire
or at least consult with someone with affiliate experience to design your
program correctly. I see new advertisers come up unprepared expecting a flood
of customers with zero risk and quickly crash and burn in this industry every
day.

I don't want to turn this into a critique of zferral, but as a quick comment,
the pricing model is all wrong. If you're a hosted affiliate tracking service,
you need to charge per click, like an adserver, and provide the proper SLA. If
you're a network, take a percentage of payouts.

~~~
jeffepp
I would also like to add that my co-founder is a core team member at piwik.org
so he knows a bit about tracking and analytics...

We will make this more evident on the website soon.

~~~
brianbreslin
does this handle subscriptions? i.e. give a person a % of monthly recurring
fees?

~~~
jeffepp
Of course, there are several custom options: Tiers, Rev %, Flat commissions.
Recurring (forever, for a time), and also a one time sum (plus recurring rev
share).

Basically, if you can dream it, you can create it. Use the invite code
"hackernews" to gain immediate access upon signup.

------
kaib
I think the article has a great set of ideas but if you follow this advice
blindly you might risk flailing around doing everything badly instead of doing
one or two things really well. As long as you cover your whole customer
acquisition pipeline I think it's more useful to focus your efforts on a few
of these channels and really push them.

I'm basing this both on observation of successful startups of late, like the
experience DropBox had with AdWords, and also on my own limited experience. In
my last startup we would probably have been even better off if we had focused
more on the things that worked and quickly discarded non-revenue generating
activities. In our case AdWords paid handsomely for the time and money
invested while PR gave absolutely abysmal results. However, I personally kept
working on bad marketing efforts mostly based on the naive view about how
things are supposed to be.

~~~
il
I've had similar results with my projects. PPC was the main driver of sales,
and press releases proved worthless. The only successful PR I've done is
reaching out to bloggers in the space with a personalized email.

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jacquesm
You really should write that book, I would have given my left arm for this
article 12 years ago. Excellent stuff, one thing I would add - and it's only a
small thing - get a professional copywriter with PR experience to write your
press release for you. If it isn't in the right format it will be completely
ignored.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
One thing I really want to do in the next couple of years is write a book re:
an entrepreneurial topic. Just need the time to do it right.

Agreed re: press releases. They're still used, not sure how effective
depending on the audience, but they need to be done right. It's not terribly
expensive either.

~~~
jacquesm
Well, at least I got the email bit right :)

It's disappointing to see how much stuff gets announced here and how little of
it is still alive a year later.

~~~
all
Truly. I have the feeling a lot of people view the race as a sprint and run
out of wherewithall when they realise it is more like an ultra marathon.

~~~
jacquesm
I think a part of the problem is the perception that a successful launch is
something you can measure 'the morning after', whereas the truth is that after
the initial burst of traffic is gone you'll be left with little to no
traction. That's when the real work starts and you're looking at months of
gruelling grunt work to flog the thing forward in spite of any really
gratifying moments other than to slowly see your stats craws back up to the
level that you seemed to achieve so effortlessly on day one.

It can take quite a while before your real audience has found you, viral
elements help but are no guarantee of a significantly easier process, even if
they can cut the time it takes to get to the level of 'ramen profitability'.

And that's all assuming you make no critical mistakes, which can set you back
weeks or months.

Endurance is _far_ more important than talent in this phase and I think that
is something that ought to be made much more clear. If the expectations are
more realistic I think people would find it in themselves to go the distance.

Unrealistic expectations are killing.

------
rwhitman
Here's my recent philosophy - if you have the time to worry about mailing
lists and slow reveal, testimonials and launch date hooha then you're doing
something wrong, because in the time you spent noodling around on these things
- hyping up internally that which does not yet exist and thus setting yourself
up for a harder fall later - you could have launched the thing already and
started validating the business model...

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petercooper
FWIW, this page has a very poor reading experience on the iPad. The text is
oddly "grainy", scrolling is sluggish, you have to keep scrolling up and down
due to the columns, and when you do scroll, the text flashes on and off. I
hope Apple gets Safari Reader integrated on the iOS devices one day,
Readability isn't quite as good :-)

~~~
sundarurfriend
> I hope Apple gets Safari Reader integrated on the iOS devices one day,
> Readability isn't quite as good

Do you mean you used Readability and it didn't help? In that case, won't
Safari Reader be the same since it's just Readability plugged into Safari by
Apple?

~~~
petercooper
I mean Safari Reader looks better. Tweaking Readability on an iPad is going to
be somewhat of an undertaking (though possible, I suspect).

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wensing
We launched our first publicly-accessible version of Stormpulse in late 2006.
Even though we emailed everyone we could think of (as we had time), our
traffic stayed pretty flat (0-250 visits per day).

We continued to refine the product, continued "to try to get word out" with
simple blogging and SEO, and continued to see a flatline of traffic until
August 2008 when we launched our affiliate maps program (map is free to embed
on your site as long as you link back). The program took off like wildfire and
our traffic six months out of the year is now in the 6-7 figure range.

------
mcargian
is anyone else getting a virus fishing attack warning on this link?

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Update: The .js file had an unescaped string in it. I just updated to this new
design/theme a week ago. _I removed the unescaped part and all should be fine
now._ I'm on mediatemple btw.

~~~
mcargian
From AVG:

wp_content/themes/LightBright/js/League_Gothic_400.font.js

Exploit link to exploit site

edit: FF 3.6.8 on Windows - AVG 9

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
browser? os? someone said this on twitter to ericries after he retweeted
another article of mine. I looked this weekend/had others ask if they got a
warning. Everyone said it was fine. Looking at the .js file now (its some
cufon thing) and the source of the post as well. It's part of what im using
with elegantthemes.

Update: <http://pastebin.com/UNijfWPu> is everything contained in the file
mentioned (League_Gothic_400.font.js)

~~~
colonelxc
I bet it is emapis. org, see:

<http://www.urlvoid.com/scan/emapis.org>

As the unescaped javascript shows, it's a random chance for different sites,
so it might be somewhat hard to reproduce. So far I haven't been able to pull
a mootools.js from those sites to see it.

Edit: the js I'm getting back is just (function(){var error = 404;})();

Also, with regards to your site, here is the google safebrowse:
[http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=jasonlbap...](http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=jasonlbaptiste.com)

It shows that you also had stuff going to smartenergymodel[.]com, which is
also listed on that unmaskparasites link that everyone is passing around.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
yeah, dealt with the smartenergymodel thing. Google hasn't updated that yet.
this seems to be related to a lot of Mediatemple happenings.

------
paraschopra
I think the major work after the launch boils down to iterating on the product
(incorporating user feedback), doing excellent customer support (generates
great Word of Mouth) and releasing new features (to keep the buzz).

Also, once the initial wave of excitement goes down, what a startup needs to
find is predictable source of potential customers. The medium doesn't matter
as much as finding such a source. It can be affiliates, SEO, PPC or a mix of
these mediums.

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joshbert
I just want to thank you for this amazing blog post. I was literally having
epiphany, after epiphany, after epiphany. Now it's time for me to turn these
insights into actionable items. Thanks again!

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Wow, you're welcome Josh. It means a lot to me that it's that useful. Feel
free to contact me if you have any more questions: j@jasonlbaptiste.com

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jasonlbaptiste
I'm going to add in another point: If they do come, be prepared to have
support protocols in place.

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pinksoda
I saw the virus on your site earlier. It appears to be gone now and I couldn't
find any XSS or SQL vulnerabilities on your site. Here's some other stuff to
consider:

\- Possibly vulnerable to mod_rewrite off-by-one buffer overflow (Apache
2.0.54). Upgrade Apache.

\- Possibly vulnerable to header injection (Apache 2.0.54). Upgrade Apache.

\- Possibly vulnerable to session fixation attack. Set
session.use_only_cookies = 1 in php.ini

\- Install mod_security if you haven't already. It's a great extra layer of
security and can save your butt when someone forgets to sanitize input (which
WordPress and 3rd party plugins frequently do).

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Many thanks for the insight. Lot of it detailed here too:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551868> Sadly, my blog is on
mediatemple, so I can't change a lot of the good Apache stuff. I may switch to
the semi advanced setup I have running for Cloudomatic (rackspace cloud).

