
Marketing - Straubiz
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/marketing.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29&utm_content=Netvibes
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alexophile
_2) Social hoooks - Your product/service must be social. It must encourage
your users to invite others to try it out. Hooks into Facebook and Twitter are
obvious. Email invites are another obvious feature. The product should allow
people to express themselves in it. Profiles, personalization, etc will allow
the users to feel ownership of the product and tell others about it.
Foursquare's adoption of a game dynamic when it launched is a particularly
clever implementation of a social hook. Games are the most social of all
things on the web._

Ugh. Maybe it's just me, but I can't stand this. Whatever happened to just
being useful? If I like your product, I'm fully capable of sharing it myself.
You see so many pages now that look like they were designed to maximize the
possibility that you will accidentally like them on facebook.

There's nothing wrong with a "share this post/page/app/etc" panel but, unless
your core functionality is based on social interactions, please keep it
reasonable.

Also, not everything needs to be customizable. I don't know who all these
people are that supposedly _love_ making accounts and filling out profiles for
every little thing they want to try on the internet - I think it's a huge
pain. When I studied UX it was pretty well agreed upon that you shouldn't
force people to create an account until it was _absolutely necessary,_ not the
other way around.

Jeez, I'm way too young to be having these get off my lawn moments.

edit: I also have a problem with his opening sentiments, but it's more of a
semantic issue.

 _I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks
or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be
crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga,
bud, viagra)._

It's views like this that make people sneer when I say I'm doing marketing.
So, thanks.

I believe marketing is how you capitalize on the thoughts and feelings of your
audience. This is why you should take support very seriously - people spend
sick money trying to find out what your customers (current and potential) are
thinking - when they offer it to you for free, that's the biggest marketing
opportunity you're likely to get, so treat it as such.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I agree that it must be social, but it shouldn't encourage you to share - it
must simply allow you to, should you decide to.

If I see a popup demanding that I enter friends' email addresses, I leave.

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Loginid
I find it a little bit scary that Fred Wilson might not be able to
differentiate Marketing from Promotion.

He must be having an off day.

Every business needs to have vision for how its products and/or services
relate to its customers and the wider marketplace. Marketing is fundamental to
business.

However, I do agree that for many startups, costly promotional efforts
probably wont offer enough return to justify the expense.

~~~
mindcrime
_I find it a little bit scary that Fred Wilson might not be able to
differentiate Marketing from Promotion_

Glad to see I wasn't alone in having that thought.

 _Every business needs to have vision for how its products and/or services
relate to its customers and the wider marketplace. Marketing is fundamental to
business._

Exactly. If you aren't "marketing," you basically don't have a business.
Marketing is just identifying a need, finding a solution to that need, and
connecting them. To borrow from Wikipedia[1]:

 _Marketing is the process of performing market research, selling products
and/or services to customers and promoting them via advertising to further
enhance sales. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques,
business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process
through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value
for their customers and for themselves._

 _Marketing is used to identify the customer, to satisfy the customer, and to
keep the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be
concluded that marketing management is one of the major components of business
management. Marketing evolved to meet the stasis in developing new markets
caused by mature markets and overcapacities in the last 2-3 centuries. The
adoption of marketing strategies requires businesses to shift their focus from
production to the perceived needs and wants of their customers as the means of
staying profitable_

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing>

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alexandros
Don't be Google's bitch - but building on Facebook is just fine?

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spencerfry
My favorite style of marketing is when your users market your app for you. NOT
in the way you might think (not through referral programs, emailing friends,
etc.) rather that they're encouraged to share their profile, page, website,
etc., because it will benefit them directly. In turn it benefits you, but it
starts with benefiting them.

What's an example? KickStarter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr,
Foursquare, etc., are all examples of this. Another is Carbonmade. Artists
must share their portfolio (e.g. <http://colerise.carbonmade.com/>) with their
friends, recruiters, etc., to get benefit from it and in turn those friends
(usually other artists) see the Carbonmade link at the bottom of the
portfolio, click it, and can then sign up for their own. It sets off a viral
chain.

Side note: We're seeing nearly as many referrals from Facebook as we are from
Google, because people are sharing their portfolios on Facebook as their
homepage. Screenshot: <http://cl.ly/0a372w1T3y3G1s2U3337> And look at
StumbleUpon's comeback!

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derefr
This is only effective for apps where the content the user puts into the app
is put in with the intent of sharing it in the first place (i.e. this isn't a
marketing technique, so much as an app-design technique.) You can't just pick
a random app in a different vertical (say, Gmail) and tack viral own-data
sharing onto it.

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spencerfry
Certainly, but gmail has the @gmail.com to market for them. :)

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code_duck
I and someone in my family invested a lot of time trying to be a customer of
one of Fred's portfolio sites, Etsy. One of their problems is definitely
effective marketing and sane branding. The guy in charge of their marketing,
Matt Stinchomb, had no experience in the field other than promoting an indie
band, so that's how he promoted Etsy. Their activities since then leave a lot
to be desired. I hear so many people who have heard of Regretsy, a site
created to mock Etsy, and not Etsy itself. It doesn't make me feel proud to
have a shop.

It seems like Fred's plans here are 'one size fits all' without recognizing
that not all web ventures are the same. They've treated Etsy like it's some
viral Facebook 'tag your chickens in VR' app, more than something that needs
to be built into a household name.

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robryan
I guess this only really applies to consumer web startups with some kind of
viral aspect. What if your marketing to businesses in a certain field that
makes it unlikely for you to get more than a trickle of word of mouth uptake
and your app doesn't get any external exposure from the business.

That kind of thing closes the door on a lot of the methods mentioned,
depending on your field to you might need a decent budget just to get a look
in on industry events.

Interested to hear others with more B2B based products and what they think
about advertising early on.

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yakisoft
I'm struggling to see how Twitter is of any use in finding customers.

On the other hand spending on Adwords links me directly to people who are
looking for my products. For me it is consistent, reliable, directly
measurable and profitable.

~~~
avk
I've had luck converting people tweeting about the problem my product solves
to beta users. I'm sure it depends on who your customers are and how likely
they are to express themselves on Twitter and other social media.

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joeag
"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door".

I thought this was discredited a long time ago.

The world has to find out about your mousetrap before they beat a path to your
door.

That's marketing.

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ChaseB
Fred is confusing marketing with advertising. Advertising is one of many
functions of marketing.

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smeatish
Agreed. This post smacks of hubris too - it's fantastic that your social media
investments have a viral loop built in, but good luck selling enterprise
software without a customer acquisition cost. Maybe your enterprise software
is so awesome that customers are beating down your door, but you still need
salespeople to close.

Very narrow thinking.

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andrewtbham
from the article: "I'm not an expert on enteprise focused SAAS businesses. I
am not going to address that part of the market here."

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nobody_nowhere
Interesting article, as usual. But a rule like "you shouldn't have a marketing
budget" seems too one-size-fits-all. If you're building consumer apps, sure,
it makes sense to rely on it being viral, but there's a whole universe of
other stuff out there to build where it can be a lot harder to reach the
customers.

And even if it is a viral consumer app, don't you want to be able to put the
pedal down and accelerate growth at some point?

We launched at techcrunch, but it still cost money to get out there, get
material ready for the demo, etc. Isn't that marketing (to investors, but
still)? Seems like you're spending time/money on marketing even if it doesn't
have a dedicated budget line item.

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Straubiz
I think Fred means that you shouldn't spend your marketing budget on
advertising.

I agree with you that it sounds a bit like a mantra; for instance, you may
want to foster your growth with advertising to get network effects faster.

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avk
This post was the biggest surprise of my day. I like the sentiment of good
enough products market themselves but it also reminds me too much of "build it
and they will come." And we know how often that works out...

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stevenj
i'd like to hear more about customer acquisition (ie getting users);
especially from YC startups.

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stevenj
late edit: i meant especially from non-YC startups.

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laujen
I am late to this conversation and Fred already posted a follow up but I
wanted to just add that this is not Fred's normal voice. He is upset about
something. When usually his posts are very open and constructive, this one was
bitter.

