

Does your startup pass The Sleep Test? - mmaunder
http://markmaunder.com/2010/does-your-startup-pass-the-sleep-test/

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patio11
For those of you whose businesses should pass the Sleep Test (as in, have no
permanent impediment like requiring sales presentations for $75k
authorizations in B2B) but don't, I really can't recommend SEO enough. It is
the gift that keeps on giving -- today, tomorrow, and until the end of time --
and it works whether you're asleep, at a day job, on a date, etc. Similarly,
display advertising, search advertising, free trials, and automated
fulfillment. (When I found you could send someone a CD with a HTTP POST I
nearly had kittens.)

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whyleyc
What resources would you recommend for learning more about SEO (either online
or in books) ?

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patio11
This is a broad topic, like "What would you recommend for learning
programming?" I recommend the SEOMoz blog, the SEOBook blog, and building
stuff. Much like programming, you can read yourself up to a low
intermediate... after that, you learn by building, seeing what worked,
building some more, seeing what worked, etc.

(SEO is as much a marketing challenge as a technical challenge, and for that
part of it, you can cross-apply any marketing books you want. "How To Win
Friends And Influence People... To Link To You".)

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swombat
Isn't this pretty obvious?

Oh, btw, that first morning when you wake up and find out you earned money
while you were asleep... feels great.

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patio11
Just wait until the day you spend seventeen hours at the day job, collapse at
a hotel for six hours prior to doing it again, and on waking and turning on
your Kindle found that you made more while sleeping than you did while
working.

That feels... great. Just freaking great. _sigh_ 30 more days.

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gcheong
What do you have on your Kindle that tells you how much money you made?

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mey
The kindle as a simple xhtml browser. So any basic website that works well
with mobile browsers will generally work.

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mattjung
This article may create a wrong attitude towards customers and business imo. I
believe it is indispensable to go out and talk and listen to people instead
relying only on online-tools (by the way, that's what 37signals always have
done, too). A company that is happy to pass the sleep-test, is very likely to
start drifting off...

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vgurgov
Unless your business earns revenue while you are sleeping, it won’t scale.

I find this statement oversimplified. I works for some models like basecamp,
but some social services's business model can be simplified to "register for
free and WE will pay you $100(ok, maybe not in cash but in value that they
spend on average user/ or value that user gets of using them)". However as we
can see some of these services growing really fast and probably can be huge
success in future, just by monetizing their huge audience.

So i guess initial statement is mostly address bootstrapped startups, not
taking VC/angel into consideration. I'd modify it to smthg like:

Unless your business earns revenue or traction while you are sleeping, it
won’t scale.

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davidw
Presumably, when they attach the monetizers to their huge audience and begin
extracting money from them, it will happen even when they sleep, so the
statement still stands.

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enjo
I guess Chili's doesn't scale?

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nfnaaron
"If you’re a brick-layer who employs other brick layers and also employs a
sales person, driver, accountant and all the other business components so that
your business runs while you’re not there, you CAN scale."

So yes, Chili's scales. The owner(s) of franchise granting rights makes money
from franchisees while they sleep. The owner of each franchise makes money
from wait and kitchen staff while they manage their money and buy another
franchise.

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Confusion

      [To be able to scale] your web app business must also:
      1. Not require additional staff time per customer
    

Well, I guess that means immensely succesful enterprises like Facebook and
Twitter don't scale. After all, they've been hiring more and more people while
growing, in part to deal with all their customers.

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Huppie
It's there, in the end:

 _Final caveat: I’ve written this post discussing this concept in absolutes
i.e. you either do or do not pass the sleep test. Of course in reality there
is not a single web app business that does not need to employ more staff as
their revenue and customer base grows. Google is a fine example of a business
that is designed to avoid having to employ more people as revenue or customers
grow and they employ over 20,000 people today. But this test is a useful way
to measure and think about how efficiently your business will scale._

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zackattack
passive income + good content (which is inherently viral)

