

"The Dirty Dozen" Marketing Processes that every Internet start-up must master - Hates_
http://blog.publisha.com/articles/42202--the-dirty-dozen-marketing-processes-that-every-internet-start-up-must-master

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Chris_Newton
I'm all for sharing ideas, and I'm happy that these ideas have been working
for this company. However, I do wish people in the start-up community would
stop presuming that there are two ways, theirs and the wrong one. Reading too
many articles like this, one might conclude that the only viable business
model is:

1\. Identify mildly useful/interesting idea.

2\. Produce cheap implementation.

3\. Sell to the general public for peanuts.

4\. Refine to maximise number of people and size of peanuts.

Given that the culture around HN seems to be heavily biased towards businesses
that do follow this model, I think it would be interesting to hear from
investors and/or successful founders about other ideas as well. Does this
model dominate HN simply because of the emphasis on angel investing, which
maybe doesn't fit as well with other models?

Do investors like YC also fund businesses producing products/services for
niche markets rather than the general public? What about products/services
where getting to launch fundamentally requires some serious R&D that is going
to take time and money, and you can't just produce a MVP in a few weeks and
iterate, but where the prices you can charge customers/users are much higher?
Maybe this happens, but we don't tend to hear about them so often because
there are not so many and/or the people doing them happen not to be the ones
who participate here or post their progress on a company site/blog?

If so, what extent do the sorts of ideas in the linked article generalise, and
what sorts of processes have proved most useful/important in successful
businesses with more specialised/long-term/high-value products and services?

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pluies
I've heard about Plan Do Check Act before, but isn't it just a
glorified/marketing version of the whole scientific process? Design studies to
test hypotheses (oftentimes educated guesses), conduct said studies, analyze
the results to draw theories, and refine them with further studies.

The PDCA version only replaces the "advancing human knowledge" goal by "making
money", but I think the similarities are quite striking.

~~~
hugh3
Plan Do Check Act sounds like exactly the kind of crap that some jerk would
come up with in order to sell business books. Take something bloody obvious
that everybody knows, come up with some fancy-sounding (yet understandable to
any six-year-old or middle manager) jargon to explain it, then somehow blow it
up to two hundred pages with repetition, examples, case studies and
testimonials.

