
Ask HN: What is your startup's marketing stack? (March 2017) - jaynate
I am launching a startup which is currently a one-man operation. I am planning to develop content to drive inbound marketing. I have both Highrise and Hubspot trial&#x2F;free accounts for CRM and am considering Wix for my web presence based on some of the great looking templates they have available. Curious to know what products &amp; integrations others are using to get their marketing efforts off the ground?
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contingencies
You seem to be discussing tooling rather than channels.

Appropriate marketing channels vary distinctly by business type, development
level and market positioning. Service vs. product, physical vs. digital,
popular vs. specialist, early stage vs. validating vs. growth-phrase vs.
stable, desired audience, phase of moon, etc.

In general tooling should be determined by the channel, not the other way
around.

The advice given to me by a very successful CFO (many $Ms personal exit,
multi-decade angel, now running an accelerator) on my first business was:
"test each channel". That means: marketing spend per new prospect, conversion
percentage, repeat customer percentage, customer lifetime or fixed-period
value estimate, and maybe other channel properties like responsiveness,
customer demographic or other data available, markets served, total available
inbound volume. Try to keep the building of this data for objective channel-
vs-channel analysis as your focus, and don't get distracted. Remember, you're
being marketed to. ;)

If you're lucky, you'll find a strong channel. In most cases, you simply need
to sink a certain minimum amount of capital to get your customer base large
enough to get in the black. Take it from me - not having this war-chest can
cost you the business (as it did my first). If you find yourself in that
position, workarounds can include partnerships with established networks,
acquisitions, pivots to SaaS-conversions ... but again it depends on the
business. Good luck out there :)

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bwerdschinski
That's awesome advice, thanks for sharing. I'm in a similar position to the OP
as a one man band, can you recommend any books or blogs on exactly how to
start testing each channel? A lot of the advice I've come across only mentions
it in broad strokes. Maybe there's some foundation level knowledge I'm missing
but I don't know where to look next to get up to speed. :)

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michaelbuckbee
Traction [1] is the book I can unreservedly recommend as it both lays out more
channels than you were probably aware of, it also has a nice crisp framework
for trying a few at a time and folding that knowledge back into your
operations.

It's also very applicable for people where we're at (fellow one person SAAS
founder here), which many other marketing books are decidedly not. This is
important as now is not the time to be worrying about the proper branding
position of your superbowl ad, etc.

One last thing: there have a Slideshare[2] that moves through most of the book
content which is a great resource as well.

1 -
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TY3ZOMS/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TY3ZOMS/)

2 - [https://www.slideshare.net/jwmares/traction-trumps-
everythin...](https://www.slideshare.net/jwmares/traction-trumps-everything)

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bwerdschinski
Fantastic, thank you so much

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edoceo
I've been using pipedrive.com for deal flow.

And checkout Segment.io

Also, I've got triggers in my app that spawn Trello cards. I feed Trello, then
manually do stuff in the other systems. Ugly but I can switch out other tools
easier. This lets me try new tools faster, and switch back too.

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ANaimi
Vocus.io (I'm the founder but also happen to rely heavily on it for our own
growth). Great for outreach and customer support.

Others:

    
    
      - Mixpanel
    
      - Pipedrive  
    
      - CloudWatch

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BorisMelnik
looks like a really good tool...do you have a FF extension or plans for
standalone / web app?

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leftrightupdown
Crm - streak crm ([http://www.streak.crm](http://www.streak.crm)), nice crm
that integrates with gmail. Used to categorize email communication. Email
marketing - listshine ([http://www.listshine.com](http://www.listshine.com))
cheap alternative to mailchimp, used to regularly email new and existing
customers.

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pryelluw
Simple is better. Start with the minimum and as you build demand introduce
tools.

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BorisMelnik
Basecamp (project management)$

Skype(chat/collab)

Piwik (analytics)free

Ahrefs (SEO)$

Google Mail (email)$

Google Cloud (hosting)$

Amazon S3 (backup)$

WordPress (CMS)free

Prosperworks (CRM)$

Hootsuite (social)$

AdEspresso (social ppc)

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chrisked
If you think chat is relevant to your business I suggest you'd give drift.com
a spin.

