
Lessons learned from helping over 150 startups with marketing (from my Offer HN) - il
http://insight.io/blog/2010/11/lessons-learned-from-helping-over-150-startups-with-marketing-part-1-fundamentals/
======
treeface
Ilya was kind enough to review my startup, an online rave gear retail site:

<http://www.plurty.com>

Previously, I had this giant "Sign up" button on the home page, but what I had
forgotten was that most of the value of the site came from the ability to _not
have to sign up in order to buy our products_. We built anonymity into it so
much that you don't even have to enter your email address. This was crucial
for us because nobody wants to sign up for a website that is unknown.

Also, Ilya pointed out that the most distinguishing feature of our site were
the extended exposure images and that we should use it as a marketing tool. We
are currently planning on replacing our text-only adwords campaign and using
the images to get more clicks.

Anyway...just thought I'd add my $0.02 and thank Ilya again. It was useful
advice that we really needed.

~~~
jscore
Just adding $0.02 of my own about your site. I went there really quick but
took a while to figure out what you were selling. I'd simplify the design and
add a headline somewhere about what the site does. It's just too busy.

~~~
treeface
Thanks jscore! We're in the process of a redesign that will greatly simplify
the whole thing, but I will see what I can do in the short term to make it
more obvious what we sell. Thanks again :-]

~~~
user24
look at the site with fresh eyes.

Load the homepage and only allow yourself to read the most obvious 5 words on
it.

What do you read? At the moment when I do that, I read: "plurty cart checkout
light gloves".

Just put a nice bright tagline under plurty that says "Number 1 for rave
lights" and bam!

~~~
prawn
First thing I noticed was "top product" which is pretty generic. Might be
better if that said "green lasers - our top seller" or similar?

~~~
patio11
Serious Ravers Love Our Lasers -- Pew Pew

You may want to take off the "pew pew". I am not plugged into that community.
Alternate phrasing "Like Glow Sticks, Without The Suck"

Edit:

 _Want an intense effect for your next rave? Try a green laser -- it is
magical in a dark room or at nighttime. Each laser pen is effectively a laser
pointer with a detachable kaleidoscope light filter on the top. When this
filter is on, the single, solid laser beam transforms into hundreds of
different points of light on a surface. Too dangerous to point at a face._

~~~
Johnnytops
As the co-owner of this site, I highly approve of the pew pew and have added
it to the description. Now to figure out how to add a cross-browser compatible
sound effect...

~~~
templaedhel
Oh god, next thing you know you'll have gif backgrounds and have your whole
level middle management walk out. Don't go down that path.

~~~
treeface
I have an even better idea: _animated_ gifs. Think about the revenue
possibilities!

------
d_r
_It pains me to see so many startups emailing me who have already spent months
or even years building a product without thinking about promotion or
validating their idea at all before launching. “Launch first, then figure out
marketing” is a recipe for disaster._

This should be repeated again and again, and I think this is a point missed by
many enginers. (Disclaimer: I'm an engineer.)

I've seen people spend months (or years) building that perfect website, wait
anxiously for the proverbial "launch day," and then be highly discouraged when
customers don't magically come. Figuring out who your customers are (and how
you are going to get them!) is as important (or even more important) as
picking the best framework, optimizing your code, or whatever else we spend
time on.

------
rksprst
_If you’re building a B2B app to manage payroll, “Cloud hosted SaaS payroll
for your business” is not a good headline. “Spend less time worrying about
payroll” is a better one. “Cut payroll management costs by 37% instantly” is
even better._

From my experience, the user needs to first know what your product is. After
that, you can sell the benefits. Benefits are not easily understood without
knowing what the product is.

You should get better results with "Hosted payroll for your business" on the
frontpage than "Cut payroll management costs by 37% instantly" (Unless of
course all your visitors are already aware of you and what you do - this is
never the case). The "Cut payroll management costs by 37% instantly" should be
used on the "take a tour" page to describe the benefit and drive conversions.

I'd be curious to know if you have any stats related to this that you can
share? It seems a bit counter-intuitive that a "flat" descriptive headline is
better than flashy benefit, but the data I've seen shows that.

------
CharlesPal
"Articulate a Clear, Specific, Compelling Value Proposition"

Great advice. Linking the value prop of any B2B service with a crystal clear
ROI makes for a great sales pitch.

The fastest way to make $1 is to make (or save) your client $10.

------
Goladus
_List Benefits, not Features_

If your actual features are so far removed from your listed benefits that
people who ask "how?" don't also have an answer within 5 seconds (or at least
a clear obvious path to that answer), you haven't solved the problem.

------
benzheren
Ilya, this is a great article. There is just some tiny style issue on the
landing page of insight.io in Chrome.:)

------
8ren
Great article! Some asides on MVP, inspired by this line:

 _[Marketing is] everything- product, price, placement, and promotion. Start
thinking about these things before you launch, learn from them, and iterate
quickly before wasting a lot of time and money._

Since "product" is part of "marketing", it would be nice to include it in the
iterative cycle. Instead of working it out _before_ launch, launch
prematurely, and work out the product simultaneously with the rest of the
marketing. That is, "release early, release often", and iterate the whole
thing. This helps for those products that you didn't know you needed until you
saw it. It worked for me for a software library; I haven't tried it with an
application.

Reflection: the idea of "assessing the market first" is waterfall-style, even
though it is agile-style _within_ that stage. The idea of "pivoting" attempts
to incorporate an iteration, but at a much longer time-scale. It would seem
better to be even more agile, by assessing the market _with_ the product
within each iteration, and pivoting within each iteration. This would need
instant prototyping; and rapid feature changes (for pivots). One obstacle is
that software takes too long to build, and too long to adapt. Consider: if you
could make a prototype as easily and as quickly as a webpage to gather email
addresses, wouldn't it be better to do that? If you could create different
feature sets that would appeal to different markets as quickly and easily as
making different landing pages, wouldn't that be better? Like "A/B testing for
products".

Sounds like a hacker-philosopher's stone? While we can't eliminate essential
complexity, only accidental complexity (by Brooks) and so it's hard to make
much progress in this for general programming, for the subset of programming
which is SaaS websites, we have already made great progress, with frameworks,
RoR, AppEngine etc. It could be made much easier, if we focussed on the goal
of an initial prototype, where bugs and lack of features don't matter,
_provided_ you get feedback on them (eg: have a "search for help" facility,
and store the searches). Then, you can iterate and change direction quickly.
The task is to seek traction. You don't need to hit it perfectly (like the
iPhone), but just to get a nibble, and then you adjust. At first, you just
want to know where the fish are.

Of course, product features are only part of marketing, and you also need to
iterate quickly on graphic design, copywriting, adwords and so on. And
pivoting may be intrinsically slow, because it takes time for your message to
diffuse, be trialled, be adopted, word of mouth etc - though twitter, facebook
etc may also speed this up too.

------
Charuru
You really need more line spacing on your blog. The text is quite hard to
read.

~~~
il
What do you suggest I change? I don't really know CSS.

~~~
sjwright
Add this to the bottom of style.css

.post .post-content { line-height: 1.6em; } p { line-height: inherit
!important; }

