
Patience and hard work - kirubakaran
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/patience-and-hard-work/
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tonystubblebine
It would be interesting to see a list of successful "took their time"
startups. One year for Basecamp is actually pretty quick, although it doesn't
take into account the many years they spent developing a following. I use
MailChimp for sending newsletters and saw that they launched in 2001 but still
did web development on the side until 2006.

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10ren
I don't dispute the article's approach of ongoing promotion, but I think
there's another way to approach marketing: design the product (and website) to
fit the market.

Make the product's benefit easy to see (for target customer task and needs;
and in terms that are easy to understand); easy to try it so as to confirm
those claims (download, install, "plug-and-play", "getting started", general
usability); and easy to purchase (this one isn't so important for enterprise
software, because the person processing the sale usually isn't in the decision
making loop - bizarrely, it's sometimes a different company altogether that
makes the purchase).

The wonderful thing about this is that you are making a kind of sales machine,
instead of doing that work manually. It's automation. Of course, it is a
tremendous amount of work to actually discover what the market it, who the
customers are, what their concerns are, what tasks you can help with and so
on. But once you've found out, that knowledge is an asset that you can
incorporate into your systems, so it keeps giving value to you - just like a
program.

It's sort of "throwing the product over the wall" to see what happens, applied
to the marketing aspect itself (except iterative development is needed for
both product and "marketing machine").

Of course, this is all immensely appealing to a scientifically-minded technie
type, who wants to avoid actually making sales visits or phone calls... I
think my approach can succeed, but it probably can't be as successful as
someone who tackles sales as a task in itself.

As one data point, I've personally succeeded with this to some extent, but to
fully disclose: I do get a lot more sales when I make a release (which is
automatically publicized on many websites). I've tried google adwords, trying
out different ads, keywords and so on, but it made no impact whatsoever (spent
about $100 trying it out).

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anigbrowl
I think there's an interesting contrast here between US and European attitudes
about startups. Here in the US and California is particular it's regarded as a
mark of wisdom and maturity to say 'fail early, fail often, because failure is
a fact and you may as well exploit it'. It's OK to say your first x ventures
went bust as long you can articulate what you learned and still exhibit Thomas
Edison-like persistence. Over in Europe, on the other hand, mentioning that
you have been involved in a string of failures is like saying you recently
contracted leprosy or something. Even if people admire your persistence,
they'll want to know what happened to your previous employees and investors,
and you may be classed as visionary but irresponsible.

I'm Irish BTW - I like living in CA because there's a more freewheeling, 'take
a chance, change your life' attitude...and yet I am often scared off projects
by the risk/reward calculus. I wonder if other immigrants have a similar
experience.

~~~
sho
Although broad trends might be visible across a whole population, it's also
who you hang out with. I'm not American (Australian) but definitely there are
wildly varying attitudes to risk and failure within the same community.
Depends on the person. I assume it's the same in the US - some people would be
impressed with your fortitude if you told them you'd started 5 failed
companies. Others would be horrified.

Surround yourself with the first type! Might be harder to find than in the US,
but there's got to be plenty around. Here might be a very good place to start.

