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I do, but marketing is my job decription at the startup I work for ( avanoo.com ).
I think it's important to set at least rudimentary benchmarks/milestones in terms of growth and brand recognition.
After that, throw a bunch of stuff on the wall and see what sticks. The few ideas with the most ROI in terms of 1. traffic and 2. user retention should be at the forefront of your future strategies.
This may not sound like much of a plan, but as long as you have a mini-strategy in place for every one of your marketing efforts, and as long as you understand and, if possible, participate in the community you are marketing to, the try-everything approach should work.
Plans? We don't need no stinkin' plans (particularly not a time-phased one).
Seriously: Marketing success (like software development success) seems to be highly correlated with getting something out there and iterating as frequently as possible based on feedback.
Writing a plan is fine (if that floats your boat), but it often creates the delusion that you can actually control and predict how things are going to go.
"Failure to plan is to plan for failure." ... Writing a plan is fine does not creates the delusion that that one can actually control and predict how things are going to go. ... It gives the implementers an concept what might be happening. ... From a high level but pragmatic viewpoint, it is what process of writing the plan are you using that is failing you. If you are writing it from a low level, you will FAIL.
Planning requires people with wisdom, vision and conscious experience. . . . A person who has no conscious of what is going on, usually live on the seat of their pants. ... Reader! Who is planning for your company? Do they know the big picture from a "top down tangible viewpoint"? (Where we are at, We call it a Tangible Vision.) From the strategic classics: One who excels at warfare will await events in the situation without making any movements. When he sees he can be victorious he will arise; if he see he cannot be victorious he will desist. Thus it is said he doesn't have any fear, he doesn't vacillate. Of many harms that can beset any army, vacillations is the greatest. Of disasters that can befall an army, none surpasses doubt. - Six Secret Teachings, 26
If you manage to jott down 10 ways to market your idea and have a timeline i think its a good idea. everyone knows you cannot predict what is going to happen but that doesnt mean u cannot plan for the future.
That's what I'd do if I was in that situation... structure it as separate holding companies for the IP or whatever so you can flip each product individually if needed, but don't unnecessarily duplicate resources. Of course you're probably going to get into a world of fun "internal accounting" taking this approach... you will probably want to "bill" the appropriate holding company for time spent working on that project, etc.
You only really need to do enough accounting in order to pay your taxes correctly. You might need more than that if you want to try to go public, but the rest can be repaired retroactively. And if you just sit down with the relevant IRS publications and read through them, you'll find that the tax code isn't as scary as you think it is. A tax return is about as complex as, and makes about as much sense as, a typical Microsoft API.
I'm working as an employee for one startup and a founder of another, in two totally different business domains (financial software and internet games, respectively).
It's hard. Startups take more out of you than a regular job will, because you can't just switch into maintenance mode. There've been times where my boss has had a demo for an important client one week (making me work nights & weekends for a couple days to get it ready), and then I've gone straight to preparing a launch for the startup.
I don't think I really could've done it differently, though. I wanted to work at a startup so I could get experience & a sense of what I was getting myself into, and this is my first job since college. The day job is essentially funding my startup - it pays better than YCombinator, with similar advice & experience benefits. I thought about switching to a less intensive job at a big company, but I dunno if they'd hire me when I already have a startup on the side. Plus, I have a pretty good relationship with my boss and the IP policy is relatively lenient at my current employer, reducing the chance of IP problems (he doesn't care as long as I'm not starting a competitor, basically).
Overall, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're in a similar situation - first job out of college, self-funding, and want the training of a startup. If you're older and already have plenty of experience with business, I'd get a job at a big blue chip where nobody knows what anybody else is doing - a coworker said that Thomson Financial is great for this, almost everybody has their own private business that they run out of their cube because the company is incapable of getting anything done itself. If you can get YCombinator or similar funding, I'd take that: you're trading equity for time, which is usually a good tradeoff. If you can afford to, quit your day job and live off savings (I'll probably do this fairly soon, but I want a little more runway so my startup has a greater margin of safety).
On the other hand... maybe testing the waters with a few different things, and being flexible and willing to experiment might not be stupid. I'd guess that it's better to be sequential rather than parallel though, in order to focus on one thing at a time.
It's hard. ;-)
I'm running my own (small) business while working very hard at launching our startup. It's really hard, because you have so many people to keep satisfied (well, in my case at least); e.g. clients and partners.
But if you think you can do it....
Yet another side note: Why are folks so merciless here? Sure, mod the post down to 0 points. But -13? That's just silly. Why are such low numbers allowed in the first place?
I'm not referring to those blatant buy-a-mailing-list-and-spam kinda process. I'm talking about the more subtle invitation "spam" executed by the likes of plaxo, hi5 etc.
Given how users got banners-blind after some years of conditioning, how long would it take for them to become Adwords-blind, especially with 99.999999999999999999999% of websites forcing these ads on them via Adsense?
