Startup Marketing

Good blogs that follow the 4 Steps Model are: Steve Blank (author of the book) - http://steveblank.com/ Eric Ries - http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/ - An advisee/investment of Steve Blank, started IMVU.com, Venture Advisor at Kleiner Perkins) His blog has become somewhat less useful lately though as he's been using it mostly to promote his "Lean Startup" classes. Sean Ellis - http://startup-marketing.com/ - Has applied 4 Steps model at many companies, consults on "Customer Development" with VC backed companies Also Venture Hacks is a great place to start. Check out the archives at http://venturehacks.com/archives/

OK Now I'm at home and can write you a substantive answer. It starts here: - Marketing is Highly Situational - Different Markets Should Be Approached Differently - Tactics are constantly changing and evolving, so mix, match, and measure until you find something that works. It sounds like you're looking for the essence of web marketing strategies for early stage startups. The best person blogging about this topic right now is a guy named Sean Ellis (http://www.startup-marketing.com) who's the CEO of Catchfree and ran marketing at some really amazing companies (Dropbox, Eventbrite, Xobni, etc.). His framework, as detailed in these interviews here - http://venturehacks.com/articles/sean-ellis-interview - the Sean Ellis framework seems to be the following: - Value Proposition Clarification based on user interviews/analytics/qualitative customer data. - Conversion Optimization - not only conventional LPO or form optimization, but actually optimizing for high quality users, attracted by the value proposition found in part 1. - Channel experimentation/optimization - At some level, web companies are not highly scalable until they can "buy" customers profitably - until there's a known, strong relationship between CPA (cost per acquisition) and CLTV (customer lifetime value), and of course, you can get CPA below CLTV at scale. So this step is where experimenting with different channels and different tactics fits in. Here's where you'd try different channels like paid and…

Ideally, you build an audience ahead of time, but establishing some authority and credibility in your field. Publish relevant, valuable content via G+, Facebook, Twitter, a blog, etc., and start building your audience. Then, when you want to publicize your startup, you have people waiting to hear about it, who will - hopefully - become fans and help spread the word further. Also, by putting legitimately valuable content "out there" you are, in effect, doing what people call "content marketing". You want to draw eyeballs to your site/blog/whatever when people search for keywords related to what you are doing. See, among other resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_marketing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing http://www.startup-marketing.com/ http://hackermonthly.com/startup-marketing.html

Sean Ellis's blog has a lot of good material on how to go about this, especially for freemium products - http://startup-marketing.com/

One of my favorite insights from Steve Blank is "you fail if you stay a startup." I strongly recommend watching his Startup Lessons Learned Conference presentation (link below). The differences between startups and established companies run deep and most entrepreneurs don't make the transition from the former to the latter. http://startup-marketing.com/steve-blanks-sll-keynote-its-a-must-watch…

Nice analogy. I think this is why Steve Blank talk so much about founders 'getting out of the building'. The first instinct of a highly intelligent tech nerd when faced with the challenges of a startup is to bury their head in code and not engage directly with the customer at all, i.e. focus solely on improving the product and not testing if there is a market for the product in the first place: http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/ Fortunately, Steve Blank has designed his 'Customer Development' roadmap to mitigate against this. For a brief, free synopsis, see: http://www.socrated.com/courses/4?home=1 This was posted on HN recently enough, and it's brilliant. It sums up the entire Customer Devlopment roadmap quite nicely. I'd still recommend buying the book too though, also excellent.

If you are making money from get go, paid search is not bad if you can get to a positive ROI after a little bit of messing around. Your leverage with paid search will depend on your longterm earning per customer and your cost of customer acquisition among other factors. I would suggest you read Sean Ellis' blog. He talks a lot about customer acquisition: http://startup-marketing.com/

for this, no -- tim wanted some help with his charity effort, so we put something together quickly. otherwise, we use analytics, split testing and surveying all the time to drive business decisions, like what policies to set, what features to prioritize, content for landing pages/signup/referral flows etc. of course, we also listen to feedback and our own product intuition -- hard data is just one input. sean ellis also helped us a lot -- see http://startup-marketing.com -- and i like dave mcclure's "aarrr" model (google it)

I have worked with and known adennis4 for 4 years and want to vouch for him. What he's leaving out is that he's incredibly motivated, hard working, and doesn't take no for an answer. He is one of the most outgoing and charismatic guys I know and I'd bet on him to succeed in his ventures through sheer force of will. He isn't a programmer, but he's trying to learn the ropes. He's still no slouch. He is the "everything else" guy every startup should dream of having. If he doesn't know how to do it, he'll either find out how or find the person who does. This post is him trying to find the person who can propel him to the next level. Not only is he a good startup bet, he's a guy you just want to be friends with. I cannot sing his praises enough. I would love to work with him, but I can't offer him what he needs. My best guess as a half-hacker is that he needs a guy somewhere between: http://abstractnonsense.com/life-at-a-startup/ and http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/ (or patio11. that would do nicely.) Best of luck Andrew.

also see: http://survey.io/ http://startup-marketing.com/

Reminds me of the Sean Ellis 40% survey: http://www.startup-marketing.com/using-survey-io

Maybe no one wants your product? http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/

To me, the cautionary warning (echoing Andrew Chen's[1]) for consumer startups was key: Beware too of the edge case where something spreads rapidly but the churn is high too, so that you have good net growth till you run through all the potential users, at which point it suddenly stops Sean Ellis[2] has a similar test for product market fit (the 40% rule): I ask existing users of a product how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product. [1] http://andrewchen.co/2012/06/20/quora-when-does-high-growth-not-imply-… [2] http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/

Here is what I think after interviewing 20+ GHs and doing it myself for the past two years. growth hacker (noun) - one who’s passion and focus is growth through use of a testable, empirical, and scalable methodology. Basically, a growth hacker is the blend of a product, marketing, and data. They sort of operate as R&D within a startup. Resources: http://www.quora.com/Growth-Hacking/What-is-growth-hacking/answer/Aaro… http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/ http://www.vlaskovits.com/2012/07/youre-a-growth-rookie-not-a-growth-h… http://www.aginnt.com/growth-hacker#.UDvRGmPlWPI

Entrepreneurship: http://cdixon.org/ http://derekandersen.me/ http://davidcummings.org/ http://viniciusvacanti.com/ http://www.steveblank.com/ http://37signals.com/svn Startup/Tech Marketing: http://www.responsys.com/blogs/nsm/ http://startup-marketing.com/ http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ http://unbounce.com/blog/ Venture Capital: http://bhorowitz.com/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/ http://www.feld.com/wp/ http://www.avc.com/ http://vcinjerusalem.typepad.com/vcinjerusalem/ http://sixkidsandafulltimejob.blogspot.com/ http://redeye.firstround.com/ http://informationarbitrage.com/

Sean Ellis recently did a good presentation on this, highlighting whats different for network effect businesses: http://startup-marketing.com/bringing-a-network-effect-business-to-mar…

I think another name for what you're looking for is Growth Hacker http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/ I spend a fair amount of my time doing this - but really another side of this is analytics and testing / experimentation systems. It isn't all about the campaigns. I should also mention that my current role wasn't the result of a post but just something everyone agreed I should do.

Reminds me of http://startup-marketing.com/the-3-keys-to-success-with-freemium/

Also, see Sean's post on growth hackers here: http://startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/

Sean Ellis has said that a startup has achieved product/market fit when >40% of its visitors would be 'very disappointed' if the product were no longer available. http://startup-marketing.com/the-startup-pyramid/

I think things like options and any other legal is a very delicate stuffs and better be done with experts (lawyer, accountant etc). For resources, here are few that i have in the arsenal: Marketing: http://startup-marketing.com/ http://andrewchenblog.com/ Legal: http://www.thestartuplawyer.com/ General: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/ http://onstartups.com/ You can ask any topic: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz http://news.ycombinator.com/ Hope it helps.

I am largely to blame for the recent tirade against “growth hacking.” I’ve let the term be bastardized and redefined a lot since my original blog post on it back in 2010 http://www.startup-marketing.com/where-are-all-the-growth-hackers/ . I wrote that blog post primarily for startups that had achieved product/market fit. The idea was not to replace marketing, but to create a category of marketing activities that have a direct attributable impact on growth. Startups are always on the brink of death. They don’t have the luxury to focus on things like awareness building or to prepare 50 page slide decks on the demographics of the customer. I wrote that a startup’s first marketing hire should have “growth as their true north.” They shouldn’t be outsourcing and managing vendors, the person should be a hands-on “builder” and optimizer of growth programs. In order to help make the concept stick, I put a name to it. On that day the term “growth hacker” was born. I won’t rehash why all this debate is actually a good thing. Read my comment here http://www.growthhackers.com/dhh-growth-hacking-a-cool-sounding-euphem… for my thoughts on that… Since my original post in 2010, I’ve been happy with certain evolutions of the term. One is that I think large companies should have a group that is exclusively focused on managing the activities that are directly attributable to growth. Companies like Facebook,…