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If you build it, they won’t come, unless…

October 11, 2010 By Jason



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This is Part 5 of the 5-part series: 5 lessons from 150 startup pitches.

Ask a technical founder about his startup, and he’ll proudly describe his stunning software — simple, compelling, useful, fun. Then he’ll describe his cutting-edge platform — cloud-based, scalable, distributed version control, continuous integration, one-click-deploy. Maybe you’ll even get a wobbly demo.

“Great,” I always exclaim, sharing the thrill of modern software development, “so how will people find out about this brilliant website?”

Cue sound of cicadas buzzing.
 (Or “crickets chirping” but in Texas the cicadas are louder.)

Four uncomfortable seconds later, a smile breaks across the founder’s face. “Here it comes,” I think, “there is a strategy after all!”

Except the “strategy” is a tirade of drivel I’ve heard so many times I can lip-sync as the words spew out the founder’s mouth:

  • “We’re going to A/B-test AdWords campaigns until we discover our hook.”
  • “We’re going to A/B-test our landing pages until the right message appears.”
  • “We’re better than everyone else at SEO.”
  • “A friend of mine knows how to get popular on Twitter.”
  • “We’re going to get reviews on blogs.”
  • “We’re going to start with our own network and grow it from there.”
  • “We’re going to use an affiliate program so our customers sell it for us.”
  • “We’re putting a ‘Retweet’ button inside the product to encourage viral growth.”

The obvious problem is that every new startup on Earth says exactly these things. Nowadays the “strategy” above sounds the same as:

  • “We’ll have a website so people can read about us.”
  • “We’ll have an email address so people can communicate with us without picking up the phone.”

Yes, you’re going to do those things, but since millions of other people are doing that too, you’re still invisible. Visibility-fail. Anyone-gives-a-crap-fail.

OK, so what can you do to rise above the cacophony that is the Internet? Here come a few ideas; leave more and discuss in the comments!

Infection built-in, not bolt-on

WhenBusy is a bootstrapped startup that lets people schedule meetings with you in currently-available time-slots without you having to share your calendar [disclosure: I'm an advisor]. For example, here’s what the founder’s (Josh Baer) availability looks like:

whenbusy schedule

Instead of trading emails with lists of available time-slots, Josh just sends the link to this page and the other person uses the product to schedule a meeting. This is the viral step: Having trialed the tool, the stranger might use it herself, then more people find out about it, and so forth.

Note that at no point did I say “a button lets people ‘like’ this on Facebook.” I know of no companies who have “gone viral” because of buttons. Buttons are good — why not use them? — but they don’t make your product intrinsically viral like WhenBusy.

Which is OK — not all products need to be viral! But if it’s not viral you still need a killer method of finding customers, and if it is supposed to be viral it better be encoded in the DNA of the application, not bolted on as an afterthought.

Frightening honesty

Balsamiq Mockups is a ludicrously popular wire-framing tool. The software is good — don’t get me wrong — but what sets Peldi (the founder) apart isn’t prescient feature selection or bug-free releases, it’s his startling transparency. He published revenue figures even when they were still pathetic, he pledged loudly and eagerly to give away lots of free copies to non-profits, and he revealed all his (remarkably effective) marketing strategies (updated here) even though it meant competitors would learn them too.

He didn’t just have an “authentic voice,” he made public promises. That’s compelling.

He didn’t just “tell it like it is,” he gave up his marketing secrets and opened his company books. That’s newsworthy.

This isn’t merely “being human” and all that claptrap, it’s almost too much honesty, like when you ask someone how it’s going and they tell you about a weird pustule on their middle toe that’s been oozing since last Wednesday.

In a world where everyone and their brother is “joining the conversation” (oops, I use that phrase constantly!), you have to truly bare your soul if you want to compete on the transparency front. It’s not for everyone, and I’m not suggesting it ought to be, but there’s no sense in half-assing it.

Making Oprah cry

The number one mistake founders make when trying to generate press is talking about what the company does rather than telling a compelling story.

Does Twitter get press when it helps Iranians fight an illegitimate government or when it creates a new internal IT process to increase up-time? Does Apple win the hearts (yes, hearts) of millions because of their obsession with design or because of their development APIs? Does 37signals have over three million users because their software is “better” than the competition, or is it because they motivate designers and entrepreneurs through their writing and philosophy?

Without a powerful narrative, your chances of getting big press and enthusiastic users who spread the word for you approach zero as a limit.

It took me years to figure this out at Smart Bear. At first when someone asked what the Smart Bear tool suite was, I would say:

Smart Bear makes data-mining tools for version control systems.

It’s a description so esoteric that, although accurate, not even a hardcore geek would have any idea what it is, much less why it’s useful.

Years later, when it was clear that code review software became our sole focus, I got better at describing it:

You know how Word has “track changes” where you can make modifications and comments and show them to someone else? We do that for software developers, integrating with their tools instead of Word and working within their standard practices.

Better, yes, and for a while I thought I nailed it, but still no press. Eventually (thanks to helpful journalists) I realized that I was still just describing what it is rather than why anyone cares. I left it up to the reader to figure out why she should get excited.

Eventually I developed stories like the following, each tuned to a certain category of listener. Here’s the one for the journalists:

It’s always fun to tell a journalist like you that we enable software developers to review each other’s code because your reaction is always: “Wait a minute, you’re seriously telling me they don’t do this already?” The idea of editing and review is so embedded in your industry you can’t imagine life without it, and you’re right! You know better than anyone how another set of eyeballs finds important problems.

Of course two heads are better than one, but developers traditionally work in isolation, mainly because there’s a dearth of tools which help teams bridge the social gap of an ocean, integrate with incumbent tools, and are lightweight enough to still be fun and relevant.

That’s what we do: Bring the benefits of peer review to software development.

Now the reason for excitement is clear: We’re transforming how software is created, applying the age-old techniques of peer review to an industry that needs it but where it’s traditionally too hard to do. That’s a story.

It took me five years to figure out (a) I needed a story and (b) what the story was. It’s hard. But one story beats a pile of AdWords A/B tests.

Advertising → [transmogrification] → Revenue

Yeah yeah, nowadays marketing is about “relationships” and “authority” and other things which cost time but not money. It’s all I hear about anymore.

But don’t be so quick to throw out the idea of spending money to make money. Advertising isn’t dead; you can still buy eyeballs. I’m not talking about “triage” strategies like buying AdWords linking to a page of ads, I’m just pointing out that most companies on Earth don’t depend on “joining the conversation” to acquire customers.

It sounds simple: The average cost of acquiring a customer is $C (advertising, sales, support, doing demos) and the lifetime revenue you get from that customer is $R, so if C < R you have a business. C can be driven down with cheaper ads, better lead quality, a more efficient conversion rate, and straightforward trials with minimal tech support.

Of course it’s not that simple, and many business plans I’ve seen (unintentionally) omit many of the true costs of acquisition. Read this great interview with Sean Ellis at VentureHacks for a great discussion of how to seek a repeatable, profitable model where C < R, and then optimize and grow. It’s a little heavy on the “huge VC-style company” strategy for my style, but you’ll come away with a strong perspective on how to build a machine that turns advertising dollars into (a greater number of) revenue dollars.

Celebrity Championship

I already beat you to death about how celebrity endorsement can serve as an untouchable competitive advantage, and it’s also an answer to how to burst out of the dull roar of Internet marketing.

Take me. I’m no Seth Godin, but consider what I could do if I were a co-founder in a new software development tool company:

  • I have personal relationships with the CEOs and other influencers at hundreds of software development companies. During ideation, they would brainstorm. During beta-testing they would be guinea pigs. After release of v3.0 some would be ready to become paying customers.
  • I have relationships with editors of nearly all software development publications (on-line and off); I’ve already published articles with them. Some would help vet our stories, some would publish our articles.
  • I’ve bought ads in every major (and quite a few minor) software development websites, magazines, newsletters, conferences, and webinars. So when it’s time to advertise, we’ll come in with the right message for the audience and probably cut a deal.
  • If you read this blog you’re probably a software developer, so even just a few mentions here might be more powerful than $10,000 in A/B tested Google AdWords.
  • If we were trying to raise money, my previous success would not only get us the initial meetings but would be a significant bump in our chance of raising it.

While everyone else is mucking about with a new blog, blasting their LinkedIn network with pleading emails, and paying out the nose to test AdWord variants, we’re years ahead in the marketing war.

Let’s generate more ideas

Share the love in the comments section. Let’s come up with more ways to reach customers that isn’t the same as everyone else.



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Filed Under: advertising, branding, How-To, lead-gen, Marketing, positioning, social media

The right way to position against competition

August 23, 2010 By Jason



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google-goldfish

This is Part 4 of the series: 5 lessons from 150 startup pitches.

After seeing hundreds of startup pitches for this year’s Capital Factory program, I can tell you that the two most common errors in positioning a company against competition are, strangely, opposites:

  1. Claiming you have no competition.
  2. Defining your company’s offering and positioning by combining “the best” traits of 6 competitors.

This isn’t just a problem when pitching — it’s a problem with you defining who your customers are, what they want, and your role in the marketplace.

Let’s break down the ways these fallacies manifest and what you can do instead.

There is no competition

Here’s what this sounds like in the wild, and my reaction when I hear it:

  • “I have no competitors.”
    Either you’re ignorant of direct competition, or your not considering alternate solutions like “build it yourself.”
  • “No one is doing it like we are.”
    Of course you’re going to position your company with a unique offering: exclusive features, a distinctive culture, a refreshing pricing plan, an innovative sales strategy, etc.. But uniqueness doesn’t imply lack of competition!
  • “There’s no competition because this is an industry that has never used software to solve this problem.”
    I know that sounds like a good thing, but what this also implies is that you’ll have to convince computer-phobic people to trust software, and that’s a disadvantage. You’re competing against the status quo.
  • “There’s no competition because people haven’t realized it’s a problem.”
    If they don’t already know they have the pain, the sales process is going to be excruciating. There’s a word for that — evangelism — which conjures other words: Expensive, difficult, time-consuming.

If you’re tempted to argue that you’re the exception, here’s how to elucidate the advantages you’re seeing, but in a way that actually makes sense as a business strategy:

  • We’ve carved out a niche specific enough that no one else is actively targeting it. There are similar competitors A, B, and C, but they’re not targeting this niche because of X, and would be hard for them to switch into this niche because of Y. In fact, it’s quite possible that we’d end up partnering with or being bought by A, B, or C exactly because our idea is similar but out of their reach.
  • We’ve identified a market too small for the large, established players to address, but big enough to build a company. For example, because an 800-pound gorilla like Microsoft is so inefficient at building new software, it can’t go after a market unless there’s a billion dollars at stake. We think there’s a solid business to be made in this hundred-million-dollar market. However, whereas Microsoft can’t afford to build this from scratch, if we show good growth and profits it would be an obvious acquisition target for them.
  • We’ve created technology so different from the incumbents that we’re changing the conversation about how people solve this pain.  Though it’s different, our solution is very easy to describe and to use. (Example: Netflix)
  • Our target customer has traditionally solved this pain themselves or just lived with the pain rather than paying for relief. However, a combination of newly-available technology and modern mindset makes this the right time for a new software play.For example, my company Smart Bear created the first commercial peer code review tool. Before us, there was no software competition but there were plenty of alternative processes — looking over someone’s shoulder, sending emails with diffs, code review meetings, even “Formal Inspections.” By tackling a few specific annoyances with peer code review and leveraging newer technology (like the advent of ubiquitous version control), we completely changed what a “code review” could be.
  • It’s true that this industry hasn’t yet seen a software solution, but that’s not because they hate computers, but rather that it hasn’t been possible to address that market with software. Now it is because (pick one):
    • We’ve built an improbable team that spans geeks and industry insiders.
    • New hardware/networks have just appeared which makes this possible.
    • New attitudes towards the Internet (e.g. ubiquity of Facebook even among traditional technophobes) enables new workflows.
    • This industry is commoditized so giving a player the slightest edge is a big deal.
    • This industry is just now starting to show tangible signs of embracing technology.
    • We have three lead customers signed up for alpha testers; if we make them successful the case studies will be all the evangelism we’ll need.

Defining your company by the competition

Your company is defined by its own strengths, values, customers, and products, not by how it compares with other companies. You need a strong position, something that would be equally clear and compelling even if competitors didn’t exist.

Here’s some ways this mistake manifests:

  • “We combine the best traits of our competitors, letting them show the way to our success.”
    I like the idea that you can learn from the mistakes and successes of similar companies, but “combining the best” misses the point. There are specific tradeoffs each of those companies are making; things you see as “not best” might in fact be best for their target market. Why are you sure that your notion of “best” will result in enough customers who not only agree with you, but is so convinced that they’re willing to switch to you?
  • The rubric.
    A chart with one row for each “feature” and one column for each of six “competitors.” There’s checks and X’s everywhere, except of course a glowing, highlighted column representing your company which just happens to be full of checks. C’mon, everyone knows this is bullshit; it’s insulting.
  • “We’re just like competitor X, only we’re Y.”
    In that case you’re betting your future on the fact that Y is overwhelmingly compelling to a large market segment. X automatically has advantages over you (brand, customers, revenue, inside knowledge, a team, momentum), so Y had better be brain-explodingly awesome.
    Oh, and it’d better be impossible for X to implement Y — or even 1/3 of Y — themselves. Talk about putting your fate in others’ hands!
  • “We’re the same as X, only cheaper.”
    Being cheaper is a strategy, but it can’t be your only strategy. It’s too easy for competitors to change price or offer deals. Typically the best customers aren’t as price-sensitive anyway, so you’re actually biting off a less desirable segment of the market. Often this claim is paired with “We’ll do 70% of the features for 50% of the price,” but supplying less for less is not inspirational.

So how do you look inward to establish your company, contrasting with the competition but not letting the competition dictate your identity?

  • We’re targeting the market segment defined by X, Y, and Z.  We’ve spoken with 20 potential customers who match at least two of those criteria, and they agree our product is exactly what they need and that none of our competitors are doing an acceptable job addressing their issues.
  • Our company has core value X that we exude everywhere from our AdWords to our tech support to our product. (Example value: Simplicity. A simple product with few features, low-cost, pain-point obvious, not tackling complex problems, focussed on making life easier rather than on saving money.) We own this value because we’re completely committed; this is the one point on which we will never compromise. Our customers know it and value this too, which is why it doesn’t matter what features, prices, or advertisement our competitors have.
  • This is the competitive matrix. Note that each player in this space is targeting a different market segment, as is clear from feature selection, pricing, and advertising/messaging. We, too, are targeting a niche; as you can see our offering is consistent with owning that niche, and doesn’t overlap significantly with competitors. It would be difficult for any of them to “switch” into our niche, because as you can see they’d have to change the product, pricing, and their company’s persona; that’s a risk we’re willing to take.
  • We’re going after competitor X. We know they already have a ton of advantages over us — well-known, well understood, and a deep feature list. However they haven’t done anything new in 3 years and we have evidence that their customer base is pissed off. Not only that, they’re famous for annoying attributes A, B, and C (Examples: buggy, slow, confusing, must install, expensive, crap tech support). We see a huge opportunity in their wake of destruction, vacuuming up their customers with our overwhelming advantage. They can’t do this themselves because they’re too big to turn the ship, and anyway the past 3 years shows they’re not able to change.

What else?

How do you cope with competition, incorporating it into your strategy while not letting it consume you? Leave a comment and join the conversation.



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Filed Under: branding, competition, How-To, Marketing, positioning, strategy

What the crazy name "Smart Bear" taught me about branding

August 2, 2010 By Jason



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smart bear logoEvery founder struggles to find a great name for her company. Often it’s the first source of good-natured strife between co-founders. It’s an exhilarating, scary combination of having to decide who you are — what you do, the persona you expose — combined with the technical issues of being memorable, spell-able, and available as a domain name.

My name started as a whim, was almost changed for the wrong reasons, and ended up with a punch-line I would never have dreamed of.

Storytime! (Lessons at the end.)

hotel new hampshire

An inauspicious birth

The origin of “Smart Bear” is John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire, a surreal novel in which a “smart bear” plays an important role; near the end we are told repeatedly that “a smart bear makes all the difference.” I chose it because at the time my (then new) wife and I were into John Irving and it was whimsical, fun, and meaningful, albeit just to us.

In other words: I picked the name with utter disregard to marketing or business sensibility. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong; maybe all it means is that some branding principles, while interesting, aren’t as vital as they first seem.

“It sounds like shareware.”

A few years into Smart Bear I was still toiling away at the compiler when I was approached by an ex-VP of Sales from a company that had IPO’ed. He wanted to partner up — I’m the young geek, he’s the silver-haired, golf-bag-toting, sports-metaphor-slinging salesman.

The full story of that ill-fated misadventure is related here; the relevant detail is that this guy insisted that we change the name of the company:

“Our potential customers — IBM, Intuit, Adobe, Qualcomm — aren’t going to take us seriously with a silly name like ‘Smart Bear.’ It sounds like shareware, not enterprise software.

“Big companies buy from companies with formal names like IBM, CA, BEA, CSC, HP, stuff like that.”

His suggestion? Software Test and Deployment Systems, Inc, which shortens to the unfortunate “STDS.”

Yeah, an acronym already taken by gonorrhea.

(The jokes, though, were almost worth it. Viral marketing! Our invoices flare up every year!)

I got lucky, though. I was all set to pair up with this guy and change the name, but in another example of serendipity being more influential on business success than purposeful action, I happened to receive a hugeamongous purchase order from Intuit, a whopping $50,000.

You know, exactly the kind of order from exactly the kind of company who would never do business with silly old “Smart Bear” run by non-salesy, geeky Jason. Today, as you can see from our customer list, all the companies he listed are, in fact, customers, and many more besides.

All with a silly name and informal sales.

The VP of Sales’ rationale made sense though, and of course Smart Bear might have been equally successful if named STDS. But once again I learned that maybe the name isn’t as important as either of us thought.

“Let’s just ask the customers.”

Fast-forward six years to present day. I sold Smart Bear a few years ago to AutomatedQA — a great company with a compatible culture and similar goals where Smart Bear (now as a division) continued to thrive (meaning: more revenue, more profits, bigger-and-badder software, and happy customers).

After making a few other acquisitions and continuing to grow, AutomatedQA is now a large company which in the next few years is on a path to be successful even by a VC’s standards. If you thought “Smart Bear” was too informal before, now it’s even more out of place. (If you subscribe to that theory.)

But having all these departments with different names (AutomatedQA, Smart Bear, Pragmatic Software) sucks when you’re trying to build a company which is starting to capitalize by making already-best-of-breed tools work together, especially with customers who we all share. So they decided to rebrand everything under a single name.

But which name? AutomatedQA (the one which was biggest to begin with and clearly a great name)? Smart Bear? Something new? STDS?

So they decided to poll everyone they could find in the software industry — customers and otherwise. They asked positioning questions like:

  • Do you have a good or bad immediate impression of this brand?
  • Have you heard this name before, and if yes what have you heard?
  • If you have experience with this brand, what was that like?

The result? See for yourself: As of July 19th 2010, the entire company has been rebranded Smart Bear. Come see the new website — it’s neat to see something start out so ugly and terrible and end up as the banner of what is already a massively successful, many-million-dollar business.

So what’s in a name?

What’s in a name? Not as much as some folks say, it appears.

The lessons I took from this are:

  • It’s what you do, not what you call it.
  • It’s more effective to do/say something important/valuable than to hope a logo or name will say it for you.
  • Being memorable is more important than what they remember.
  • First impressions are important, but so are all the other impressions, and the latter can trump the former.
  • Your time isn’t well-spent fretting about brand (early on).
  • You can change your brand later.

Continued in the comments…

What are your experiences with naming and branding? Am I being too harsh in dismissing the value of branding? Let’s continue the discussion in the comments.



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Filed Under: branding, Design, Essays, Marketing, positioning

Real Unfair Advantages

July 19, 2010 By Jason



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This is Part 2 of the series: 5 lessons from 150 startup pitches.

santa's naughty list

What if someone copies your awesome business idea?

About twenty people on Answers OnStartups have asked this question in one form or another:

When I meet an angel investor, he may ask: “What if a big company copies your idea and develops the same website as yours after your website goes public?”

How can I answer this question?

No, the question is: What are you doing now knowing that a big company will copy your idea?

No, wait, the real question is: What are you going to do when another smart, scrappy startup copies it, and gets $10m in funding, and is thrice featured on TechCrunch?

No, wait, I’m sorry, the real question is: What are you going to do when there are four totally free, open-source competitors?

No wait, I forgot, actually the question is: What happens when employee #2 makes off with your code and roadmap and marketing data and customer list, moves to Bolivia, and starts selling your stuff world-wide at one-tenth the price?

The good news: There are good answers to these questions!

The bad news: Almost no one I talk to has good answers, but they think they do. And that’s fatal, because it means they’re not working towards remedying that situation. Which means when one of the above scenarios happens, it will be too late.

The first step is admitting you have a problem.

Last week I detailed the most common misconceptions about competitive advantages, so go read that if you haven’t already.

To summarize: Anything that can be copied will be copied, including features, marketing copy, and pricing. Anything you read on popular blogs is also read by everyone else. You don’t have an “edge” just because you’re passionate, hard-working, or “lean.”

The only real competitive advantage is that which cannot be copied and cannot be bought.

Like what?

Insider information

They say the only way to consistently make money on Wall Street is to have insider information. Unfortunately it’s not a joke, and although it’s illegal (and people occasionally go to jail for it), those in the know will tell you it’s the norm.

stock-dance

Fortunately, using intimate knowledge of an industry and the specific pain points within an industry is a perfectly legal unfair advantage for a startup.

Here’s a real-world example of how this advantage manifests. Adriana has been a psychiatrist for 10 years; she understands the ins and outs of that business. During a lull in her practice she got a serendipitous opportunity to shift gears completely and ended up leading software product development teams.  (Turns out that for big-business project management it’s more valuable to be a sensible thinker and counselor than to be an expert in debugging legacy C++ code.)

Now Adriana has an epiphany: Traditional practice-management software for psychiatrists totally sucks; she knows both the pain points and the existing software first-hand. But now she has the vision and ability to design her own software, capitalizing on modern trends (e.g. a web application instead of cumbersome installed applications) and new interpretations of HIPPA regulation (which allows web-based applications to store medical records like patient histories).

Adriana holds a unique position: Expert in the industry, able to “geek out” with her target customer, yet capable of leading a product team. Even if someone else saw Adriana’s product after the fact, it’s almost impossible to find a person — or even assemble a team — who has more integrated knowledge. At best, they could copy. Of course by then Adriana has moved on to version two.

Single-minded, uncompromising obsession with One Thing

A popular comment on the previous post was that a “Unique Feature” could be a competitive advantage in some circumstances. Some examples of a feature being a company’s primary advantage are:

  • Apple compromises everything in the name of design. Their products are over-priced (magically being profitable at half the price 12 months after release), buggy (how many iOS debacles have there been?), and every experience I’ve had with their tech support has been atrocious, but man their stuff looks and feels nice! (I’m typing this on an Air and there’s an iPhone in my pocket, so no Apple fan-boy mail please.)
  • Google’s search algorithm was just better, therefore they won the eyeballs, therefore they were able to monetize. Sure Bing and Yahoo are good now, but the advantage lasted long enough.
  • Photodex is a little company you’ve never heard of I worked for in Austin in the 90′s. We made an image browser with thumbnail previews so you didn’t have to open each file individually to see what it was. (In the 90′s, y’all, before that was built into all the operating systems!) Our advantage was speed. Not the best, not the most stable, didn’t read the most formats, didn’t have the most features, just “fastest.” For many users of that product, speed wins; Photodex now makes tens of millions of dollars a year, and “speed” is still the only point on which they will not compromise.

However it’s not enough for a feature to merely be unique (like my mini-browser) because it’s still easily duplicated. Indeed, most of the innovations we’ve made at Smart Bear in the art of code review have already been duplicated by both commercial and open-source competitors.

Rather, this requires unwavering devotion to the One Thing that is (a) hard, and (b) you refuse to lose, no matter what.

Google has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on their search algorithm, the single biggest focus of the company even today, a decade after they decided that was their One Thing. They refuse to be beaten by competitors or black-hat hackers, whatever it takes.

37signals can build simple — almost trivial — software and earn three million customers because they absolutely will not compromise on their philosophy of simplicity, transparency, and owning their own company, and that’s something millions of people respect and support. Competitors could build trivial web applications too (as Joel Spolsky is fond of saying, “Their software is just a bunch of text fields!”), but without the single-minded obsession it’s just software with no features.

To remain un-copyable, your One Thing needs to be not just central to your existence, but also difficult to achieve. Google’s algorithm, combined with the hardware and software to implement a search of trillions of websites in 0.2 seconds, is hard to replicate; it took hundreds (thousands?) of really smart people at Microsoft and Yahoo years to catch up. 37signals’ ranting platform — a blog with 131k followers and a best-selling book — is nearly impossible to build even with a full-time army of insightful writers.

“Being hard to do” is still a true advantage, particularly when you devote your primary energy to it.

P.S. For more, here are detailed examples of how this mindset also sets up your sales pitch.

Personal authority

codereviewbook-smChris Brogan commands $22,000 for a single day of consulting in an industry (social media marketing) where all the information you need is already online and free. Joel Spolsky makes millions of dollars off bug tracking — an industry with hundreds of competitors and little innovation. My company Smart Bear sells the most expensive tool of its kind. How did we earn this powerful authority, and how can you earn this overwhelming advantage?

I’m a great example of someone who wasn’t an authority on anything, but built that authority over time to the point where now my company (Smart Bear) is untouchable as the leader in both revenue and ideas in the area of peer code review.

Not only was I not an expert on code review prior to building a code review tool, I wasn’t even an expert on software development processes generally! I didn’t give lectures, I didn’t have a blog, I didn’t have a column in Dr. Dobbs magazine, and most interesting of all, I didn’t even know “code review” was going to be what made the company successful!

Unfortunately all this “authority” crap takes years of expensive effort, and even then success is probably due as much to luck as anything else, so is it worthwhile? Yes, exactly because it takes years of effort and a little luck.

Authority cannot be purchased. You can’t raise VC money and then “have authority” in a year. A big company cannot just decide they want to be the thought-leaders in their field. Even a pack of hyper-intelligent geeks cannot automatically become authorities because it’s not about how well you can code.

But how does authority convert to revenue? Here’s one tiny example:

I give talks on peer code review at conferences. My competition pays thousands of dollars for a booth, then spends thousands advertising to attendees begging them to come to that booth, then gives sales pitches at the booth to uninterested passersby who are also being bombarded by other pitches and distracted by the general hubbub.

Whereas, because I’m a known authority on code review and software development, I get to talk for an entire hour to a captive, undistracted group of 100 people, self-selected as interested in code review. After the talk typically 5-20 people want to chat one-on-one. Some head straight to the booth to get a demo; for many I give a private demo of the product on sofas in the hallway. It’s not unusual to get $10,000-$50,000 in sales over the next three months from people who saw me at that talk.

That’s just one example!  Now add to that: What’s the effect of a blog that tens of thousands of people read? What’s the effect on sales of my writing the book that’s the modern authority of code review?

Authority is expensive and time-consuming to earn, no doubt. But it’s also an overwhelming, untouchable competitive advantage.

(P.S. I’m hoping that the authority I’m slowly earning from this blog will help when I launch my next venture. That’s not why I blog, but I certainly will leverage it when the time comes!)

(P.P.S. I apologize for blatantly abusing the word “authority,” considering I just lambasted everyone who does things like that.)

The Dream Team

The tech startup world is littered with famous killer teams: Gates & Allen, Steve & Steve, Page & Brin, Fried & DHH.

In each case, the founders were super-smart, had complimentary skill sets, worked together well (or well enough to get to important success milestones), and as a team represented a unique, powerful, and (in retrospect) unstoppable force.

Of course that’s easy to see in retrospect, and retrospect is a terrible teacher, but the principle can work for any startup, especially when your goals are more modest than being the next Google.

Take the success of ITWatchDogs, the company I helped bootstrap and eventually sell (before Smart Bear). The elements of our Dream Team were obvious from the start:

  • Varied skillsets. One experienced startup/business/salesman (Gerry), one proven software developer (me), one proven hardware developer (Michael).
  • Common vision. We agreed what the product ought to be and that the ultimate goal of the company was to sell it.
  • Insider knowledge. Gerry had done another successful startup in the same space, I had deep experience with the language and tools for embedded software, and Michael had decades of experience building inexpensive circuits and processors.

Of course a Dream Team doesn’t guarantee success but it significantly reduces the risk of the startup, and furthermore is difficult for the competition to duplicate.

This is especially true when someone on the team is already successful in their field, e.g. with a massively successful blog or a big startup success under their belt or a ridiculous rolodex. Since those are the kinds of competitive advantages that can’t be bought or consistently created, having that person on the team is by proxy a killer advantage.

P.S. This is the primary competitive advantage in a new startup I’m working on right now (to be announced soon), so shortly you’ll see another example of this theory and — better yet! — you and I both will witness over the subsequent months whether or not this really resulted in a killer advantage! (Yes of course I’ll share details!)

(The right) Celebrity endorsement

Hiten Shah’s third company is KISSMetrics. On the surface, it’s yet another “marketing metrics” company. This is a crowded, mature market with hundreds of competitors in every combination of large/small, expensive/mid/cheap/free, and product/service/hybrid.

But Hiten has something none of those competitors has: Investors and mentors who are celebrities in exactly the market he’s targeting. Folks like Dave McClure, Sean Ellis, and Eric Ries, all of whom not only help via conference call but actively promote KISSMetrics on their blogs, Twitter, and personal appearances.

How much advertising will it take for competitors to overcome Hiten’s endorsements and exposure?  Even if a competitor also wanted celebrity endorsement, these guys are taken, and in any field there’s a limited number of widely-known and respected authorities.

Many competitors have more features than KISSMetrics has. I can see the sales pitch now…

The customer objects: “Gee it would be nice to have all those features,” and Hiten responds “Well not really, because Dave, Sean, and Eric all say that those features are actually distractions and don’t add to your bottom line. Our features are the right ones, as evidenced by these 20 companies that have shown increases in revenue.”

Just on the basis of these advisors, Hiten will get hundreds if not thousands of customers. You can’t buy that kind of jumpstart, not even for millions of dollars, because it’s not about faceless leads who saw KISSMetrics in an ad, it’s people who trust Hiten because of his association with other people they already trust.

P.S. If you’re raising money, investors love to see a co-founder or even just an advisor who has been successful before. The VC game is more lemming-like than most care to admit.

Existing customers

…or as Frank Rizzo says: Open your ears, jackass!

Everyone you’ve ever sold to (and those who trialed but abandoned) possess the most valuable market research imaginable, and it’s the one thing a new competitor absolutely will not have.

This is kind of a cheat, because everyone says “I listen to my customers,” which (nowadays) is just as bullshit as “We’re passionate,” but it’s true that if you’re actively learning from your customers and you never stop moving, creating, innovating, and learning, that puts you ahead of most companies in the world.

As a company becomes successful it gains momentum, which means that it’s going in one direction with one philosophy. Like physical momentum, change becomes harder to affect. It’s logical; for example at Smart Bear we have 35,000 users, so making a drastic change to the user interface or typical workflow would mean too much retraining, even if the end result is better.

Even “cool, agile” companies like 37signals are trapped. They’ve been so clear and confident in their philosophy of “do less,” they cannot go after markets where “less” is not more but, actually, just less. For example, with more than a few sales people in a traditional sales organization it’s impossible to use Highrise — the folks-of-many-signal believe pipeline reports and geographic domains and integrated campaign management are unnecessary complications, but actually it’s Highrise that is unnecessary.

Of course the world is changing, and in particular your customers are changing. Normally this leaves room for the next competitor, but if you’re already entrenched you can leverage your existing status, insider knowledge, and revenue stream as long as you’re willing to change too.

You have more money, you’re better known, you have existing happy customers to help spread the word, you have employees to build new things, and you have more experience with what customers actually do and actually need, which means you should have the best insight.

Any new competitor would kill for just one of these advantages. If you’re not using them, how silly is that?

Zoho made exactly this argument to explain why they’re not terribly worried that Microsoft is now a direct competitor:

Companies don’t get killed by competition, they usually find creative ways to commit suicide. Office 2010 will be the end of Zoho, if we stop innovating, stop being nimble and flexible in our business model. Then again, if we stop all that, Zoho will die anyway, no Office 2010 needed to do the job.

37signals is trapped inside their self-imposed philosophy, but you don’t have to be.

Go git ‘em

Imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s still sucks when someone does it to you.

Of course you can still battle it out in the marketplace, but you need something that can’t be duplicated, something they could never beat you on, then hang your hat on that and don’t look back.

Don’t despair if you don’t have an unfair advantage yet. I didn’t either when I started Smart Bear! But I built toward having some, and eventually earned it.

What else? What other competitive advantages can’t be easily copied, or if they are copied it doesn’t matter? Leave a comment and join the conversation.



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Filed Under: competition, How-To, inspiration, Marketing, positioning, strategy

No, that IS NOT a competitive advantage

July 12, 2010 By Jason



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This is part 1 of the series: 5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches.

Listening to first-time entrepreneurs talk about their competitive advantages is as predictably invalid as the local weatherman’s 10-day forecast.

location location location

Between this blog and reviewing applications to Capital Factory I see hundreds of pitches a year. Every pitch has a section on competitive advantages, and quite literally 95% of the time the claimed competitive advantages are pathetic, unoriginal, and not really advantages at all.

The first clue that your competitive advantages aren’t actual advantages is that everyone else on Earth claims those advantages too!

P.S. Next week I’ll talk about what are real competitive advantages.

The following are not competitive advantages:

We have feature X.
This is an advantage only until others copy it, so it’s not long-term protection against competition. Indeed, the next company can observe what works well and what doesn’t, and than improve on your innovation. End users don’t care who thought it up, they just care how it works today.

We have the most features.
It’s common for older products to compete on the fact that they have more features than the competition. Trouble is, customers don’t want more features, they want the right features. As the competition also adds features, they reach a critical mass where they have all the features 80% of your customers want, and then just having “more” is no longer an interesting selling point.

We’re patenting our features.
“No one can compete with my blog because it’s copyrighted.” Silly, right?

That’s what you sound like when you claim that getting a software patent will protect you from competition. Except in certain industries (e.g. food, drug, medical), I’m unaware of companies who stave off quality competitors through patent holdings. Software patents are especially useless for small, bootstrapped startups. It’s even true in hardware: Every mp3 player uses zillions of patents, but that didn’t stop Apple from winning.

We’re better at SEO and social media.
80% of Americans believe they are better-than-average drivers. Can’t be true, right? Well 80% of the folks I meet tell me they’re way better than average at SEO, Twitter, and “building communities” whateverthehell that means.

Social media and SEO is ever-changing quicksand. You’re on top of Google today, gone tomorrow. Other companies being good — or better — is completely outside your control, so claiming that you have a sustainable advantage is poppycock.

We’re passionate.
Everyone has passion. What, you think everyone else quits their job, starts mowing through savings, works long hours, and yet has no passion? Passion is necessary but far from sufficient.

This is like saying, “My children are going to be more successful because I love them more than you love yours.” This makes investors roll their eyes and show you the door.

We have three PhDs / MBAs.
The landscape of successful startups is littered with people lacking post-graduate education. If you’ve lived in the software world for a few years you know the stuff they teach you in school is irrelevant, so who cares what degree you have? In all the interviews you’ve read about founders’ success, how many credit their MBA program? How many even have MBAs? It’s not bad to have a degree, but neither is it a significant advantage.

We work hard.
 You hear about the 37signals guys working 30 hours per week and Tim Ferris just four hours (bullshit!), so you figure if you work a “healthy” 70 hours per week, you’ll win! But working harder is not, in fact, smarter. And even you could work 70 on-task hours per week, that’s still blown away by 10 developers at a funded company or even 10 passionate open source developers working part-time.

We’re cheaper.
It’s not bad to be cheaper. Indeed, at ITWatchDogs, the company I did before Smart Bear, being inexpensive was critical to our strategy. The key is that you cannot compete only on price, because then all a competitor has to do is lower their price. Established companies can destroy you with the “loss leader” strategy (e.g. when Microsoft put 1,000 developers on IE and gave it away for free, destroying the market for web browsers), newly funded companies can spend ludicrous amounts of money to get market share (even if it means taking you down with them), and anyone can implement a “freemium” model.

In the case of ITWatchDogs, the reasons we were cheaper were that (a) we sold direct instead through a channel, so our product wasn’t marked up 6x before it got to the customer, and (b) we used the newest, cheapest parts whereas our established competitors had stopped innovating and were using expensive 5-year-old parts.

So where does that leave us?

Haven’t I just claimed that the fruits of intense effort and innovation and one-upmanship isn’t enough?

Yes.

Innovative design and intellectual property are no longer long-term competitive advantages.

You live in the era of the flat world where millions of people have access to technology, education, and a powerful sales, marketing, and communication platform (the Internet).

You live in the era where the most powerful programming frameworks and tools are free, local broadband and high-availability servers are cheap, and world-class people are willing to work 60 hours/week in exchange for Ramen noodles and the chance to be a part of a cool new startup.

There’s too much energy, availability, intelligence and opportunity in the world to hide behind outdated notions of intellectual property.

Almost anything can be copied. In fact, I’d claim that anything of any value will be copied. It should be part of your business plan that other people will copy you.

Fortunately there’s plenty of ways to have true advantages that competition cannot readily overcome. Unfortunately, they’re difficult and rare. Of course they are! What, you thought creating and running a successful, untouchable startup was easy and commonplace?

Next week I’ll go into depth on some true unfair competitive advantages — ones that cannot be overcome even by a giant company, a funded company, a bootstrapped company, or an open-source movement.

Are these assertions unfair? Do you have more false-advantages to add? Leave a comment and join the conversation.



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Filed Under: competition, Essays, introspection, positioning, strategy

5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches

July 11, 2010 By Jason



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I just reviewed several hundred startup pitches for Capital Factory. Most were on paper and video; 20 were invited to pitch in person.

three little pigs

Interesting patterns emerged:

  • Everyone makes the same classes of error.
  • Those who avoided just one of those errors stood out in the crowd.
  • These are problems with the business concept or the founder’s attitude, not specific to raising angel money.

You’re probably making a lot of these errors too.

Not that I blame you! After all, these became clear to me only after seeing hundreds of applications; you don’t have the luxury of that perspective.

So for the next few weeks I’m doing a series on these mistakes and what to do about them.  This post serves as a hyperlinked table of contents, so either bookmark this page or subscribe by email or RSS to get notified when new articles get posted.

Here’s the list:

  1. Invalid competitive advantages
    “Superior SEO” and “unique features” are not competitive advantages.
  2. Lacking an unfair advantage
    You need one killer advantage that no one on Earth can beat you on. (‘Cause you might get beaten on everything else!)
  3. No one said they’d buy it
    You don’t need statistically-significant studies before you begin, but it’s astonishing how many founders blaze ahead before they’ve found even a single person willing to give them money.
  4. Incorrect positioning against competition
    The two faults here are opposites: Believing that uniqueness means competition doesn’t exist, or defining yourself by the competition instead of constructing your own message.
  5. No significant route to customers (coming soon…)
    If your marketing strategy is to run A/B tests and build RSS subscribers, you’ve already lost.

There’s also this list, equally common but I didn’t feel the urge to write an entire blog post on each one:

  1. Unable to describe the company in 60 seconds.
    We’ve all heard of the elevator pitch, but when asked to produce it almost no one succeeded. This is important whether or not you’re raising money because it means you understand your customers and why they buy your stuff.
  2. Building for yourself instead of the market.
    “Scratching your own itch” is how many great ideas begin, but it’s not a business strategy. Often you assume your customer is the same as you — sees the problem the same way, wants to solve it your way, and wants to pay for it. But you’re explicitly not like your customers; for one thing, you have enough initiative and insight to quit your job to start a company. It’s easy to let your idiosyncratic preconceptions prevent you from observing what the larger market will accept.
  3. Pretending your faults don’t exist.
    You have all sorts of shortcomings: First startup, inexperienced, ignorant about how “sales” works, buggy software, whatever. None of it’s a problem if you’re willing to acknowledge and cope with it, but if you persist in lying to me and your customers about it, that’s a problem. (And a lie by omission is twice the lie.)
  4. Don’t know what you don’t know.
    I don’t care that your resume doesn’t prepare you for a startup — mine didn’t either! But if your answer to any question is “How do I know? I just do,” then I know right away you’re not only ignorant but incapable of fixing that ignorance. How do I know this will result in your business drifting aimlessly until you finally run out of money? I just do.

Stay tuned!  The first post in the series goes up Monday.



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Filed Under: advice, capitalfactory, competition, customers, How-To, investment, Marketing, positioning, starting, strategy

Human + Fallible = Love; Corporate + Sterile = Refund

June 28, 2010 By Jason



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A lovely new company/customer etiquette has emerged, and small startups are especially suited for exploiting it. I hope you’re not ignoring it.

Just yesterday someone explained to me what they expect from their website hosting company:

I want someone else making sure the server doesn’t go down. Or, if it does go down, I want someone to apologize to me.

Ten years ago, that bold text would have read: “Or, if it does go down, I want someone to scream at.” Or: “I want someone to give me a refund.”  The new attitude is not “Those assholes better not ever screw up,” but rather “I expect them to try hard, to care, and to treat me well when they inevitably screw up.”

This doesn’t mean you get a free pass to screw your customers, then earn forgiveness from a heartfelt “open letter from the CEO.” Rather, it means:

  • You’re doing your honest, level best to do right by your customers, evidenced continuously through all your communication — blog, tech support, website — not just after a crisis.
  • You’re learning from your mistakes, evidenced by problems tending towards the esoteric, and by explaining in your apology what steps you’ve taken to avoid this and similar classes of error.
  • You’re doing everything in your power to be the best, evidenced by a culture of awesome employees and inventing new ways to make your customers successful, so mistakes are ordinary human error, not negligence or indifference.

It’s not even the apology itself; no one’s convinced when a large company issues an insincere, legally-vetted “official apology” that you know doesn’t fix anything. What that quote above really means is: “I want to work with other people who behave like real people, who are obviously trying their best, and who respond to problems as earnestly and quickly as can be expected.”

In short: People readily forgive honest human error, but become adversarial and distrustful with the typical, sterile customer/provider relationship.

This is why every blog-about-blogging sternly instructs you to “be human.” Umm, what? Compared to what, being feline?

(Isn’t it weird that we have to be told how to “be human?” WTF?)

“No no,” they say, “it means let your humanity show — be authentic.” Oh brother, ok, how do I do that?

The typical advice for “being authentic” is to “just be yourself,” but I don’t know what that means. Thales said the most difficult thing is to “Know Thyself,” so it must be really hard to do that over Twitter and AdWords. (By the way, Thales also said the easiest thing is “To Give Advice.” I’ll let you bask in the irony for a minute…)

So I suppose one route to “finding your voice” is to take stock of your total life experience together with your ten-year goals, then synthesize a compelling, internally-consistent philosophy, apply that to all your actions and communications, and summarize it in four punchy words on your home page.

Yeah right, who can do that? Not me, I can’t even decide what to have for lunch.

So instead, here’s a few more practical ways to discover what’s essential to your personality and point of view:

  • Criticize others.
    If you especially enjoy someone’s slogan, why? Is it because it’s funny, clever, specific, unwavering, simple, conservative, confident, or ballsy? Conversely if you loathe someone’s “About Us” page, why? Is it because it’s too personal, not personal enough, too detailed, not detailed enough, silly, formal, useless, childish, lengthy, or arrogant? When you see something that strikes a nerve, complete the sentence: “I absolutely [love|hate] that because ….”
  • Decide what you are not.
    For example, you might say “I hate companies who use formal language; I’m never going to allow formality to dictate how I communicate.” Or the opposite: “I hate companies who think it’s funny and clever to use informal language; I’m going to instill confidence by showing that we behave like grown-ups.” It’s easy to identify corporate stuff that pisses you off; use that to decide both what not to do and what to do instead.
  • Copy something you love.
    Sounds weird I know — how can copying lead to a unique, personal style? But if you think about why you love something — a company, an attitude, a writing style, a philosophy — it’s because you identify with it so completely. It is you! Of course over time you’ll morph that copy into something unique, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a head start by imitating something you wish you had thought of yourself. Careful though — I’m not advocating plagiarism! The goal is mimicry, not theft, influence, not carbon-copy. Your mindset should be: The thing I’m copying is a rough draft that needs extensive editing but whose heart is in the right place.

Even assuming you successful identify what “being human” means to you, it’s still surprisingly difficult to implement because every strong decision you make will necessarily alienate many people even while it’s thrilling others.

If you adopt an informal style, some people will find it refreshing while others find you untrustworthy. If you’re proactive in announcing bugs, some people will reciprocate by gracefully putting up with the problems, while others will be shocked – shocked! — and will Twitter that you sell shoddy software. If you admit the entire company consists of two people, some folks will smile knowing they’ll get primo customer service while others will flee because of the low probability you’ll still be around next year. If you curse on your blog, many people will wince and click “Back” but others will laugh and click “Subscribe.”

And yet, strong, specific, and honest you must be. Yes it means turning off some people, but the remainder will love you all the more (and make sure their Facebook “friends” know it).

What’s the alternative — having no persona at all? Then why would anyone get excited about you? Why would they put up with your faults? Why would they tell their friends about you?

Is your goal is to become a soulless corporation? No? Well then, do whatever it takes to be soulful.

Continued in the comments… How do you find your voice? How do you decide which people to alienate? Do you disagree with the premise? Leave a comment and join the discussion.



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Filed Under: culture, Essays, honesty, inspiration, introspection, Marketing, persona, philosophy, positioning, social media

Out of the cesspool and into the sewer: A/B testing trap

June 21, 2010 By Jason



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local-minimum-global-maximum.jpg

Your A/B tests are trapped in a cesspool when they should be in the sewer.

Do you really care why A/B testing is analogous to unwanted liquids? Not yet, so I’d better get right to the point.

Water pools in backyard.jpg

On the rare occasion that it rains in Austin we get these deep puddles in the backyard. Of course it would be better if the water would flow out into the street and into the sewer, but that’s not how gravity works.

Water “seeks” the lowest point in the yard, but it’s narrow-minded. It doesn’t survey the environment, locate the lowest area, and head there. Rather, at each point along its path it chooses whatever direction is lowest in the immediate vicinity. Water doesn’t “know” that if only it made the effort to hop over the fence, it could get much lower, like in the sewer.

In mathematical terms, water doesn’t “globally optimize” for getting to the lowest possible point, but rather “locally optimizes” at each step. If you enjoy clichés, water misses the forest for the trees.

Maybe your A/B tests are missing the forest for the trees too.

A typical A/B test looks like this: You start with a baseline, then you make a change. Maybe the title changes from “Sour Cream Getting you Down?” to “Don’t know when Sour Cream Goes Bad?”  You test that for a while and one wins, and then you try another variation: “Is this Sour Cream Good or Bad?”

And so on, inching your way through incremental improvements. A little here, a little there, and — you believe — soon it adds up to real money.

Except, often it doesn’t.

Often what happens is you get to a point where small changes aren’t doing anything. It can be hard to recognize this effect which is why you need to (horrors!) use math to decide empirically whether anything’s actually happening.

At this point you might be tempted to give up, but that’s wrong too.

What’s happened is that you’ve found what mathematicians call a “local minimum” and what I just called a “cesspool” (and what more tasteful writers call a “watershed.”) Your test is the water in the backyard — you’ve flowed into the lowest point, but you’re still in the backyard!

Completely changing your perspective, your message, your layout, your value proposition, your colors, or your target audience might reveal an entirely new, discontinuous, non-incremental change. The real fun is in the sewer; you need to jump over the backyard fence.

In fact, because looking in completely new places has the potential to yield far more results than incremental improvement, you need to be looking for discontinuous results from the start.

The best idea is to do both: Instead of just running A versus incremental-change A2, also run a B version that’s radically different from A. Thus you reap the straightforward benefits of incremental improvements while also searching for something that could radically improve your revenue.

Better still, if a radically different message gets you massively better results, perhaps all your messaging should change accordingly. Maybe your idea of what the market wants should shift. Maybe your entire business can change for the better.

Why poop along with minor variations when you could be toying with new ideas and new identities?

Play!

What strategies do you use for tests? Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Join me in my new startup WPEngine: Super-fast, super-secure WordPress hosting.

Filed Under: branding, Essays, lead-gen, Metrics, positioning, testing

Telling the 800-lb Gorilla to Shove it up his Ass

May 31, 2010 By Jason



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Every founder frets about competition from a big company, me included.

We scoff at their inability to innovate and for prioritizing shareholders over customers, but still we quiver in fear.

stock-dance

Dozens of people on Answers.OnStartups ask about it so I know I’m not alone. It always goes like this:

I’m just a two-person operation with no budget. What if a huge company with a hundred software developers and a million dollars in marketing budget decides to copy my idea?

Answer: You’re dead! Give up! No small company has ever survived competition with a large one!

Oh wait, that’s not true. But poking fun doesn’t help; maybe this article will.

First, take a deep breath and remember that every little software company on Earth in under this threat. This fact alone means competition — or threat of competition — isn’t fatal, and possibly not even important.

Don’t fear the dinosaur, fear the quivering warm-blooded tree-shrew

65 million years ago an iridium-enfused extra-terrestrial meatball o’ death caused what we would nowadays call a “disruptive market event,” and the cold-blooded dinosaurs couldn’t weather the shitstorm. It was the little cenozoic warm-blooded agile (oh sorry, now we’re saying “lean”) rodents who adapted by getting “outside the nest” to discover how to eat cockroaches, because we all know that cockroaches are the one form of life that can survive anything.

Like unadaptable dinosaurs, whatever your large competitor is doing now is probably what they’ll be doing two years from now, possibly four. Same message, same product, same pricing, and still taking a dump on Facebook instead of playing by the new rules. By then where will you be?

That kind of competition isn’t scary. What is scary is another scrappy, smart startup like yours — another tree-shrew. The one who silently observes you from afar, then drives down the road you paved, skipping the mistakes you made and copying the good parts.

Take all your angst about big competitors and refocus it on the little ones. (I’ll talk about this sort of competition in future post.)

You’re scratching out a living, not “beating Google.”

If your only conception of “success” is to utterly destroy large companies, then I guess you should stop reading now.

But if you want to build a solid company, something you’re proud of, something that pays handsomely but doesn’t have to be worth $1B, then the game isn’t “us or them.” The question is: How can you own your little piece of the world; Not: How can you wrest $100m of revenue from a big guy.

It’s not your purpose to “beat” another company. It’s your purpose to define yourself on your own terms, not in terms of how you’re like or unlike someone else.

Sure it’s constructive to “set your sights” on a competitor, actively trying to beat them in the marketplace or even steal their customers (e.g. give a discount if someone switches to you). But ultimately the only thing that matters is that you earn more and more customers, whether or not anyone else does too.

Using a gorilla to increase your own prospects

It can actually be an advantage to have a big player in your market, especially if they enter your market after you’re established.

At Smart Bear we make a peer review tool for software programmers; you don’t have to be a geek to know that any software development tool company shares the following fear: “What if Microsoft copies us?” But we know that any code review tool from Microsoft would work only with their own version control system and only inside Visual Studio. (Can you imagine a tool from Microsoft that supported ClearCase, ran inside Eclipse, and had excellent support for Java?)

So what if they did copy us, and what if as a result they owned 100% of the Visual Studio market? Well that still leaves every other market on Earth. And then all of Microsoft’s competitors would also need a code review tool so they don’t fall behind on the hallowed competitive analysis chart, so suddenly IBM, CA, Oracle, Serena, CompuWare, and HP would need a code review tool right away. What better way to accomplish that than to buy the #1 (or maybe now #2) code review tool company — hey that’s us! — which by the way is profitable at a time when any company is happy to have a department that’s generating cash.

In short, Microsoft copying the idea would only validate the market, causing the value of Smart Bear to increase.

What actually happened is instructive too: Microsoft added the concept of “shelving” and put the absolute least amount of effort into supporting code review (it’s literally a check-box that indicates that, somehow, somewhere, a code review happened), so the result is that we sell a ton of Code Collaborator to Visual Studio shops.

In other words, they validated the market by entering it, but exactly because they’re a huge company they couldn’t make it good enough to stop us.

Go where they can’t follow

Big companies play only in big markets.

It’s logical: With all the expensive machinery and bureaucracy it takes a dump truck of money and dozens of man-years to build something new, so the opportunity has to be enormous. Even if they were successful in a small market there wouldn’t be enough profits to move the big needle at the top.

So Microsoft can’t attack a market unless there’s a potential to earn at least $1B. But wouldn’t you be happy playing in a market where you’d be able to rake in “only” $100M? Of course you would.

I’m not talking about carving out micro-niches where only seven people on Earth are potential customers. Just don’t go after massive, general markets like “everyone with a digital camera” or “anyone with a smart phone” or “all software developers.”

big fish small pond

Do what they cannot

Big companies have significant advantages like money, a brand, a team, and a large customer base, many of whom will never switch even when presented with a clearly-better alternative.

Their brand alone is a powerful force you probably cannot overcome, e.g. ”eBay is trustable” or “Apple is cool” or “IBM is safe.”

But the same attributes which deliver those advantages are also restrictive:

  • They can’t release a completely-revamped, brand-new version because they can’t retrain 200,000 users.
  • They can’t take a risk because protecting the existing revenue stream is more important than anything else, even if it means their ultimate demise.
  • They can’t quickly convert new ideas to released code because there’s requirements and documents and designers and approvals and schedules and testing and vetting.
  • They can’t change their image because there’s too much momentum with the old one. For example if they have a reputation for bad tech support, even if it gets remedied most people will still think of them has having bad support.
  • They can’t observe and react quickly to changing market demands because there’s too many layers of people and process, and too many people whose careers depend on maintaining the status quo.

For example, Intuit needs to look solid and timeless, their developers know C++ and desktop applications, and they can’t retrain the computer-phobic home users of Quicken… so they cannot create Mint.

As another example, IBM requires expensive infrastructure, development teams, and sales channels to command multi-million dollar consulting deals, but that also means it’s not profitable to do a small deal, which means small consulting shops never worry about competing with IBM.

They can’t change their product, so you can innovate without competition. They can’t change their image, so you can fill the gap. They can’t listen to a customer and make an impact one week later; you can.

Do what they can’t do, be what they’re not, and you won’t have to worry about competing on those points.

What else?

What are more tips for defending, defeating, or just avoiding big companies? What are your experiences with meeting dinosaurs on the sales floor? Leave a comment and extend this discussion.



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Filed Under: branding, competition, Essays, Marketing, positioning

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