From A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

I talk to a lot of companies that are still hunting for customer #1, or a few sales have been made but the ball isn’t rolling yet.

Most of them are making the same mistake: Their public persona is exactly wrong.

I know, because I made the same mistake! But I learned my lesson, and I’d like to share it with you.

Even before I had a single customer, I “knew” it was important to look professional. My website would need to look and feel like a “real company.” I need culture-neutral language complimenting culturally-diverse clip-art photos of frighteningly chipper co-workers huddled around a laptop, awash with the thrill and delight of configuring a JDBC connection to SQL Server 2008.

It also means adopting typical “marketing-speak,” so my “About Us” page started with:

Smart Bear is the leading provider of enterprise version control data-mining tools. Companies world-wide use Smart Bear’s Code Historian software for risk-analysis, root-cause discovery, and software development decision-support.

“Leading provider?” “Data mining?” I’m not even sure what that means. But you have to give me credit for an impressive quantity of hyphens.

That’s what you’re supposed to do right? That’s what other companies do, so it must be right. Who am I to break with tradition? Surely my potential customers would immediately close the browser if they read:

Hi, I’m Jason and I built an inexpensive tool for visualizing what’s in your version control system. It’s useful for answering questions like “When was the last time we changed this file?” Check it out and tell me what sucks!

I mean, can you just imagine a person with “Software Engineer III” on their business card taking me seriously if I just talked like a human being? What if someone gets offended by the word “sucks?” No no, big companies want to see professional language!

But I was wrong. I’ll explain why from the point of view of selling software over the web, but the same lesson applies to every little company trying to get off the ground.

Now repeat after me:

My next sale won’t be a 1000-seat order from Lockheed Martin.
My next sale won’t be a 1000-seat order from Lockheed Martin.
My next sale won’t be a 1000-seat order from Lockheed Martin.

I’m telling you this having sold software to every size of company from micro-ISV to IBM, and, well, to Lockheed Martin.

Your vision is to land $100k deals with big companies — and you will! But not today. Today your product is a shaky version one-dot-oh with bugs you haven’t uncovered yet, missing 80% of the features big companies require (never say “big companies!”), and with no significant documentation like case studies or a proper manual or an ROI model or a large, reference-able customer.

Today, you’re a complete mismatch with Lockheed Martin! But there’s a nice big niche that’s a perfect match: Early Adopters.

Early Adopters are people who want to live on the bleeding edge. They like new technology, even if that means it’s buggy. They like working with teeny companies where they have a personal relationship with the founders, where they are showered with attention, and where their ideas are implemented before their very eyes. They don’t mind putting up with a hundred bugs so long as they get fixed fast. They want to be involved in the process.

Tom is an Early Adopter. At Smart Bear I must have had ten or twenty of these guys before our product was stable enough and feature-rich enough to start getting attention from the big boys.

The best part is, this is exactly the moment in your company’s life when you need Early Adopters to help you build the right product! You don’t need people who download, get discouraged, and then never call you back. You need a chatty Cathy who wants to dive in and help out.

So now back to your website, your blog, your Twitters — your public corporate persona generally. What do you put up on your website that screams out to those potential Early Adopter Cheerleaders that you are exactly what they’re looking for: A cool new company with a fresh product and fresh attitude; a product that might be rough around the edges but is ripe for feedback and collaboration; a company that may be small today but is thinking big.

Well here’s how not to it: Say “a leading provider of” and blather on about how you “Provide the ability to quickly and easily do XYZ so you can go back to accomplishing high-value tasks.”

Puh-leeze. Can you be more uninspiring?

Balsamiq Studios is doing it right. Read their company page. It’s says “Hello.”  It says “Yes, a couple of guys in a studio.” They don’t skirt the issues of being a small company:

I know, it sounds iffy: how can such a small team create, test, maintain, market, sell, and support a software company?

Well, that remains to be seen.

Balsamiq made $800,000 in their first year of operations, so don’t tell me “big companies” need to hear garbage PR/marketing language. Balsamiq got 100 product reviews during their first six weeks of operation, so don’t tell me “a couple of guys in a studio” isn’t a good public persona.

You want that kind of success? Stop acting like a faceless, humorless, generic, robotic company!

Put yourself in the shoes of that Early Adopter. Does she want to see useless garbage phrases or does she want to hear about how you totally understand her pain? Should you come off as a big, established, safe company or as a cool, passionate, small team who wants to make a difference? Should you hide behind “Contact Us” forms or display your phone number and Twitter account on your home page? Should you promote features and benefits you don’t really have implemented yet or should you promote your forums, blog, and weekly all-customer virtual meeting where everyone chimes in with feedback?

Be human. Stop hiding. Be yourself.

What do you think about how small companies should present themselves to their customers? Is it appropriate to be informal or is formality needed? Leave a comment!

From A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Everyone says “be remarkable” is the best marketing advice.

It’s easy to say, but how exactly do you go about doing it?

Although not planned this way, this was the main theme when I was interviewed by Justin Vincent and Jason Roberts over at the techZING! postcast.

Click here to listen.

Yeah 90 minutes is a long time, but we covered a lot of ground, including some topics I haven’t written about yet, like how writing a paperback book — and giving it away for free — transformed marketing and sales at Smart Bear.

P.S. Some of you had asked for more audio content; is this satisfying your craving? Leave a comment and let me know if you’d like to see more of this.

I recently had an email exchange with an individual who was recruiting engineers, and someone with PR experience, to get a new startup off the ground. I inquired about the need for broader marketing skills. The response:

“Part of the problem is until you have a really firm idea of what you’re building it’s really hard to figure out how to market it. For example if you start out with the idea of selling a product focused on say insurance there would be two possible markets for it, the customer and the insurance company. The marketing for selling to a company is totally different than the marketing that you would take to sell to a consumer.”

I guess figuring out the product then figuring out how to sell it is more of an engineering mindset rather than a pure marketing mindset.”

The notion – practiced by many tech startups — that we need to choose between either a so-called “engineering” or “marketing” mindset seems to me misguided.  Maybe this is because, as an electrical engineer who has spent the past 18 years creating and marketing new technology-based ventures, I have lived in both worlds. But how can you hope to create a real business without, from the beginning, taking seriously the needs of the market and how you will attract paying customers? At the same time, how can you hope to create a product that relies on technology as its underlying foundation without, from the beginning, taking seriously the capabilities, limitations and costs of building it? In any case, my experience is that leveraging the expertise of both engineers and marketers in a collaborative and iterative process — rather than a siloed and sequential process where engineering precedes marketing or vice-versa – results in a better product getting to market more quickly.

The risks of pursing an “engineering” mindset are well understood, the most common being the creation of a product that doesn’t meet the needs of a specific customer segment significantly better than existing alternatives. On the other hand, pursuing a “marketing” mindset can lead to equally bad outcomes, such as defining feature requirements that cannot be built with current technology or resources, or overlooking opportunities where technology can enable breakthrough innovations that are valuable to customers.

When Mark Britton and I started Avvo – a lawyer search website — we took mostly a collaborative, iterative approach. Rather than jumping immediately into product definition, we started with basic market research to help us to deeply understand the customer problem, and then quickly transitioned into brainstorming product features and assessing technical feasibility.

Our market research was relatively quick and inexpensive. We conducted interviews with upwards of 20 lawyers in Mark’s network. Importantly, our conversations didn’t focus on getting reaction to a specific product concept. Rather, we asked general, open ended questions and continually probed to understand the reasons behind the answers. We did the same on the consumer side, asking friends, family, and acquaintances to share their experiences choosing a lawyer.  We scoured the Internet for market research, and found a treasure trove of free information from the American Bar Association, the Yellow Pages Association, and our competitors’ web sites. We studied products targeting the legal market, as well as products in other verticals like health care.  Finally, we sifted through all the interviews, data, and competitive analyses and boiled them down to a few core insights that reflected our understanding of the opportunity.

These core insights formed the basis around which we brainstormed product features.  As we generated ideas we wanted to quickly understand the technical implications, which then enabled us to discard or refine our original ideas and generate new ones (while we recruited a VP Engineering we relied on former colleagues to participate in brainstorming and provide technical guidance).  The process was highly iterative: new learnings about the market informed product ideas; new product ideas led to a better understanding of available technologies; and this understanding of technologies led to more, better and achievable product ideas.

We continued this process until we had created a product blueprint that would meet market needs and be technically viable. By the end of the process we were confident that if we executed well we had a good chance to have a real impact in the marketplace.

This cross-functional, iterative process isn’t perfect nor is it easy.  There is often an urge to push off market and technical research and jump immediately to product definition. Perhaps most difficult are the organizational and team issues that have to be managed. However, in my experience, it is more likely to lead to a successful outcome than starting a company with a purely “engineering” or “marketing” mindset.

What is your company’s mindset?

Paul Bloom has conceived, launched and managed dozens of new software and online products for consumers and businesses. His most recent entrepreneurial venture was as co-founder of Avvo.com, a lawyer search web site. Paul is currently consulting with technology companies to help them identify and exploit new opportunities for growth.

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