I’m on a bit of a posting spree tonight. Just got through this presentation about Marketing for Pirates “AARRR”, also known as:
Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue
Its a pretty money presentation for you marketers out there, so go to town.
Best advice I’ve read in a while: http://venturehacks.com/articles/new-york-meetup-awesome
1. Build a minimum viable product. If your market is big enough, it doesn’t matter if you piss of 10,000 customers along the way with a lame minimum viable product. If you’re really worried about your brand, market your product under a different name.
2. Get the MVP into the hands of few people. Use Twitter updates, Facebook updates, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, standing on a corner, blogging, etc. to get your product in front of people and see if they make it to the finish line. If you can’t find 100 customers this way, it won’t do you any good to be on the front page of the New York Times.
3. Iterate your product with these customers through surveys and interviews, until they think your product is a must-have. Yes, they might not embrace your product if you show them something too early —that’s fine. Don’t fear the false negative — just build the next version and test it again.
It’s a commonly held truism that venture capitalists don’t invest in an entrepreneur that hasn’t been introduced through their network. I’m sure that everyone has that one story of the entrepreneur who emails a firm on a lark and ends up with 5 million in financing. The one I know of is that of Tony Hsieh who invested in Zappos after a message left on his voicemail. This is hardly the norm, and I’ve personally seen how hard it is to get ahold of investors.
So why is it that so many venture capitalists have links on their websites to “submit your business plan”? Does anyone actually do this? Is it to perpetuate the myth that these firms are approachable?
Here’s a better solution: use LinkedIn, or rather, this nice little mashup here. This bad boy will tell users how many people they know at your firm via their own networks. I think this could be phenomenally powerful if I were looking for financing and I got to your site and saw that by virtue of my connections, I knew 2 associates and a partner at your firm. Now I can get an intro and actually have my business plan heard, as opposed to dismissed out of hand.
I’ve noticed that there are several analysts out there are saying how “broken” the venture capital model is. There are also several VC’s calling for the contraction of the industry, smaller funds, less money chasing the same number of deals, etc. Quick question: are there any entrepreneurs complaining about the “broken” model? Any of us who wish there was less money to go after?
Just a thought 
One of the blogs I keep up with (Eric Friedman’s marketing.fm) recently wrote about the latest non-enforceable contract sensation sweeping the nation, and a crucial utility in the start-up junkies toolbox,FriendDA – the Friend Non-Disclosure Agreement. This agreement amongst friends (and soon to be confidants) is facetious, granted, but there is an underlying subtext of seriousness that every business dreamer would love to be able to impose. You need buddies to bounce your crazy ideas off of and it sucks to think your buddy would steal your idea.
Just last night my roommate and I discussed a new real estate business, ski business, pizza business, and a handful of other zany ideas. Many of them were crap but there’s the off chance that one of them turns into something…why should I worry? Enter the FriendDA…well, if only.
At my day job, we have a healthy, if not obsessive dedication towards hearing back from our customers. We also have an unusual statistic: an unusually large number of our customers respond to our email surveys. We don’t offer much in the way in incentives, often times only $25 or $50 dollars in a raffle, yet regardless, 1 in every 10 people we send a request to fills out the survey. Typical industry averages hover at less than 2% response rates
We’ve had several experts tell us beforehand that customers won’t respond to such nominal awards, some say that our users won’t even wipe their nose for the chance at $25. So what’s our secret? We make our users feel like they are a part of something before we ask for the survey.
Secrets to Community Building and Survey Administration
1) We have kept our userbase intentionally small while we perfect our product and build a community. If you offer advice, it will be considered.
2) We respond almost immediately to comments on our blog, twitter @replies or DM’s, and support requests. Support requests are enormously important to respond to, and I’ve had dozens of people tell me we provide the best customer service they have experienced (although they have probably never dealt with Zappos). We use Fogbugz to track support requests, which I highly recommend.
3) We make an effort to actually incorporate user feedback and our respondents know that their voice will be heard. People feel like they have their hand in making this startup a success.
4) We respond to our surveys takers. In our most recent survey, people were legitimately surprised to hear back from us even when we asked if we could contact them for more information!
5) We keep our surveys short. No one like’s their time wasted with 50 question marathons and if someone trusts you enough to click on your link, you better not lose their trust once they get there. We ask 5 or 10 questions max. If you need more than 10 questions, you need a focus group, not a survey.
6) Lastly, make your emails personal. We try to address everyone by their first name when we send email requests. If we don’t have the name, and it can’t be inferred from the email, then we don’t worry about it, but people like the personal touch.
As we scale the business, we hope we maintain this successful feedback rate. We might have to experiment with more focused survey’s on smaller user segments, larger rewards, etc, but we’ll tackle those problems when we get there.
Most of the startups that I see are nonsense. They lack a business model, an understanding of their competitive environment, and a compelling technology. After all, as Peter Drucker said, “business has two functions: marketing and innovation” and if a company has neither, they are dead in the water. Sometimes, however, you spot a company that’s got it, and TrialPay is just such a company.
Essentially, TrialPay is a way to monetize stingy customers. It’s an advertising network that gives consumers the choice between paying for the products they want, or getting the product by signing up for a trial offer from TrialPay’s partners. Ie. I’m considering purchasing some software for my computer, but the $50 price is a bit steep for me. However, if I sign up for a subscription with Netflix then the software is now free. Netflix gets a new customer, and I get the software (and movies from a subscription I had considered purchasing anyways).
Obviously, the business needs both partners offering these trials and businesses offering TrialPay as a payment mechanism, and it looks like they are lacking in the latter. I counted only 10 products that I could buy on their site, though I saw claims of over 400 products using TrialPlay on various blogs. I’m not sure why there’s this discrepency, but frankly, I’m sure that they will have no problems getting more businesses to offer TrialPay to their customers. If WebNotes had a consumer offering (instead of selling to professionals) I guarantee we would seriously consider it.
My buddy, Alan Perlman, recently notified me of a company called Zumbox which essentially gives everyone in the US an online email address tied to your physical mailing address. The need stems from a very real problem: sending snail mail is wasteful, expensive and inefficient. An online mechanism which can solve this problem is clearly a nice thing to have. That said, I think this service is programmed to be unnecessary.
The one function that has the potential to be great is the ability to consolidate and pay all of your bills from one spot. I’m pretty sure this has been tried before and has it’s share of problems (namely that most businesses that consistently send bills already have this system in place), but I think it’s nice. Maybe if they target midsize businesses that can’t build out these systems themselves, Zumbox could work and find it’s niche.
In the latest economic crisis, most everyone has been hurting. Surprisingly, charities held up alright for 2008, but most predict misery for 2009. People are hoarding cash, spending far less on non-necessary expenditures, including non-for-profits. Donations in the past have typically come from large corporations, grants from the government and wealthy individuals, but with banks collapsing, the government issuing a huge amount of debt, and most wealthy individuals’ net worth entering into a death plunge, these donations are freezing up.
I’ve started up a blog called Twiver dedicated to non-profit news and helping charities understand technology and new media, as well as how these new forms of media can help them interact with their donors. If you know of a non-profit that needs some exposure, send me an email at alex@twiver.org and I’ll see if I can’t do my part.
My step-by-step comments on how to launch your startup to the greater public are now available at WebNotes’ blog. Go, comment, prosper!
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