Posts Tagged ‘startups’

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Book Report – The Little Red Book of Selling

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

In Jeffrey Gitomer’s The Little Red Book of Selling, there are a few decently helpful themes in the books for web entrepreneurs. For the most part, it’s a motivational self-help book that’s big on obvious answers and an underlying “never say die” approach to selling. At most times of day, this is exactly what most salespeople need to hear.

In the end, it’s a great book for web entrepreneurs for two reasons:

  1. Sales is all about engaging the prospect. Similarly, in most websites, you have to engage the user to immediately engage and use your site. Most sites have some sort of registration or participation process, and you have to be creative in engaging them. There are different styles to doing so, but you have to have a strategy from that start and/or splash page to engage the user as a returning customer of your site. The point is that you cannot hope that some bit of “technological sweetness” will push users towards your site alone.
  2. Learn to be creative. Read about it. There are several lists on Amazon that can point you in the right direction. My first book on creativity and product development was IDEO’s The Art of Innovation. If you can understand how the human creates novel ideas, then you’ll be more prone to create it. In sales, it’s being creative in asking insightful questions to create opportunities.

In any case, the Little Red Book of Selling is a great first book to read to get some exposure on how to sell yourself, your site, and your services.

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Book Report – Book Yourself Solid

Monday, October 20, 2008

Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port is a book about becoming a independent contractor. The book lays out strategies for developing business and consulting gigs. From the beginning, the book is more about marketing and selling ones services. It’s a book that you might need to do one or 2 consulting gigs to boostrap your business. not the ideal solution ever but you never know so it’s good to have some knowledge on the field.

The high points of this book include:

Imagine your ideal user/client You have to imagine and characterize your ideal client, much the same way that we have to imagine ShareMeme’s ideal user. When you stray away from seeking out your ideal client, you have a tendency to stress yourself out and not get the most of your independent contracting or service for your client.

Don’t sell everything on the first try. The typical sales cycle should move gradually up from free, less priced services to higher priced services. At some point, the website should give away something for free even without registering. Lower the barrier to entry even more to your website.

Network. The book recommends that when you get someone’s information, that you use it to keep in touch. Even if you never talk to that person again, it’s helpful to have their information. Later on, they can be added to a newsletter or something.

Practice pitching. The basic framework proposed by Port is: 1) explain the target market, 2) explain their primary problem, 3) explain what you do, 4) explain a dramatic result from a previous client, and 5) explain the benefits. This pitch can be pared down to shorter versions for different discussions.

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Book Report – Buzzmarketing

Monday, October 13, 2008

When Luc was trying his hand at his first startup, an affiliate office of Ready 2 Play., he and his partners read Buzzmarketing by Mark Hughes. They eventually came up with an idea to stack thousands of CD’s on top of each other near the Washington Monument on the National Mall. That never happened, but the book is still worth reading for generating marketing ideas.

The key takeaways are:

Marketing is not buzzmarketing. In a traditional marketing paradigm, marketing is about news releases and getting blogs to write about the latest achievement of your company. That’s bland, and consumers are great at filtering the noise. The goal of buzzmarketing is compelling the consumers and the media to have a conversation about your product. Once they have the conversation, then the product sells itself. But buzzmarketing is more than a means to sell your product. It should be an end in itself.

Know the six buttons of buzz. These pressure points for buzz are: the taboo, the unusual, the outrageous, the hilarious, the remarkable, the secrets. If you take these buttons to heart, you should think in these terms to create buzz for your company.

Create a compelling story. If you leverage the six buttons of buzz and create a story, then you’re more likely to grab the media attention that you so desire. Hughes offers his six templates for stories, that the media gravitates to: the David-and-Goliath story, the unusual or outrageous story, the controversy story, the celebrity story, and the “what’s already hot in the media” story.

Like some have already said, the story about two college kids creating a webs site is kinda done and old. We’ve all heard it, and we need something new. You have to work on the story as much as you have to work on your pitch or on our tagline for your site/service/product.

Advertise in an unflitered media stream. You have to take risks, when you’re a young, hungry enterpreneur. Of course, you can start a Google AdWords campaign to spread the word on your product. You can go through print and television advertising, but these are tried and true methods. And, like Hughes drums into your head throughout the book, consumers are great at filtering commercials through those media. Find other avenues to advertise, like renaming a city. Half.com renamed a city in Oregon to increase the buzz around their product, and you can’t pay for that type of publicity.

Keep swingin’. Inevitably, as we plan to stay creative and market in creative ways, we’re bound to fail repeatedly in attempting to generate buzz. That’s unfortunate, but it’s true. The only way to be successful is to keep trying… at developing the right product and creating the right buzz.

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Book Report: Purple Cow

Thursday, October 2, 2008

This is the third part of our Book Report series.

In Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, he talks about the need to create a Purple Cow – a remarkable product. The product has to be so remarkable that it markets itself. Though you can stop reading there, and know what the complete story behind the book, it’s worth driving the point home for new ideas on the Net.

If you’re not creating something that completely leaves everything behind in the dust, then you’re not doing it right. In the era of mass market advertising, your potential target market is already so good at avoiding the noise. If you create a marginally better product, there’s no chance of being able to create enough momentum to take on the mass-marketed product in your industry. No startup is creating an alternative to Gmail, because they know it can’t compete with the Google brand on an enormously successful product.

That’s only the beginning, because you can’t market to the masses in any case – remarkable product or not. The masses, in the graph below, are the early and late majority.

Consumer Product Adoption Curve

Any new product on the Net should appeal to the early adopters. They’ll naturally cling to a new, remarkable product. If you don’t know who your early adopters are, find them aggressively. Find a group that has a passion around a product that you intend to create. It almost goes without saying that too many products are not being remarkable, they’re just being incrementally better. It’ll be hard for them to survive when competing with the big marketing budgets of their competitors. That’s Seth Godin’s message.

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Book Report: E-Myth Revisited

Monday, September 29, 2008

Luc and I read a lot at ShareMeme, and we really tuned our reading lists to books about entrepreneurship. We already placed some emphasis on book reports before with Geoff Livingston’s Now is Gone. In this series, we really want to nail down the quick hit takeaways from books that might be applicable to web entrepreneurs.

One of the first books that we wanted to highlight was E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. We took away the following lessons from the book:

Document. Documenting everything is an important task and goal. This should include code, sales, marketing, finances, etc. The closer a small startup moves towards that paradigm, it eventually means that we’re more marketable for selling and hiring others to come on board later on. There’s written proof the past practices, successes, failures, and duties. There’s history! The same applies to accounting practices too.

Organize. An organizational chart with responsibilities even between two people is really important. It sets clear guidelines for who does what especially with job descriptions or job contracts, as written in the book. For two people, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but we feel it reduces conflict on decision-making and duties. over time, as new people are brought in, they’ll be presented with a clear division of duties and won’t be confused as to how things work in some mysterious ways in small businesses.

Understand. Marketing is understanding the customer and why they buy. For us, the customer buys what’s easiest and quickest to use. The customer also considers how credible the site is, so that his/her friends consider it credible. An easy way to gain name-recognition is to make the experience quick and easy.

The simple, quick message of the book is to become the technician, manager, and entrepreneur. Being successful in a small business requires equal parts expertise, management ability, and vision.

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Why Start ShareMeme Now?

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Paul Graham wrote a prophetic essay in May 2005 that should be revisited by any 22 year old out there. It’s called Hiring is Obsolete. In the essay, he had this gem for all of us twentysomethings:
Your early twenties are exactly the time to take insane career risks.

The reason risk is always proportionate to reward is that market forces make it so. People will pay extra for stability. So if you choose stability– by buying bonds, or by going to work for a big company– it’s going to cost you.

Riskier career moves pay better on average, because there is less demand for them. Extreme choices like starting a startup are so frightening that most people won’t even try. So you don’t end up having as much competition as you might expect, considering the prizes at stake.

The math is brutal. While perhaps 9 out of 10 startups fail, the one that succeeds will pay the founders more than 10 times what they would have made in an ordinary job. [3] That’s the sense in which startups pay better “on average.”

Remember that. If you start a startup, you’ll probably fail. Most startups fail. It’s the nature of the business. But it’s not necessarily a mistake to try something that has a 90% chance of failing, if you can afford the risk. Failing at 40, when you have a family to support, could be serious. But if you fail at 22, so what? If you try to start a startup right out of college and it tanks, you’ll end up at 23 broke and a lot smarter. Which, if you think about it, is roughly what you hope to get from a graduate program.

If you really believe in yourself, and you have minimal financial commitments, now is the time. Of course, Luc and I are a little older, but we have some advantages in turn. We have graduate degrees which grant us a little more credibility and a few more skills. If we fail… well we won’t think about that right now.

In any case, Paul Graham’s logic made sense to us. So we’re here!

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How it all started – A Retreat Weekend!

Monday, August 25, 2008

Before this summer, Luc and I knew each other from our first year at the University of Virginia back in 2000. As we finished up our respective MS programs at UVA and Georgia Tech, we we looking for roommates in Northern Virginia. Eventually, we moved in together for about a year.

In the next year, I decided to go back to UVA to pursue a PhD in systems engineering, and Luc continued to work for one of the big telco companies. During one lunch during the early summer of 2007, we began to think that we should take a stab at creating a website. We saw how all these new websites were grabbing our attention, and we decided that we’re qualified enough.

Later that summer, we decided to go off to Annapolis for a weekend. There would be few distractions, and we would just come together to brainstorm ideas. We had some laptops and a couple coffee shops and the whole weekend. You can see a screenshot of our Writeboard document below. It’s nothing too fancy or innovative.

ShareMeme - WriteBoard ScreenShot

The sad thing is that we found a website that was doing something very similar to each idea on our list. Eventually, we took these 10-odd ideas narrowed down to 3. Then, we had a long discussion about those 3 ideas. We decided on one.

By that time until now, Luc has become quite the guy to talk to about Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Ramaze, and Java on Ubuntu. Hence, we started programming in Ruby on Rails.

At first, this was a weekend thing, but we both knew that this summer would be crucial. As a part-time deal, we could both put in the effort into refining the idea, buildings the prototype, and seek funding. Lucky for us, now, we have all three!

In later posts, we’ll start talking about particulars of taking our time to build ShareMeme, and hopefully our example will be a lesson for what to do and not do for others.

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