startup hustle

And this is coming from a startup marketing manager. I have worked on quite a few startup products through the years and I keep witnessing the same trend. The startups that actually solve an issue or provide a unique service, don’t really need my help. I might give the initial push, but the product itself creates the snowball effect.

I’m not suggesting you get rid of your marketing guy completely. You will need someone to schedule all the interview appointments with the media.

The hardest part is getting your product to those few outlets that will start the avalanche.

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I have been following YCombinator’s News section almost since its inception. I have seen the YC community in action; from the switch of “Startup News” to “Hacker News”, to the disappearance of nickb and his return. It is one of the best sites on the web for startup information. The members are passionate about the community they have built, the articles are often right on par and spam is kept to a minimum.

I recently noticed a shift of the material making its way to the front page. Almost a quarter of the Top 30 submissions were “Ask YC” questions (aka Ask HN and Ask PG). Instead of posting an article from the web, members ask each other startup advice. This is why YC News is a step above other article submission sites. Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz and Sphinn all have a dedicated community, but not the level of involvement and support that YC members provide.

At a time when sites are doing whatever they can to grow, Paul Graham and the YC community make an effort to keep the population small and focused. This allows the material on the site to remain at such a high level instead of bogging it down with volume. That in it self is a lesson to every founder on the site. Volume instead of quality is a common objective that startups focus on that led them down the wrong path from the beginning.

A trend I am starting to see among young internet entrepreneurs as well as more established startups is a lack of understanding how customers use the internet to research and buy. This information is more basic than understanding your target customers, it is common consumer processes.

There are many reports written on how consumers use the internet to buy products and services. Its not new information, but hardly any of us (us = startups and entrepreneurs) use that knowledge to our benefit. I recently sat in a meeting with a colleague to help weed issues in his startup marketing plan. Before the meeting, someone was mentioning the new purchases they had made on the internet. The amount of research this individual conducted was what you would expect from a twenty-something that is internet savvy. This startup didn’t build a product under the assumption that their customers would do the same product research. They did not do it on purpose, they just didn’t put themselves in the consumers shoes.

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I have been tracking Google’s indexing for a few sites I work on (this is how I track Google’s indexing). The index for one site has dropped hard while the other sites saw no large movements. While this is a weak conclusion, I assumed a change on the site had caused the shift, not a change on Google’s side.

As I was researching possible causes for the shift downward, I remembered that our server (we have complete control of our server, it is not hosted by an external company) had issues around the same time. The site traffic and search engine crawling was working our servers hard. We started to experience server timeouts and slow server response times. Could this be the cause?

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Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends had a great post last week with marketing experts sharing one of their marketing secrets. I have quoted some of my favorites with a reason why I think the point is important below.

Toby Bloomberg, Diva Marketing – “Forget what your mama or your preacher taught you. The Golden Rule does NOT work for developing marketing strategy. Your customers do not want to be treated “as you would like to be treated.” In understanding your customers you might discover that their values, needs and expectations differ from yours. New Golden Rule For Marketers: Do Unto Your Customers As THEY Would Like To Be Treated.”

• I work with many startups and a common issue I find is as the product changes and molds in the first few years (as it does in all startups), many lose sight of their customer. Too many startups make changes because they believe they are not growing fast enough and it usually breeds a poor product and poor quality.

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Launching a new landing page is exciting. You spend weeks working and tweaking a landing page for public launch with hopes it will sell your product or service. After launch you are reviewing Google Analytics and CrazyEgg several times a day and keeping track of sales.

How do you gauge if a landing page is really working?

There are two web page analytic rates that you need to pay particular attention to, bounce rate and exit rate. The first thing we need to do is understand the difference between the two.

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After a discussion I had with some colleagues this evening, I was blown away with the lack of understanding of why websites are more popular/make more money/receive attention (buzz) than others. This discussion usual revolves around free sites and premium (paid) sites. Let me explain my understanding between free and premium sites (other than the obvious).

A free site allows you to reach a solution without paying for it. LinkedIn.com allows me to network with colleagues without paying. Even though they have services that require payment, I don’t need it to perform the main service of the site, networking. This is why I deem LinkedIn a free site. And then you have the super obvious example, Facebook.

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Scott Shane wrote a guest blog article on Guy Kawasaki’s Blog about the Top Ten Myths of Entrepreneurship. It was a great list. I’m only going to quote the myths I found most interesting. Visit the article to read all ten.

2. Venture capitalists are a good place to go for start-up money. Not unless you start a computer or biotech company. Computer hardware and software, semiconductors, communication, and biotechnology account for 81 percent of all venture capital dollars, and seventy-two percent of the companies that got VC money over the past fifteen or so years. VCs only fund about 3,000 companies per year and only about one quarter of those companies are in the seed or start-up stage. In fact, the odds that a start-up company will get VC money are about one in 4,000. That’s worse than the odds that you will die from a fall in the shower.

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I love researching new domain names. My first website was a forum for pay-per-click marketing. When I found the domain PerClickForums.com as an unregistered domain, I thought I was a genius. I sold the site and the new owners drove it into the ground (wish I still had the domain though). Later I came up with StartupHustle.com. What startup doesn’t hustle a little at the beginning?

When looking for a new domain you have to research to see if that great domain you just thought of is available. You might not buy a particular domain that moment as you are checking the availability of multiple names. Hopefully you weren’t doing any domain research at NetworkSolutions.com recently. There are rumors is evidence that Network Solutions is registering domains that individuals are checking the availability of, and selling them at a higher price. I wouldn’t even be able to describe my anger if that had happened to me.

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