2011 May « Fred's Blog

Getting into the Loop

16 May 2011

Here are two different marketing approaches:

Spend buckets of money marketing your product via radio/tv/papers, and hope that the brand sticks in people’s’ heads until they actually need your product
Another approach is to get your product in front of customers at the very right moment, when they are ready to actually use your services

The second approach means you only spend money on people who are very likely to become customers that same day, at that very moment. It also means you don’t fork out lots of money before you know if customers are willing to pay for your product/service.

For a web site this normally means you show up in Google when people are searching for certain suitable keywords.

I have not come across any good terms for the second approach yet. How about “getting into the loop”. Have you got a better name for it? Please comment below.

The truth about entrepreneurs

15 May 2011

Fred Other important stuff Comments Off

Came across a very honest blog post from a guy who started a web site. He tells how much new stuff you have to learn to grow your company.

When you start a company you are suddenly supposed to know everything about recruitment, accounting, cash-flow, marketing, tax, health & safety, and so on. Truth is, most of the time you just wing it.

Read his blog post here

Report on “what’s been done”, not “what can be done”

12 May 2011

Fred Productivity Comments Off

When working with a big group of people there is sometimes a tendency to spend lots of time coming up with theories and ideas, without anything real to show for it.

Here are some words you want to avoid when assigning tasks at meetings: “Look at”, “Investigate”, and “Study”. Instead you want to give people tasks with words like “Solve”, “Fix”, and “Do”.

For example, compare these two projects:

Improve the speed of X 10%
Investigate how we can improve the speed of X

Which one would you rather work on? Number two feels a bit safer, but I guarantee that number one is way more fun.

Minimum Viable Product

9 May 2011

Fred Productivity 1 Comment

The Minimum Viable Product is a great idea when developing a new product or service. The idea is to create a real product with just the absolutely necessary features, and get it out to real customers as quickly as possible.

There are two main goals with this approach:

Avoid wasting time on features that will change
Get real feedback from real customers as quickly as possible

You can do market research until the cows come home, but there is only one way to really test the market for your product. Get it into the hands of your customers and see how they react. And more importantly, see if they will actually pay for it.

Market research is useful, but it is never the real thing. There are things people say they won’t pay for and they will, and there are things they say they will pay for and they won’t.

So, get your big marker out, scratch out 80% of your new product’s planned feature set. Then go ahead and launch your next great Minimum Viable Product.

Promote Word-of-Mouth

7 May 2011

Fred Other important stuff 1 Comment

Word of mouth is a great way to market your company. It is free, it comes from a trusted source (a friend), and it spreads really fast.

There are lots of things you can do to help word of mouth happen. Here are two ways to get started: conversation starters and prepping.

Conversation Starter

This is anything that helps people start talking about your company. Typical examples are t-shirts, stickers, pens, etc.

For DoneDeal the conversation starter is often an email someone sends to a friend with a link to a specific ad on DoneDeal. Or they might share an ad on their Facebook page. The ad might have a cool or funny photo, or it might show a cool car, cute pups, a bike with super-duper go-faster-stripes, or anything else interesting.

Emails and Facebook entries can be great conversation starters, but real-life items can work even better. For example, we often use prizes for competitions as great conversation starters (t-shirts, beer koozies, balloons, etc)

Prepping

Prepping is when you coach people to tell others about your company. You educated them with stories and anecdotes that they can bring up during conversations.

For example, customers who know how your company got started might discuss it with a friend over a beer. Any interesting facts they know about your product or company help them talk about you more often.

So, go on, tell your customers more about yourself, your life, your company, and your product.

Read more about Word-of-mouth marketing on the clever TrendWatching site.