Marketing Insight Archives - Page 10 of 15

Community overload

Posted on June 3, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Today I had a discussion about an entrepreneur who runs a well know business in Australia. He commented about building a community, then working out how to extract revenue later.

Seems everyone is trying to build on line communities these days. How many auto generated emails are you getting? My inbox is full of them. Sure we know it works, we know it’s crucial, we know its all about the community. Interestingly when we say community we don’t really mean it. We mean bunch of people who we can do direct selling to. But here’s a thought:

There are only so many communities we can all belong to.

People are suffering from ‘Community Overload’.

The law of diminishing returns is not excluded from community participation. We only have 24 hours a day – something the internet hasn’t been able to revolutionize just yet. And just maybe some of our people / customers / community don’t care as much about what we do as we’d like to think.

It just might be time to flip our thinking a little here. Maybe we can just sell something instead. Maybe create a great product or service which people value – and just leave them alone. The ultimate community which matters is family and friends, and the best way we can serve that group is by not stealing time from it.

10 steps to web start up

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

It’s never been cheaper to start a business in the history of man. Especially on line. Startup guru Guy Kawasaki proved it with his $12,000 example for www.trumours.com – But startup blog says you can do it for pretty close to zero. In the spirit of sharing here’s the startup blog list of the 10 things you need to get started, and resources to help perform these necessary tasks.

Idea generating – Ideas these days are free and omnipresent. Steal ideas from www.springwise.com or www.idea-a-day.com – Just take one that suits you and do it. Maybe bring their idea to your geography, or just copy something already successful and do it. There is no currency in ideas. They are free. Take them. Any successful entrepreneur will tell you that is the easiest part of any venture. And they are right.
Name Generating – Actually your business name has nothing to do with success. There’s only two things to consider. Firstly that it’s available (.com?) and secondly that people can say it. Check out www.nameboy.com to help you generate some.
Idea testing – I loved the idea from Timothy Ferriss who tested the idea for the best book name (4 hour work week won it) by using Google Adwords for the various options and seeing which one got the most clicks with certain key words. Inspired stuff. Steal his idea and use adwords to test your business proposition before investing heavily.
Project Managment – Keep your project stuff all in one digital location. The crew over at 37 Signals provide some awesome tools for free in doing so. We’ve used it extensively for rentoid.com
Communication – Get skype set up for all your international dealings phone calls and chats required in managing your project and team. I work with with people all over the world on rentoid and have never paid for a phone call yet. You can even get it on your iphone to make free calls from – Giddy up.
Design – Don’t get stooged paying a zillion dollars for an agency to design your stuff. Leave the agency work for big companies with big budgets, you’re a bootstrapper and need to get it done cheap. But lucky for us these days cheap doesn’t have to mean crap. Check out 99 designs to get your site designed. If you need digital icons or related visuals check out istock photo for great up to date design. For pictures use Flickr creative commons.
CSS (Cascading Style Cheets) – Check out slice and dice it to get your shiny new designs ready for coding.
Coding / Programming – Yep, that tricky stuff which makes it all work under the website. Easy, go straight to Elance or ODesk to find coders for HTML, PHP, Rails, AJAX – anything. They’re all there waiting for your brief. (this should be the only biggish expense for your web startup – which means a few hundred dollars with a currency advantage)
Payment gateway – Use paypal – free set up and the cheapest, most trusted way to accept credit cards and multiple payment forms on the internet.
Promotion tools – OK this is the stuff you’re all familiar with and using daily. So turn these fun parks into business tools by using them properly. But just choose a couple of them and use them well. My favourites are youtube, twitter, blogging (recommend wordpress).

So there you have it – web start up in 10 easy steps. Feel free to add any other cool tools and ideas in the comments.

What are you waiting for? Get started.

Steve.

Threadless – quotes from Ross Zietz

Posted on May 30, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

On Monday night I went to the Threadless in Conversation shindig in Melbourne.

In truth I expected a bit more on the business side, and little less on the design fan boy love.

In the spirit of creating value I have written below some quotes I took from Ross which are in blue, and my thoughts are underneath which are in black.

‘We’d rather just have a conversation’

– Still largely one way. We listen, but to those who deserve to be heard.

‘Started in 2000’

– Another example of overnight success taking nearly 10 years.

‘We saw the idea for threadless and said what if we just did it?’

– Again ideas are free, ideas are everywhere, doing creates winning.

‘I saw a tiny little ad for it in a magazine & just submitted a design & got hooked’

– Action….

‘My interview was in an Irish pub on St Patrick’s day drinking green beer’

– Pretty cool, why do people sit in stupid rooms to conduct interviews, maybe alcohol should be at all job interviews?

‘My title (Art Director) doesn’t really represent what I do. I do all kinds of different stuff’

– Job titles are an outdated idea from the Industrial Era.

‘ Our prints are not selling well…’

– Even successful businesses have flops.

‘Interacting with the community is the first part of my job’

– They all say that. But I wouldn’t know as I prefer Neighborhoodies.

‘My eduction didn’t prepare me for it. It was on the job I learned.’

– Education is just a ticket to the ball game.

‘People want to win, so they tell their friends’

– Viral stuff is about them, it’s never about us.

‘We’re going back to American Apparel. Custom is too hard’

– They create the Illusion of customisation.

‘We’re good friends with the guys at Twitter’

– Collaboration and relationships win in business. Who you know matters.

‘They opened a store because it was a cool idea and people asked’

– Sounds like a diworsification to me.

‘Whenever we have a sale volume goes up like a 100%’

– Even cool brands have price sensitive customers.

‘We email voters to remind them when a shirt they voted on is printed’

– Sounds like a little like spam, er sorry, bacn, but it must work.

‘The oldest person in our company is like 35’

– Is culture age dependent? I’m really curious. Comment if you have the answer.

‘We had a CFO who was like 50 or something and he just didn’t fit in’

– hmm, Did you let him?

‘Our team at threadless has 32 people’

– Sounds like a reasonably tight organisation. We don’t need huge numbers of people to get stuff done.

What to change

Posted on May 18, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

There is no limit to the available resources available to entrepreneurs these days. Everyone is an ‘expert’ on what ‘you’ should be doing with your business. This blog included.

So with all the recommendations of what makes sense, it really comes down to one thing: What to change.

What should we change to make our startup more successful, and the answer is this:

Only change things which aren’t working.

butterfly

Regardless of who the advice comes from – even if it is advice from the uber successful. Their method might not work in your industry, with your team, or maybe, they got lucky. If you’ve worked out a method that works, stick with it.

Only take advice, where advice or change is needed.

Irony

Posted on May 18, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I’ve been thinking late that many of our so called labour saving inventions are simply a bad idea. Including but not limited to escalators, revolving doors, auto opening doors and electric hedge trimmers. These tiny ‘exercise saving’ devices have become so pervasive that we had to invent other little machines which are ‘labour creating’ – like gym memberships, treadmills and other contraptions we’d find in a gym….

Net result = obesity crisis

Here’s an idea: remove all the unneeded labour saving devices, (exclude those needed for disabled access) reduce energy requirements, remove the need for gyms and improve the health of the populous.

Startup crew out there – create something which helps society.

Value & people

Posted on May 17, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

We often define value in monetary terms. I try not to. Because value is quite simply not defined as such in it’s primary meaning.

The dictionary defines value as the following: relative worth, merit, or importance.

That said, we ought define the value of what we do and create to how important it is for us and the people around us. If we do this, the money will find us.

Speaking of people….

Here’s a list of things people are not:

Targets
Numbers
Revenue opportunities
Resources
Demographics
(Insert marketing jargon here)

Only when we treat whoever we are dealing with in buisness like people, will we get the positive response we are hoping for.

Know what to do

Posted on May 10, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I was thinking about my business rentoid.com and why I believe we, the rentoid team can succeed making this business something incredibly valuable for all our people. (I’ll do my next blog entry on those two important words, valuable & people).

These are the 4 reasons:

Our concept has been validated in market.
We know what to do.
We know how to do it.
We are are actually doing it – right now.

If you have these 4 factors working in your favour, then success is inevitable. Of course all of these elements need some explaining.

1. Our concept has been validated in market.

Firstly let’s look at the last two words in this sentence – in market. This means we have launched, we are live, we have customers, and revenue. We have gone beyond the idea (the easy part), and launched something which makes the original business launch plan a historical & irrelevant document. Concept validation – this has occurred when people are buying what we sell as well as any positive coverage we have. Coverage includes people and media talking about what we are doing for other people, the people who buy from us, not us. Basically – the business has potential and isn’t a stupid whim.

2. We know what to do.

We’ve been doing what we do, selling what we sell long enough to know the crappy parts of our business. We know what we must improve to make our semi-broken, yet still alive startup get better. We’ve been around long enough to have feedback from the market which gives us a good indication of how to improve our ‘thing’. Until this point innovation, location, good people and lots of saying sorry has kept us alive. But time has nearly run out, and we’ve learned what must be done to grow and eventually thrive.

3. We know how to do it.

Not only do we understand the above conceptually, but we actually know how to make this stuff happen. We’ve gone beyond ideas for improvement like – make the website more usable, reduce the price of the widget, create national brand awareness or increase distribution, and actually have an executable plan in place. A plan which isn’t a pipe dream, but an achievable reality. A reality in which we have the team, the skills, the financial resources and the time needed to bring our improved offer to market.

4. We are actually doing it – right now.

The plans have been put down as discussed in parts 2 and 3. In fact we won’t even look at them again. They are now ‘historical documents’. Instead we are fully engaged in implementing what we have agreed is the correct strategy. They are live projects the team is actively engaged in on a daily basis which will fundamentally change the marketing mix of our business. The projects have budgets and deadlines and we will not rest until they have been completed. Only then will we go back to part 2, 3 and 4 again.

When we do this – we are on the path to success.

(Which by the way we should define as follows: Success = the progressive realization of a worthwhile ideal. )