Category: Marketing

The core motivation underlying the whole concept of marketing is to build trust in an entity by a targeted community with the use of this ancient technology called words.

The story that is accompanied with the release and roll out of a solution/feature/product to a community needs to be coherent and consistent to the context members in the community is familiar with. A well crafted story will be easily processed and digested in the limbic brain of the community member, thus truggering off the desired set of hormones/emotions.

Lagging awareness of the underlying context, a mis-crafted message will cause cognitive dissonance in the prefrontal coretex of the community member resulting in a mild level of adrenaline release in the reptilian brain. This effect will serve to erode instead of build trust. It is important to spend time understanding the context/worldview a community holds to identify the “problem” you want to solve within that same community before crafting up the story to communicate how the solution will solve that specific problem the community is facing.

Thus the importance of doing ethnographic research as well as always maintaining a clear understanding that the purpose of any organization (for-profit/non-profit) lies not within its four walls but within the community it intends to serve. It also highlights the importance the need to be awary of employing a one-size fits all marketing story without thorough research into variance across all communities being served.

External references

• The Essential Drucker, Peter F Drucker
• Permission marketing, Seth Godin
• Purple Cow, Seth Godin
• Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

• Your startup probably won’t fail because you ran out of money. It’s premature scaling that actually kills you
• content loops when done properly are very scalable
• Growing Market places
  • GrubHub: Try growing it in one city
    • create unique pages based on
      • zipcode
      • neighborhood
      • colleges
      • cuisine combinations
  • Find a replicable way to grow
  • Try it in another city
• One half of SEO is about being relevant. The other half of SEO is about being an authority
  • on GrubHub
    • restaurant owners gave their menu data
    • visitors gave their reviews
• Figuring out which unique content to create
  • Pintrest
    • Look for what people were searching for on Pintrest
    • Went to Google Keywords planner to check corresponding search traffic
    • Check how good is the content we are servicing on Pintrest
    • This process ensures quality since users have already indicated which content was cool!

External references

• Casey Winters writeup
• Casey Winters writeup 2

SMB’s have high churn, therefore you can’t build a big SaaS business in that market.  Right?  No…

Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell (formerly Price Intelligently) (a must follow btw) recently published some great benchmark data on churn (http://bit.ly/2vS877E).

The data showed higher churn correlated with lower ARPU customers (likely smb’s).  A common conclusion from this is you have to shift up market to build a big business.  This is wrong.

Churn, while critical, is a one dimensional view on a business.  To fully understand the business you need at least a 3-D view (acquisition, monetization).

So what do you need to build a big business at the small end of the market?

1.  Mission Critical Value Prop – Think Gusto and payroll.  An easy way to pay employees is not a nice to have, it is mission critical.

2. Low Cost, High Scale Growth Loop – Some form of a low cost, high scale growth loop like virality to make up for the SMB’s that do inevitably churn.

Combine the two and you get an amazing business like Dropbox, Slack, or SurveyMonkey.

If you don’t have these two things, that is where you need to shift up market to where your value prop does become mission critical (think analytics) and/or you can support a higher cost growth loop.

References

• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6433046247216680960

Economy and startup structures

• In an economy with limited size, startups are forced to enter into multiple small niches before becoming sustainable
• In a sizeable economy, startups can focus on scaling within one single niche to achieve sustainability before branching
• Given much overhead is incurred during the branching process, startups operating in the latter economy can achieve scale at a much faster rate.
• To the extent a company can benefit the coffers of the ruling government of a territory, it experience lubrication on the legal side of its operations