Posted on December 27th, 2011 by John
We’re excited to now offer standard packages for small businesses wanting help with SEO and SEM. Writing SEO/SEM proposals for startups, non-profits, and other small businesses has been my least favorite task since we started Marketade. It takes time away from more productive work, and it always felt like a guess in terms of the hours and cost we quoted.
No matter how many projects we do, we don’t seem to be able to accurately predict how long a new one will take — because SEO and SEM projects are inherently unpredictable. Especially because these have been projects for budget-strapped businesses, we tended to err on the low side in our quotes, which meant we often ended up working many more hours than we got paid for.
Our new packages attempt to solve all these problems by providing a structure that’s both clear and flexible — and gets us out of the custom proposal writing business for small search projects. We …
- offer a discounted hourly rate of $150
- use a not-to-exceed structure where clients pay only for hours we work
- don’t provide custom quotes, instead leaving it up to clients to set a max budget
- provide minimum, maximum, and average hours/costs to give clients an idea of what to expect
We realize clients would prefer to know, ahead of time, exactly how much an SEO/SEM project will cost. But given that we can’t predict how long these projects will take, we feel strongly that the approach we’ve come up with is the best one.
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Posted on November 30th, 2011 by Karan
John and I recently attended a Lean Startup Machine weekend bootcamp in DC. This was an opportunity to learn and apply Lean Startup principles to a real-world startup idea in a highly focused setting. There were about 60 attendees and over 15 mentors and speakers – including lean movement founder Eric Ries – so we received constant coaching and inspiration throughout the weekend.
Idea #1: Online Resume Builder
We came in to the weekend with an idea for a web app that would help techies write high-quality resumes. On Friday night, with the help of our newfound teammates Mark and Ryan, we identified what we thought was a promising target market and business model: sell the app to recruiters as a way to improve the quality of their candidates’ resumes and therefore help those candidates get interviewed or hired.
Before Lean Startup, we would have spent 6 months planning and building the tool, and then tried desperately to get anyone to use it. This is the typical “build it and they will come” approach to startups.
As a developer, it’s very daunting to commit to spending several months slaving away on a loosely defined product that may or may not work. Somewhere in the back of your mind you are aware that even if you build it right, there are no guarantees that anyone will want to use it.
By applying Lean Startup principles, we learned to first identify and validate the assumptions in our plan before building anything. We spent much of Saturday contacting recruiters and learned that our core assumption – that poorly written resumes pose a major hurdle in the placement of candidates – was false. Most recruiters told us that they focus more on building strong relationships with employers and job seekers, and through the strength of these relationships they are able to effectively place their job candidates.
It was a disappointing discovery, but one that we reached after only a day’s work, and not after several months of working hard on a product that was trying to solve a non-existent problem. We could then apply another aspect of lean thinking – qualitative observations – to pivot our strategy towards a better problem/solution.
Idea #2: eHarmony for the Job Market
Through our discussions with recruiters and hiring managers, we noticed a theme that employers care as much about a candidate’s personality and how well they might fit into the company culture as their hard skills. We also heard them say that it is difficult to quickly identify candidates that would be a good fit based on a resume alone. Phone interviews with job candidates are the typical technique to solving this problem but they are lengthy and inefficient. We now had a validated problem: employers do not have a quick way to tell which candidates will be a good fit for a job in terms of their personality.
We spent Saturday night brainstorming and came up with an exciting potential solution: a site that acted like an eHarmony for the job market, sorting candidates not only by their hard skills but also by their personality match with employers.
Minutes after coming up with our idea, we spoke with a co-founder of 2 major job board websites. One of his companies had tried to create – in his words – an “eHarmony for the job market.” Despite having plenty of resources behind it, it failed – largely because job seekers weren’t willing to spend time filling out personality profiles the way date seekers are. That job seekers would be willing to do this, we realized later, was a key assumption we’d taken for granted. And it was wrong. This quick invalidation of our solution was another disappointment, but we went to sleep Saturday night knowing that (for a second time now) we’d avoided investing in an unviable idea.
Idea #3: 5-Minute Interview
On Sunday we returned to what we learned through our interviews the day before, and picked up on two more useful themes, or problems. Hiring managers had told us that 1) they are overwhelmed by resumes and desperate for ways to “cut through the noise,” and 2) they could often tell within 5 minutes of a phone interview if the candidate was a promising match.
This led us to our next solution: a web app where job applicants submit 5-minute audio or video responses to open-ended questions posed by employers. Employers can then share, review, and rate those responses to quickly vet candidates – prior to spending time scheduling and conducting phone interviews.
In discussions with the mentors, we identified what we thought was a good market for this product: tech startups that recently received funding. With only a couple hours left to start validating this solution, we did two things:
1. We created a minimum viable product or MVP: a simple landing page (see below) that described the product and included a 1-minute demo video, along with a “request private invite” form. We then searched Crunchbase to identify potential customers and searched Twitter to find founders of those companies likely to be online on Sunday. Our plan was reach out to these founders on Twitter and drive them to our landing page. But as we were running short on time, we made a new discovery …
2. We found a well-credentialed startup that had built something very close to our idea – and attracted buzz in Silicon Valley – but then had suddenly stopped to pursue something else. We tracked down one of the co-founders and asked why they abandoned the video interview product.
Their target market, he told us, was the same one we’d identified: tech startups. But they struggled to gain adoption in this market because, given the low supply and high demand for programmers, tech startups’ pain point isn’t too many resumes from job-seekers; it’s too few.
We were able to leverage months of this startup’s marketing efforts to quickly invalidate another assumption. But we also learned something equally critical: their product had gained strong initial traction among a set of companies they weren’t targeting: those hiring lots of customer service reps and sales reps. This just wasn’t a market they wanted to pursue.
As the buzzer sounded Sunday afternoon – with our heads spinning – we’d arrived at a validated problem and initial validation of a solution. Unlike at most startup bootcamps, we’d spent almost no time over the weekend on design, code, or technology. Instead we’d learned a process much more critical for new business ideas.
Applying Lean Startup at Marketade
Not only has Lean Startup changed our approach to our own product ideas, it has changed how we work with our clients. Rather than jumping straight into designing and coding a web site or app, we’re helping clients first identify and validate their assumptions – quickly and cheaply – and then change course or scrap the idea when necessary.
As Warren Buffet says, “if something’s not worth doing at all, it’s not worth doing well.”
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Posted on November 29th, 2011 by John
We’ve been drinking the Lean Startup kool-aid here at Marketade … and boy does it taste good.
Here’s my review of the book by Eric Ries. Its ideas and stories are among the most inspiring and mind-altering that I’ve read in a long time. I hope you’ll read it.
Please share your questions, reactions, and experiences below.
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Posted on July 27th, 2011 by John
I’ve been going through my “Read Again” articles folder this week and was glad I’d held on to this NY Times piece from last year on “The Rise of the Fleet-Footed Start-Up“. It discusses the efforts of Eric Ries and Steven Blank to encourage more “lean start-ups.”
Both are successful entrepreneurs; Blank also teaches at Stanford and Berkeley. A key part of their philosophy, says Blank, is that “a start-up is a temporary organization designed to discover a profitable, scalable business model.”
Here was a section of the article I circled:
The concepts apply both to designing products and to developing a market, and emphasize an early and constant focus on customers. To be sure, the methods often build on the work of others.
In product development, for example, Mr. Ries is an enthusiast of so-called agile programming methods, which emphasize rapid development, small teams and constant improvement. But, he adds: “The agile practices have to be adapted, shifting the focus somewhat from generating stuff to learning about what customers will want. Most technology start-ups fail not because the technology doesn’t work, but because they are making something that there is not a real market for.”
So the lean playbook advises quick development of a “minimum viable product,” designed with the smallest set of features that will please some group of customers. Then, the start-up should continually experiment by tweaking its offering, seeing how the market responds and changing the product accordingly. Facebook, the giant social network, grew that way, starting with simple messaging services and then adding other features.
I also liked this comment from Ries’s partner in a social networking startup, about why they raised no money early on:
“I didn’t want us to have the freedom to go for years without customer feedback.”
Worth a read. Blank also has a ton of great links to tools for startups on his site.
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Posted on July 12th, 2011 by John
Speaking of good articles in Wired … last week I really enjoyed this piece on the power of feedback loops. The concept isn’t new but he offers some fun examples of new products built around the idea of loops. I may try out the Zeo headband for sleep tracking. And given our work on SugaredSpoon, I was interested in his discussion on medication noncompliance and the opportunity for feedback loops there.
I also appreciated this conceptual overview of the key stages in a feedback loop:
A feedback loop involves four distinct stages. First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage. Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead. And finally, the fourth stage: action. There must be a clear moment when the individual can recalibrate a behavior, make a choice, and act. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.
Read the article here.
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Posted on September 23rd, 2010 by John
Last Sunday’s New York Times has an article on how “many successful entrepreneurs have qualities and quirks that, if poured into their psyches in greater ratios, would qualify as full-on mental illness.” It’s a fascinating story, told through the example of the 21-year-old founder of Scvngr and with insights from venture capitalists and academics:
The attributes that make great entrepreneurs, the experts say, are common in certain manias, though in milder forms and harnessed in ways that are hugely productive. Instead of recklessness, the entrepreneur loves risk. Instead of delusions, the entrepreneur imagines a product that sounds so compelling that it inspires people to bet their careers, or a lot of money, on something that doesn’t exist and may never sell.
So venture capitalists spend a lot of time plumbing the psyches of the people in whom they might invest. It’s not so much about separating the loonies from the slightly manic. It’s more about determining which hypomanics are too arrogant and obnoxious — traits common to the type — and which have some humanity and interpersonal skills, always helpful for recruiting talent and raising money.
Some V.C.’s have personality tests to help them weed out the former. Others emphasize their toleration of mild forms of mania, if only because starting a business is, on its face, a little nuts.
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