blog

Don’t Call Yourself Visionary

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:36:13 +0100

Even if you truly are psychic. It is not ok.

<rant>

If I see one more Linkedin headline of “Visionary Strategist” or “Visionary Technologist” or any other similarly self-important, overhyped description am going to lose it. If only you could triple unfriend people you were not even connected to on Linkedin, or Facebook had an “unlike” (or better yet “hate this”) button.

Hint: brilliant, visionary entrepreneurs and technologists don’t describe themselves as such. Other people might, but their achievements generally speak for themselves.

It is kind of like when you see electronics or musical gear described as “Professional” -- it’s a sure sign that it isn’t.

If you are a “visionary” on Linkedin, you are probably a) a 22 year old kid without enough experience or “vision” to see how silly that sounds or b) someone who has had a series of mid-level tech jobs that never lasted more than 12 months but somehow “changed the world.”

</rant>

Searching Linkedin for the term “visionary” not only turns up thousands of results, but even a few people with the title “Chief Visionary Officer.” WTF? Wow. I’d like to see that job description, probably a lot of tactical, real world deliverables.

Probably a great gig. For a Psychic Technologist, of course.

I’ll Sell for commission only, if you Code for commission only

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:47:04 +0100

As a startup advisor and marketing consultant, I’ve often been asked if I am willing to work on commission, or to be paid based on the performance of my work.

Most of us in sales and marketing have worked with significant “at risk” compensation -- be it performance bonuses or commission -- and pride or confidence in our ability to deliver typically prevents us from saying no to the request outright.

But I have found that commission-only or heavy “at risk” compensation often does not work well in early-stage startups.

I appreciate the question from startup founders. They are supposed to be aggressive, scrappy operators of their businesses. Often marketing / sales is a new area that they are not experienced in, and even if a consultant comes recommended, they don’t know for sure how the effort will work out for their business.

But commission-only structures in early stage startups are likely to be either unfair to the sales or marketing hire, or detrimental to the startup that is hiring them. The likelihood of getting it “just right” is very low.

How could trying to reduce risk by paying heavily or 100% on commission can actually create more risk for your company?

1) No Established Processes. The biggest issue with startups exploring marketing / sales efforts is that they don’t have established processes for these efforts. So part of the job is going to be experimenting and seeing what works. Obviously an experienced consultant should have a pretty good idea of what has worked for other companies and where to start, but every product and customer base is a bit different. And a lot of the effort is going to go into developing materials and learning from customer interactions.
Just like the business overall, you want the sales person to have the freedom to experiment and “fail fast” if an approach doesn’t work. Being paid on performance doesn’t incent people to experiment, nor does it encourage them to spend time developing materials and processes that may be necessary for longer-term success, but don’t produce results immediately.

On the flip side, if I have an established business like a gym that has been in business 5+ years, paying sales representatives on commission-only may be completely reasonable. Presumably I have a training program, brochures and web content already prepared, and a pretty exact idea of what types of pitches get people to sign up and how to handle common objections. And if tens or hundreds of sales people have worked for the business over the years, I also have a good baseline to evaluate new sales people’s performance against.

2) Little Historical Data. Another significant problem is a lack of historical sales data. Most startups have information on their early users, but extrapolating this out to sales or marketing targets is difficult to do accurately. And if most of your customers have come from your friends in the industry, your incubator classmates, or a TechCrunch article about your beta launch, it will really be hard to accurately forecast sales. When developing a commission plan, you want as much historical data as possible so your forecast sales targets are as realistic as possible -- otherwise the commission will be too hard or too easy to achieve, and the person will be underpaid or overpaid relative to the impact of their work.

3) Harder to Learn. One critical goal for sales and marketing in early stage startups is learning from your customers -- what they want in the product, what they are willing to pay, and more. When people are being paid primarily or only on commission, they only want to focus on activities that generate commission (obviously). So it is harder to change course or experiment with different pitches or types of activities other than what “is working.” But there may be other efforts that would “work” better if you only had a chance to try them, and there may be changes in the product needed to find the right fit.

Good sales and marketing folks are no different than engineers -- the talented, experienced ones are always in demand, especially here in Silicon Valley. So by offering only commission, you may be self-selecting for less qualified candidates who need the job. You may get lucky, but you may end up thinking your sales efforts were a failure, when you really just attracted the wrong person. And early on, hiring the wrong person or getting bad data about a critical future area of your business (sales and marketing) could make a big impact.

For more on learning about your startup through sales, see Steve Blank’s post about making sure you hire a “VP Customer Development” instead of a “VP Sales.”

The only right answer to “How are you different from Competitor X?”

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:21:33 +0100

Whether you have an early stage startup or an established company, people need to understand your business. So as a founder you will frequently be asked “How are you different from Competitor X?” or “Why are you better than Competitor Y?”

There is only one correct answer to this question:

“Competitor X is a great company, but...”

And then explain how your company is better, ideally using a differentiator or area of specialization that Competitor X doesn’t have (or doesn’t focus on).

You should commit this phrase to memory and use it often. Everyone needs a frame of reference, to compare your business to something they are familiar with, whether they be potential customers, employees, or investors. How you respond can be more critical than you think.

Investors seem the most guilty of “pattern matching” to fit you into an area they understand (and hopefully want to put money into), or to make sure you are “the same” as a company that already was funded / successful. If you denigrate the competition, however, it may give investors the impression that a) your company is not doing well, and is jealous of the competitor or b) that you haven’t properly evaluated the competitive threats to your business, and are not taking the competition seriously.

Customers are even more important to get this right with, as a savvy buyer will ask about the competition for the same reason they ask about discounts -- just to see how you respond. If you talk badly about the competition, it a) reflects negatively on you as a salesperson and b) can create the impression that you are threatened by the competitor, so they may in fact be better than your company. Even if the competition has a terrible product or no support, I would be very careful about saying anything negative about the competitor. Find a way to allude to the competitor’s problems in a round about way, if you must, but tread lightly.

I’ll finish with a quick anecdote:

When I was running sales & marketing at GoGrid, we had a (larger) competitor (that shall remain nameless). One of their sales managers apparently used to tell prospects how bad our company was, how our support was unresponsive, our data centers unreliable, etc.

Maybe it is the power of reverse psychology, or simply the sceptical nature of smart web hosting buyers, but we got a number of calls that went something like this:

“I was not familiar with GoGrid, but this guy at Competitor X kept talking about how terrible and evil you are. He really feels threatened by you, so I wanted to see what all the fuss is about, and figured I’d get a quote from you.”

The irony was, that when we went head to head with this larger, better known competitor, we typically lost the deal almost 2/3 of the time. And they were sending prospects over to us, when we weren’t even in the running originally.

Unfortunately that sales manager either wised up or was fired, and the sweet slander that sent us business came to an end.

It is 2011, learn to BCC

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:44:23 +0100

<rant>

Yesterday I received a “thanks for applying to our competition, but you didn’t win” email from a (presumably junior) marketing person at a technology company that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty.

I didn’t notice when reading it on my iPhone, but the message was sent To: 31 different people, me being one of them. Not even CC’d, the usual rookie mistake.

The good news when you get an email like this is that you can see all the other companies who received the email. Like many of the recipients probably, I did a quick scan of the emails, and opened a few new tabs in Chrome to check out the companies of email address domain names that seemed interesting. And now with services like Rapportive, you can even see who the generic free email addresses (gmail, yahoo etc.) really belong to.

The worst part of this (aside from being embarrassed for the person who sent the email), is the short orgy of self-promotion that follows. People who I assume to be adults pretending they don’t know they are replying-to-all in order to shamelessly plug their own startups. Thankfully, this usually flames out after a half-dozen emails, or when (in this case) two particularly clueless people who know each other start catching up via email’s cc’d to 30 other people (“hey, did you ever get that thing done?”) and then presumably receive private emails telling them to STFU. So it ends.

</rant>

And the cycle of Email idiocy continues. I suppose this is something of a rite of passage for inexperienced marketing or administrative folks working online - a mistake you hopefully only make once.

For some actually useful advice on using BCC when making introductions, check out this great post from Mark Suster.

Netflix’s Qwikster: New Coke or Alternate-Universe Kodak?

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:01:04 +0100

A lot has been written about Netflix’s recent announcements, related 60% stock price plummet, and then yesterday’s sooner-than-expected reversal. Most commentators panned Netflix’s tin ear, their inability to communicate, their sheer hubris at making things more inconvenient and more expensive for their customers. What were they thinking?

I couldn’t disagree more.

Breaking Netflix into two separate companies ahead of massive, unavoidable changes in their industry was a bold, visionary move. It took some serious balls. I felt certain it would be taught in MBA programs and referenced in business books decades from now.

And now the glorious experiment, the bold vision, has been cancelled.

Imagine if Kodak had spun off it’s film and processing business in 2000 into “Filmster.” (Ok, too hip, maybe just created a separate company for their digital cameras called “Kodak Digital.”)

Imagine if Microsoft had spun off Internet Explorer in 1999 after winning the first browser wars against Netscape, creating a separate “Internetster” OS separate from Windows. (Granted, for that one you’d also have to imagine that Microsoft understands the Internet even in 2011, and that anything Microsoft could ever escape the clutches of Windows -- so maybe not).

Both of these things are hard to imagine, roughly the odds of being struck by a meteor on your way to Starbucks.

But Netflix CEO Reed Hastings seemed to get it, laying out clearly in his blog post how he didn’t want to become the next AOL for dialup or Borders for books:

For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business. Eventually these companies realize their error of not focusing enough on the new thing, and then the company fights desperately and hopelessly to recover. Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.

As a Netflix subscriber, I really wanted to see this experiment through, to see how Netflix would prove all the naysayers wrong. To be one of the first companies to sacrifice its traditional business ahead of the curve to emerge victorious.

Unfortunately, I think the brilliance of this move was screwed up, or at least overshadowed, by poor communication and bad execution in two other messages:

The price hike. Prices for most things go up, deal with it. In most businesses, if you don’t raise your prices you are in effect earning less money as time goes on from inflation. I always thought that $10 a month was too cheap for unlimited streaming and 1 DVD by mail (even though with 2 Roku boxes and an iPad at home, that DVD often sat neglected for months, saving Netflix the postage costs).

Price hikes need to be spun, and should preferably coincide with either a) new services / benefits that are included or b) well accepted price increases elsewhere in the economy that everyone knows about that you can blame (e.g., rising fuel costs, postage increases, etc.). For what seems to be such an operational powerhouse, it was surprising to see Netflix not communicate the price hike as well as some local service providers I’ve seen.
The two sites, two queues debacle. How hard would it have been to announce that if you signed up for both Netflix and Qwikster, that they would have single sign on (SSO) to let you switch between the sites? And either site’s queue would provide an integrated view of both streaming and DVD queues, like it does now? That might delay full separation for a bit, but certainly would not be hard to do from a technology standpoint.

The fact that this rather obvious customer pain point was not addressed in their communication tells me either a) Qwikster was a last minute scramble to put a bandaid on the first communication disaster and not well planned, or b) Netflix wanted to sell off Qwikster in the short term, and couldn’t combine the sites.

So the grand experiment is over, and we’ll never know if the Netflix / Qwikster split was brilliant or doomed. The poor communication and stock price tank ended it before we could see.

My vote: try again in 2012, but pick a better name than Qwikster.

How to Find a Good Domain Name for Your Startup

Sat, 01 May 2010 23:08:07 +0100

Disclaimer: I have been involved in naming a lot of companies (pretty much everything here except InReach and eWork), really enjoy it, and am addicted to collecting domain names as well. This is a very tactical guide to one method that works well for naming startups. I am not a fancy naming consultant, nor am I branding expert. You shouldn’t be considering fancy people or firms anyway, unless you are starting a company that is a spin off from some existing large enterprise or is drowning in VC money. If you have the cash, you can just go out and buy a great domain name for $20k or $50k and be done with it. For those starting up with limited funds like most of us, please read on.

I often hear startup founders say that there are “no good domain names” available anymore. I also see a lot of Internet startups with horrifically bad names – not just bad because they don’t convey anything about the business, but bad because they are impossible for anyone to remember, and have crazy spellings that even your own employees will type incorrectly into a web browser. These bad names are not going to make or break your business, but since you are starting out without a big advertising budget and have no PR yet, why begin your marketing with the disadvantage of a bad name when you don’t need to?

You see Internet companies with names like Skeetrr.com or Womuuga.com (I just made those up, and thankfully no one owns those yet), where it seems that one of the founders thought of some domain names that they would like, typed them in and saw that they were all registered, and then gave up and made up some word. There are over 85 million .com domain names registered as of this blog post, so it isn’t surprising that you have to make something up to get something that someone else doesn’t already own.

It doesn’t need to be like that. Using the techniques described in this post and some patience, you can have your pick of some great domain names for your startup for just $8 to $60.

Step 1. Devise a Temporary Business Name

Step 2. Think of Keywords that describe your business.

Step 3. Check for deals on the domain marketplaces.

Step 4. Sign up with domain backordering services.

Step 5. Register a handful of domains you like.

Step 6. Decide on one domain you love and launch.

Step 1) Devise a Temporary Business Name.

You may already have an internal name for your business or project. If not, come up with something for internal use only. This is not the same as stealth mode, ideally this is just a domain you already own or even just a code name that you will use for internal reference while searching for your ideal domain name, because sometimes it can take a few months to find the perfect domain. So hopefully you are employing this technique early in your startup planning process.

Warning: as many founders, junior marketing people, rock bands, etc. have found out the hard way, if you pick a random name and then don’t follow through with a real naming process (the rest of the steps below for the purposes of this blog post), your temporary name will become familiar and will become your permanent name. Especially once you launch publicly.

Step 2) Think of Keywords that describe your business.

Just pick 2 – 4 keywords that you think describe your business and that you might want to have as part of your company name, or you might want your company name to reference. This isn’t an Adwords or SEO exercise, so no need to come up with hundreds or thousands of keywords, just a few that you like. Some of these keywords could be partial or shortened words that would generate more results, such as using “cast” instead of “broadcast”, “net” instead of “networks”, etc.

I should pause here and admit that I have a bias toward names that reference something about the product or type of company, so keywords form the basis of this domain search technique. Your company name doesn’t need to explain what your company does (though it wouldn’t hurt), but it should be memorable and I believe it provides a marketing advantage for the name to make sense to people once they understand what your company does. Note that many names of successful Internet companies do make sense as a reference to their services once you understand what the business is (eBay, Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, etc.)

Once you have these keywords in a spreadsheet, try coming up with a list of combinations of the keywords that you like. You can try different orders of the keywords, and even create a column of secondary keywords you think are cool (net, storm, app, etc. are used pretty heavily but you can be more creative) to generate more combinations. One trick if you have a lot of variations is to add a column with “.com” filled in every cell, then add another column with your variation on the formula

=concatenate(a2,b2,c2)

to save you time and magically add the columns all together, creating a list of possible domains.

Finally for step 2, copy and paste your list of created domains into your registrar’s bulk domain search and see if you get any hits. No luck? Well, that would have been too easy. Let’s continue to step 3.

Step 3) Check for deals on the domain marketplaces.

Once you have your preferred keywords, and have checked that the obvious combinations are taken, the next step is to check the domain marketplaces to see if there are any deals on domains you like. Sedo.com is the largest marketplace, but lots of domains are sold on GoDaddy’s TDNAM and eBay as well. Domains can be had for as little as $10, but of course many people have unrealistic pricing listed on these marketplaces, or are experienced domainers who know the value of their domains and are not in a hurry to sell.

Sedo seems to have the best inventory in my opinion, as well as a large staff of account managers who follow up to make sure transactions happen smoothly, so I always start there. Here are my recommended criteria for domain name searches:

.com only
No Hyphens or Numbers
10-12 characters maximum (unless you have a good reason)
Fixed price or “buy it now (BIN)” listings only

· Try searches “begins with” or “ends with” to narrow results if you care about the keyword order, as “contains” may give you too many results

These marketplaces have some great domains available, usually starting at a few $100, though many of the better ones may cost $1000 - $2000. And the good news is that any domain listed is actively trying to be sold by someone, versus being held by a company or someone’s blog.

A note on domain negotiation: A lot of the domains on these marketplaces are listed without prices so you have to make an offer. I tend to skip these, because all the back and forth negotiation can waste a lot of your time, and I don’t like not knowing what range the sellers may want, but if there is a domain that you really love it is worth a shot. Similarly, for domains you find that a) are not for sale on the marketplaces and b) not currently in use, it may be worth sending Emails inquiring if the domain is for sale and making an offer. The downside to both of these techniques is that you often have to make a decent starting offer, say $500, or you will just end up getting ignored. So it will probably cost you more, but if it is the perfect domain name for your startup then it may be worth it.

Step 4) Sign up with domain backordering services.

Didn’t see anything you like on the marketplaces, or have a very low budget? This makes your domain name quest a longer term project, but you can still get some great domains when they expire for around $60, so don’t give up yet.

When a domain name expires, it enters a Grace Period, during which time the current owner can still renew it. This Grace Period varies a bit from Registrar to Registrar (don’t ask me why, I guess it is not regulated), but usually lasts from 30 to 45 days. Once that period is over, the Registrar (eNom, GoDaddy, Register.com or any of hundreds others you can use) will release the name to the Registry (currently Verisign monopoly for .com, .net). The name then enters a 30-day Redemption Grace period. When that is over, the name goes into Pending Delete status while the registry processes the deletion and approximately 6 days later the domain name will become available for anyone to register.

One of the secrets of the domain industry is that when domains expire, many of them don’t become available for anyone to reserve, however. The registrars have deals with backordering services such as SnapNames and NameJet, who sell off the names to people who have backordered them, and split the profits with the original registrar.

SnapNames: http://www.SnapNames.com

NameJet: http://www.NameJet.com

The way these services work, you sign up for free and tell them the domain names you want. The minimum bid for SnapNames is $59 and for NameJet is $69. Each of these services has deals to get the expired inventory of different registrars, so you should sign up for both. Even if they don’t have a deal with a Registrar to get the particular domain you want, they will still try to get anything which has been backordered when it becomes available, so it is often worthwhile because they have better automated tools than you do to grab the domain quickly. You may want to backorder the entire list you created in Step 2, or at least your favorites, just in case any of them expire.

If SnapNames or NameJet is able to acquire the domain on your behalf, you get it for the minimum bid price unless other people have also backordered the domain. In the case of multiple backorders of the same domain, it goes to an auction a few days later where the winning bidder gets it.

Important tip: One of the best features of the backorder services is the ability to create saved searches and have domains that will soon be deleted emailed to you. I highly recommend doing this, as every morning you can have a few emails in your inbox with potential domains that will soon be available, and you can backorder them. Create a few saved keyword searches using some of the same criteria as the Sedo search in Step 3, and over the course of a month or two you will have the opportunity to review hundreds of expiring domains that you can acquire cheaply. Note that both SnapNames and NameJet have some of inventory from resellers like Sedo does, so I recommend setting the searches for “Pending Delete” only.

Step 5) Register a handful of domains you like.

Don’t be afraid to register 3-5 domains you like using the steps above, since the costs are pretty low. That way you can get feedback from other team members (or contact me) at a more leisurely pace – if you see a domain you want to backorder or better yet find a domain that is available to be registered, grab it – I’ve seen some expired domains sit around for weeks or months, but lost others to someone else within a few minutes of finding it available. Plus, these extra domains could be useful later on for product names, marketing campaign landing pages, etc. You can always allow them to expire or try to resell the ones you don’t end up using on Sedo later as well.

Step 6) Decide on one domain you love and launch.

Once you’ve reviewed some of your domains with your co-founders, advisors, and others, pick a name. You can always do a survey to friends using one of the online survey sites like Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey, but beware of too many cooks in the kitchen.

I am not an attorney, but it is also a good idea to do a quick trademark check to make sure there isn’t an obvious conflict with a similar company at the US Patent & Trademark web site. A trademark attorney can do a far more complete search for you, but the free web site should at least show you if there are any obviously similar trademarks owned by an Internet or software company. That would be a deal killer for the domain in question. Keep this in mind especially if you are bidding on more pricey domains in Step 3.

That’s it! Feel free to contact me if you have questions, or leave comments below. Good luck and happy domain hunting – you too can have a great domain name and company name with a little work and the tips in this article.

--David

Links to Domain Search Tools:

· DomainTools (Great Whois site)

· Internet Archive Wayback Machine (Check what sites used to be on a domain – not 100% though)

· Sedo (my favorite domain marketplace)

· eNom (my favorite registrar – some accounts require deposit though)

· SnapNames (backorder service)

· NameJet (backorder service)

· United States Patent & Trademark Office

Manage Your Customer and Lead Data Right from the Start

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:48:53 +0100

With all of the tasks that go into starting a business, it is easy to forget about properly collecting and managing data on customers and prospects in the beginning. Life in a startup business is hectic, after all, with thousands of tasks vying for your attention - everything from critical things like building the product to hiring to mundane things like getting business cards made and buying supplies.

And since you don’t have a lot of customers and prospects in the beginning, keeping them organized often falls by the wayside – similarly to the way a lot of startups fail to establish a solid financial model because they don’t expect to have any revenue in the beginning.

What I have seen many times, and suffered through personally at least once, is that if you don't take time to establish some sound data collection and management practices up front, you may not get around to it until it becomes glaringly obvious that there is a problem. By that time, you will have lots of neglected leads and angry customers (or maybe no customers).

If you think these suggestions may not apply to your cool "viral" consumer startup that is the next Twitter meets Facebook, well, you could be right if you are really lucky, but you can still use these guidelines to organize data on partners, advisors, investors, etc. For the 99.9% of startups that will need to actively sell to prospects and customers, however, these guidelines are essential.

1.   Make sure contact forms on your web site are going into a database. It is amazing how many companies do not respond to inquiries through their web site forms, despite this being effectively the same as throwing away money you spent on your web site and marketing. If the form just sends an email to someone, it is easy to see how it might get lost (or worse yet ignored, hoarded by a sales rep who is too busy to respond but doesn’t want to share, etc.).

2.   Use a Customer Relationship Managment (CRM) system as early as possible. I recommend Salesforce.com, though there are plenty of other options. CRM systems can be expensive for an early stage startup, but they do wonders for your business in terms of centralizing and organizing data. You can make your forms enter data directly into Salesforce.com via http post, eliminating data getting lost in someone's email. Once the data is in a CRM system, it is also much easier to begin to define processes for following up with and managing the relationship with those customers or leads (hence the name CRM), and some of this can even be automated through autoresponders, workflow rules, etc.

Plus, if you can enforce everyone using a central CRM system, you can always get a complete picture of leads and customers instead of having to ask around to different sales representatives, consultants, etc. This is valuable even if everyone is in the same room, but is more important with many startups that have distributed teams or pre-office space when everyone is working at home or in coffee shops.

3.   Email addresses on web sites are ok, but know what you are getting into. Putting an email address on your contact us page goes against everything I just said in 1 and 2, but it can make for a more personalized touch. It can also be necessary for certain audiences who don’t like filling out forms, or for marketing purposes (e.g. “contact OurCEOcares@bigbusiness.com”.) Just be sure that you are prepared to deal with these emails, and have clear expectations around who will answer these emails and how they will be handled. Best practices are to enable email to case, so each email logs a case or ticket in a CRM system, though this does have associated costs and may not be possible for early stage startups. Also, expect to become a “spam detective”, as sorting the one legit email from a customer out of the 100 spam messages will take some skill. Emails posted on web sites tend to attract even more than the regular insane levels of spam.

4.   If you must use Excel or Google Spreadsheets for customer or lead data, do it with a vision for the future. We all do this sometimes, but a little structure and preparation can save time and headaches. Think about what data you might want later, and keep it clean with clearly labeled, consistent columns. That way you can easily import it into a CRM system later, without further data entry or cleanup.

Bonus “type A personality” points:

5.   Enforce copy paste instead of data entry. I don’t want to sound like a high school grammar teacher, but making sure people get into the habit of copying and pasting data from emails or web sites, instead of retyping, is critical, especially when it comes to email addresses. And typos with gmail, hotmail, etc. rarely bounce to let you know you typed it wrong, one of the other 100 million people with a similar address gets your email and wonders why you are sending them a million dollar proposal when they are still a college student and they have never heard of you. If you follow point 2, of course, you shouldn’t need to do much data entry, because most of your contacts will be pushed into a CRM system.

6.   Don’t put anything in your database that does not belong. As you grow, the notes that you put in a field where they didn’t belong (“customer is a real cheapskate”) or substitutes for information you did not know (last name = “don’t know”) will come back to bite you. Keep your database clean. Automated tools can make sure CA, Calif, and California all get rewritten to CA, but other bad data will live forever. When you are larger and have so much data that you can’t easily manually review it for accuracy, your IT department will magically enable customers to update their data in an account portal. The “cheapskate” may see those notes that were not in a private notes field and be unhappy. Your marketing department will send out beautiful, personalized email newsletters addressed to “Dear Bob Don’t Know.”

Welcome to Hectic.com!

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:46:59 +0100

After 14 years of various versions of this web site, I've decided to relaunch with new content and resources for startups. In the blog, I'll be trying to deal with some pretty tactical marketing and sales considerations for Internet startup companies.

There are lots of great resources out there for how to get VC funding, or how to find cofounders, or even how to develop products. I will be focusing on what I know and love, online marketing, with some related posts about web hosting, CRM, and other lessons learned along the way. I'll try to keep it very applied, and would love your comments and feedback.

If you have a topic you would like to see me cover, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Best,
David