To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner:
"The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people are still waiting for customers."
Let's say I've have been having kicked my ass more than I can count on some beliefs I've had, but I yet have to regret working with him.
This also works for non-startup stuff. Every new Patreon supporter, every album sale came from talking about it on Twitter or Mastodon. A few have come by way of HN.
"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.
They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though.
Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something used by many that is now paid for free will become popular on its own.
That 1GB storage comes at a cost, which is basically a marketing cost. You give something away for free, in the hope it will generate word-of-mouth marketing. That free thing you're giving away is coming out of your marketing budget.
Gmail had plenty of marketing when it started: Both the '1 GB account' and the "Search don't Sort" snippet where heavily pushed through several marketing channels at the time (paid articles, Google search homepage, among others). Not all marketing is "ad banners". For example, all those Businesswire articles are pure marketing and advertising.
I'm too young to remember Hotmail launch but GMAIL did market. Their marketing investments were
1. Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition. I'd say they ate the costs of storage as marketing investment.
2. Viral invitation format -> exclusively perception
> Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition
Gmail's free storage was two orders of magnitude better than the competition. Nearly three orders of magnitude bigger than Hotmail. They launched with a gigabyte against Hotmail's 2 MB and Yahoo's 6 MB.
We're so used to not worrying about email storage anymore that it's easy to forget just how small they used to be.
I was quite young and things seemed shinier when I was young, so take this with a grain of salt. But I remember google differently. Gmail invites were a big deal, even amongst less technical people. Adding that sense of exclusivity to something they would use to advertise to us was remarkably smart.
In marketing there’s owned media, earned media, and paid media.
Google initially focused on the first two. They promoted new products like Gmail or Chrome on their search home page, and in the press. It worked well for them because they were already a newsworthy company with a lot of web traffic.
It actually depends on if you are using ecclesiastical marketing mnemonics (soft c like in contemporary Italian marketing) or reconstructed classical marketing mnemonics (hard c).
Depends on your product. If you're radio shack, sure, always be closing. If you're selling me an essential component of my business, and I expect to have a long term relationship with you... concentrate on the relationship and trust.
I worked for a small startup that won a HUGE contract because the big guy stopped supporting them to their satisfaction. We twisted over backwards to support their needs and they liked that.
Agreed with the sentiment that there are different kinds of clients/opportunities and sales cycles. However the idea specifically in ABC is the 'close'. 'Closing' is the act of securing payment from an entity. I've seen a lot of 'sales guys' who talk about how hard they're selling. But ultimately getting the money into your bank account is the real goal. Everything else is derivative.
Loosely quoting Eli Goldratt, "Until the money is in your bank account and there is no possibility of having to refund it to the customer, you have not made the sale."
Hah, we're living that right now. Big guy got bought, raised prices and removed features. Previously happy customers start looking around, find us (and others, of course).
Over the top support and flexibility are things smallcos can offer to outcompete bigcos with more $$$ and people.
It's not. It's a reminder that all of your sales and marketing efforts are wasted if you're not actually pushing towards a sale. Calls to action, follow ups, using funnels—all of these are things that increase an individual's likelihood to close. That's "ABC".
Yes, a three-letter acronym is incapable of expressing every nuance of a complex interpersonal dance. ABC is about sales and marketing driving towards the close. It doesn't mean you turn a cold call into "Hi, my name is James, buy my product. This is what it does. Buy it. Do you want to know more? Buy it first."
It's "closing" because, from memory, they're selling junk real estate. In the US, the end of a real estate transaction is called closing, beyond which it's (mostly) irrevocable.
Hence Baldwin is effectively saying "get to the end of the transaction."
Building MVP and finding and tuning your market fit early - those Lean Startup ideas were popular here 10 years ago. The money flood of the recent years seems to allow that 'Build it and they will come' as well as just bulldozing your way into market.
Is the idea that the product (once it's caught up) will be as good or better (and/or at least reach more people) than the original? Or is he OK with people being worse off than if your company never existed and the better product got to take the lead?
Better is a 100% subjective term and there's a huge discrepancy between what engineers believe is a better product and what users/customers do. Our product was and still is technically inferior to competition but we still have an NPS of 9 and are extremely sticky, why? Because of our amazing sales, marketing and customer success teams who've built excellent relationship with the customers.
"The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people are still waiting for customers."
Let's say I've have been having kicked my ass more than I can count on some beliefs I've had, but I yet have to regret working with him.