"The Dirty Dozen" Marketing Processes that every Internet start-up must master | Hacker News Reader

"The Dirty Dozen" Marketing Processes that every Internet start-up must master

blog.publisha.com

27 pointsHates_3 comments

I'm all for sharing ideas, and I'm happy that these ideas have been working for this company. However, I do wish people in the start-up community would stop presuming that there are two ways, theirs and the wrong one. Reading too many articles like this, one might conclude that the only viable business model is:

1. Identify mildly useful/interesting idea.

2. Produce cheap implementation.

3. Sell to the general public for peanuts.

4. Refine to maximise number of people and size of peanuts.

Given that the culture around HN seems to be heavily biased towards businesses that do follow this model, I think it would be interesting to hear from investors and/or successful founders about other ideas as well. Does this model dominate HN simply because of the emphasis on angel investing, which maybe doesn't fit as well with other models?

Do investors like YC also fund businesses producing products/services for niche markets rather than the general public? What about products/services where getting to launch fundamentally requires some serious R&D that is going to take time and money, and you can't just produce a MVP in a few weeks and iterate, but where the prices you can charge customers/users are much higher? Maybe this happens, but we don't tend to hear about them so often because there are not so many and/or the people doing them happen not to be the ones who participate here or post their progress on a company site/blog?

If so, what extent do the sorts of ideas in the linked article generalise, and what sorts of processes have proved most useful/important in successful businesses with more specialised/long-term/high-value products and services?

I've heard about Plan Do Check Act before, but isn't it just a glorified/marketing version of the whole scientific process? Design studies to test hypotheses (oftentimes educated guesses), conduct said studies, analyze the results to draw theories, and refine them with further studies.

The PDCA version only replaces the "advancing human knowledge" goal by "making money", but I think the similarities are quite striking.

Plan Do Check Act sounds like exactly the kind of crap that some jerk would come up with in order to sell business books. Take something bloody obvious that everybody knows, come up with some fancy-sounding (yet understandable to any six-year-old or middle manager) jargon to explain it, then somehow blow it up to two hundred pages with repetition, examples, case studies and testimonials.

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