Patience and hard work

It would be interesting to see a list of successful "took their time" startups. One year for Basecamp is actually pretty quick, although it doesn't take into account the many years they spent developing a following. I use MailChimp for sending newsletters and saw that they launched in 2001 but still did web development on the side until 2006.

I don't dispute the article's approach of ongoing promotion, but I think there's another way to approach marketing: design the product (and website) to fit the market.

Make the product's benefit easy to see (for target customer task and needs; and in terms that are easy to understand); easy to try it so as to confirm those claims (download, install, "plug-and-play", "getting started", general usability); and easy to purchase (this one isn't so important for enterprise software, because the person processing the sale usually isn't in the decision making loop - bizarrely, it's sometimes a different company altogether that makes the purchase).

The wonderful thing about this is that you are making a kind of sales machine, instead of doing that work manually. It's automation. Of course, it is a tremendous amount of work to actually discover what the market it, who the customers are, what their concerns are, what tasks you can help with and so on. But once you've found out, that knowledge is an asset that you can incorporate into your systems, so it keeps giving value to you - just like a program.

It's sort of "throwing the product over the wall" to see what happens, applied to the marketing aspect itself (except iterative development is needed for both product and "marketing machine").

Of course, this is all immensely appealing to a scientifically-minded technie type, who wants to avoid actually making sales visits or phone calls... I think my approach can succeed, but it probably can't be as successful as someone who tackles sales as a task in itself.

As one data point, I've personally succeeded with this to some extent, but to fully disclose: I do get a lot more sales when I make a release (which is automatically publicized on many websites). I've tried google adwords, trying out different ads, keywords and so on, but it made no impact whatsoever (spent about $100 trying it out).

I think there's an interesting contrast here between US and European attitudes about startups. Here in the US and California is particular it's regarded as a mark of wisdom and maturity to say 'fail early, fail often, because failure is a fact and you may as well exploit it'. It's OK to say your first x ventures went bust as long you can articulate what you learned and still exhibit Thomas Edison-like persistence. Over in Europe, on the other hand, mentioning that you have been involved in a string of failures is like saying you recently contracted leprosy or something. Even if people admire your persistence, they'll want to know what happened to your previous employees and investors, and you may be classed as visionary but irresponsible.

I'm Irish BTW - I like living in CA because there's a more freewheeling, 'take a chance, change your life' attitude...and yet I am often scared off projects by the risk/reward calculus. I wonder if other immigrants have a similar experience.