danhodgins

The top ad group (and its ad) got 1,500 clicks, and #2 got 45 clicks. That's a different of over 40X in performance in terms of clicks which is huge. My time would probably be best spent figuring out how to make the top ad group perform even better - perhaps by A/B split testing 2 ads head to head.

Adwords accounts are organized differently depending on the industry and/or products being advertised. Generally, one concept or idea will get it's own ad group with an associated array of keywords. An ad group is just a concept or a topic that can be described in different ways by a variety of keywords.

Here's an example to illustrate.

Suppose you were promoting email marketing software for photographers. This is a discreet concept that can be expressed many ways:

email marketing for photographers email marketing for photographer email marketing photographer

The single concept, email marketing for photographers would get it's own 'ad group'. Other related concepts such as email list building for photography business are unique enough to merit a seperate ad group.

The reason why Adwords is organized this way is to ensure that advertisers are laser-targeted with relevancy.

It's in both your and Google's best interests to ensure that your Adwords account is generating as many clicks as possible, and by having separate ad groups you can custom tailor the ads within each ad group to be super relevant.

You end up with an army of 'mini sales people' that work 24/7/365. And that's Adwords alone. When you combine Adwords with SEO and email marketing to drive conversions you get a very powerful system indeed.

I'm always amazed at how an experiment-driven mindset helps uncover pockets of extreme interest among people clicking carefully-crafted ads or links!

It's really about the broader industry rather than your product idea.

Can you see yourself researching opportunities in an industry for a while, and not being particularly emotional about any specific product idea?

If yes, you can very quickly and cheaply test out any idea for a product in your given industry with PPC, and you can start an SEO blog using Wordpress (I suggest Hostmonster) to tie together your PPC data and analytics in a giant data-driven feedback loop. This research-driven marketing approach will enable you to test out any product idea, and not lose ground if one doesn't fly. More specifically, if you have PPC/SEO keyword and traffic data that's tied to conversions you can almost instantly switch to a different product idea and still maintain marketing momentum.

How much domain knowledge do you have in your problem space?

If none then you'd better align yourself with people who do - key 'early adopter' customers, partners, advisors.

Otherwise, you won't know what people want/need/desire.

The specific answer regarding conversions is zero purchases, but over 200 accounts created, and hundreds of email addresses. This suggests that perhaps a 'soft offer' such as free server setup guide emailed to the user might perform better. We'll conduct experiment and collect empirical data, and let users vote with clicks, email addresses and credit cards.

Have you faced similar challenges?

Can't wait to apply these insights Patrick. Keep up the teaching/sharing - your material is fantastic.

I only found the climbers after looking at this Everest route map:

http://www.greatoutdoors.com/everest-2010/routes-maps

Look for camp 3. You have to zoom all the way in, and look at where the rough snow meets the smooth snow. You'll see some super tiny yellow dots, those are the tents. The tiny black specks just to the left are climbers.

The sense of scale in the Himalayas is almost unfathomable.....

Many of the SaaS entrepreneurs I have spoke with have mentioned that contacting prospects via cold emails or calls is very effective for getting brief customer development interviews set up.

When these conversations are positioned as interviews rather than 'research' or a 'survey' people tend to open up more about their biggest business challenges. Creating such a high fidelity connection with customers is difficult to achieve in any other way during the early days of market validation, so pick up that phone and make some calls.

Better yet, get their permission to record the calls, and then post the interview audio and transcript on your customer development blog!

This tactic has worked well for me.

With enough creativity Kickstarter can almost be seen as a marketing channel in addition to an early stage funding platform. Sounds to me like an ideal way to cajole friends and family into funding one's project/venture without having to formally raise a 'friends and family round', and without having to approach angel investors.

For no upfront marketing dollars you get free exposure, and the opportunity to reach prospects who - gasp - might even FUND your development efforts.

What a great way to reach, excite, delight and validate a market!

This is bang on. I would not advise trying to sell your solution at the end of a customer development interview, and perhaps not for weeks or even months after. If you truly solve big pain points the time will come to ask for the sale, but it's not after the first conversation.

Simply enjoy the conversation, ask them to tell you about the biggest challenges in their business, and most people will open up and give you some of the most valuable feedback you can get as an entrepreneur. It's much more valuable than sitting in your basement and running an Adwords campaign to a landing page. The depth, richness and quantity of feedback you get might surprise you. You might even consider asking your prospect if you can publish a transcript of the interview on your blog.

Publishing your customer development interviews (with your prospects' permission) will give you near instant content for SEO (get it transcribed with SpeechPad if you like), added value in the form of information for other prospects in the industry, and insight into how they express their pain points that you can inject back into your pitch and marketing messages.

I have heard many moderately and wildly successful entrepreneurs and marketers including Seth Godin, Tim Ferris, Steve Blank, and Eric Ries all mention some variation of "prove your market first by prototyping your solution and getting feedback from the market BEFORE writing a single line of code".

The market validation process is relatively obvious and straightforward to execute, but it's STILL hard to build a successful business around a compelling solution for a validated market.

Lack of market research and validation is a very common reason for B2B software business failure. And for good reason - hardcore market research can be tedious, boring, frustrating, and potentially highly disappointing.

What if the market's wants/desires cannot be solved with technology? Perhaps your prospect's deepest need is simply information about how to do their job better with existing technology. In this scenario, as an industry outsider, you are not even remotely capable of meeting their needs, so you shouldn't write even 1 line of code without talking to dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of prospects.

Why bother making an app to help tattoo shops schedule customer appointments unless you have surveyed hundreds of tattoo shop owners? Perhaps their biggest need is wowing their customers with an Ipad version of their tattoo library. But you wouldn't know this unless you or someone on your team talked to them! To me, this is what people like Steve Blank mean when they say 'get out of the building'. Survey, survey, survey!

The core entrepreneurial skills mentioned in Daniel's article do need to be present in some combination on the founding team. This team could include various blends of founders, advisors, employees, contractors, and directors.

Some core skills are orders of magnitude more valuable than others. For instance, raising $100,000 of capital in 1,000 hours is worth exactly $100/hour. Doing entry level marketing coordinator work is worth approximately $18/hour. The higher-impact activity in this context is obvious, especially if getting deals done is the driving force in a founder or co-founder's DNA.

Daniel's article is on the money when it comes to creating a list of the core entrepreneurial skills that CAN and should be learned in order to increase the odds of startup success, so let's continue this discussion over the coming weeks.

Court the traffic gatekeepers who reach your target audience by pitching them via email. In my experience asking a single direct/focused question elicits a response at least 50% of the time.

Inbound link juice from being featured on a site that's old, trusted and authoritative is 90% of the SEO game. Getting traffic is all about courting and pitching traffic gatekeepers at progressive levels of difficulty/reach, so you might as well start refining your approach.

For an inspiring read on growing your traffic check out "Crush It" by Gary Vaynerchuk, and start getting your content and community hustle on!

According to reams of empirical data prices with 7's or 9's as the last digit (e.g. $17, $49) tend to convert best. I would suggest testing prices between $7 - $11 as a simple, 'low hanging fruit' way to get started.

I agree that transcripts are mandatory - unless you are a super entertaining person on camera like Gary Vaynerchuk (most of us aren't).

You might think your on-camera presence and videos are unpolished and unprofessional - but that's YOU.

What if that slightly unpolished and rough video you created is EXACTLY the video a potential customer has been looking for? What if even a poor quality video could deliver the exact information a potential lead has been seeking, and answer their exact questions?

I think you underestimate the impact that average quality videos can have on customers.

I do, however, agree with your first point - the video must be relevant - to your content, to your site, to your startup, and most importantly, to your AUDIENCE.

SOME people respond better to a face and voice on video. Others prefer any one of a kaleidoscope of possible engagement methods. That's why it's important to try lots of approaches and see which ones resonate with your market.

Use your creativity folks - your videos CAN and WILL rank on page one with the right SEO (assuming there aren't already 1,000 videos targeting the same keywords).

You're absolutely right that video blogging is not for everyone, and not for every startup. I also agree that HN would not work as a web cam comment site.

For the right startups and founders with a certain type of DNA video related content (with transcripts and time-coded key points) can be an excellent marketing tactic. Just look at Gary Vaynerchuk - his videos are far from polished, but they are entertaining, and get the job done.

Video blogging is still an untapped opportunity.

Most people either think it's too much work, or they cannot commit to doing video blog posts that take 15 - 20 minutes, and put you on any mobile/laptop screen where an existing or potential customer, joint venture partner, blogger or reporter might wish to find you 24/7/365.

The idea with blogging is to start a data-driven feedback loop that you can fine-tune 'on the fly' similar to the following process the author outlined in the article:

* Capture every idea * Don’t wait for good ideas – shipping regularly creates quality * Don’t obsess — publish posts on the 2nd draft * Watch realtime analytics and heavily polish only the posts which start to take off

Of course some types of startups enjoy viral growth through invites/recruiting, so perhaps blogging is less important for them.

For many startups creating compelling content, syndicating the heck out of it, and connecting with as many people as possible are core drivers of organic traffic growth.

That depends. Has the idea been implemented only in one country, or on one continent? Do the creators have the ability or capital to develop strong barriers to entry that would take tremendous capital and/or years of effort to overcome?

Spotting an idea abroad and bringing it to your own geography is a perfectly viable strategy.

Check out resources like SpringWise dot com or TrendWatching dot com (full disclosure - I subscribe to both) to learn about new ideas being launched abroad that you could potentially bring to your own country/city.

Revorad, why think of each idea you have as a startup? Many of your ideas can be launched as a 'project' instead. A project might have the POTENTIAL to turn into a business, but most projects are not a business at the beginning unless they generate revenue with a sustainable business model.

I have launched two 'projects' recently, and both have started as video blogs. Even if neither gets traction, I will hold on to the domains and content as an inbound link launchpad for any other project that might turn into a business.

Have a great holiday season, and best wishes for a prosperous 2012 filled with project success!

Very refreshing read - love the author's candor about success often being accidental and mostly due to changing to idea mid-flight.

Nathan is a cool guy, a very talented designer, and a self-taught programmer.

I really enjoyed our video conversation about how he prototyped his app idea, contacted speech pathologists for feedback, gave them free promo codes in exchange for feedback and online reviews, and worked the linkerati for buzz.

Check out the two-part interview for more insights about his process and marketing strategy.

There have been plenty of mentions of Jerry Seinfeld's 'secret' to productivity. Any method that you stick with can work, and Commit is a fun way to track your progress. Love the design Nathan - so elegant and intuitive!

Here is a follow up post and video response to Paul's article: http://www.getspotta.com/user-retention-as-a-service-lifecyc...

I agree with Patio11 - even a super simple implementation with minimal business rules is still better than zero communication.

Your theory that the current state of a user's account and their past usage patterns should determine which mailers and communications the user receives essentially refers to the techniques outlined in Seth Godin's book "Permission Marketing". Check out Seth's book - I would imagine your readers and users could also use a summary or refresher of the principles behind "Permission Marketing" - it's powerful stuff!

Brilliant example of the design thinking process in action.

This man has certainly practiced the 'design thinking' process outlined by Tim Brown in "Change By Design" - a book about the process of innovation. The Design Thinking process involves lots of ethnographic research, and developing empathy for the user - the same tenets as user centered (UCD) or human centered design (HCD).

In this case, the inventor developed empathy by going so far as wearing a fake uterus that emitted goats blood!

I find this story and others like it to be very inspiring. However, knowing that the world can be changed for the better or worse by people who believe strongly enough about something is both reassuring and frightening at the same time.