pranavpiyush

Business user

This is really simple and clear - for that I applaud you.

I agree with your first piece on attraction - I equate this to creating demand. Your examples from the physical world are really good. There are analogs to the digital world that go above and beyond - but content, distribution, and community are key.

The part I disagree with is that everything below the line is sales. The line between marketing and sales is much more blurry these days due to digital. Lots of "self serve". The pitch, the narrative, the capturing of the demand (i.e. maybe this would be the design of the physical store in the physical world) happens in marketing land and there's strong partnership.

Really interesting that you put sales into COGS. If it works for you, that's great! :) I'd encourage thinking about it in CAC (cost of acquiring a customer) and then using Payback (how quickly you pay the CAC back) as a measure of health.

Love this type of discussion. I'll give you that there are many sub jobs within the job of growing revenue faster. I'll also give you that Sales's job is also to create revenue. Revenue creation/growth is the job for both marketing and sales. They have different sub jobs to achieve that.

What do you think marketing does that's above and beyond growing revenue faster? :)

I'm here to learn new perspectives.

Hmm. "The core job of marketing is to grow revenue faster." Did this line not help or too vague?

Here's feedback I got from a Series A founder after she read this post. Hope it helps you too!

"Your article came up on my LinkedIn feed and I wished it had come up months ago and saved me a lot of headache but late is better than never. We've been wrestling with gtm for months now and have made some progress but have yet to receive any high level advice as clear and structured as your article!

Thanks again for sharing the article!! It was great!! "

I can help. Reach out at pranav [at] pranavpiyush [dot] com if you want to talk through your current product and I might be able to help you think through how to find a market for it (or not).

I thought this post might resonate with the HN audience so posting here.

As startup leaders grow their business, they need to understand the core drivers of growth. Based on my experience at several startups, I've summarized the top six metrics that help you deeply understand the revenue, cost, and efficiency of your business.

Over the last decade, I’ve been asked for startup career advice 100s of times. This year, I’ve decided to write out my top 10 tips. Check them out and get in touch if you’re looking for personal advice.

Here's how. Hit the street and try to sell something to passers by. Hot day - maybe coupons for ice cream. Rainy day - maybe some umbrellas at a major bus stop or transit station. Keep leveling up from there. Find a problem and sell folks the solution.

All the book recommendations in the thread are solid.

Invoice2go | Remote | React, Front-end | FT

Invoice2go's mission is to simplify the lives of small business owners around the world so they can focus on what matters most. We do this by providing the easiest and fastest invoicing, payments, and customer management platform for freelancers, contractors, and small businesses.

You'll be working on the Growth Marketing team and be responsible for managing and executing critical projects and experiments to improve conversion from visitor to a paid subscriber. This will include managing our marketing/support website, signup, trial, checkout, paywall, and upgrade screens across web and mobile.

I'm the VP for the Go-to-market function and I'd be happy to answer any questions! pranav@2go.com

https://invoice.2go.com/open-positions/#web-developer

what are you cross selling?

at a former company, a large chunk of the roadmap came out of hackathon projects! in addition to that, it was a great way to set a culture of bottoms up innovation.

you're right... i think i just ignored java while scanning the list :P

hmm... that would result in php or c/c++/c#... really?

I remember this pain point vividly from 20 years ago, growing up in Delhi. This is a massive long term problem and a great opportunity. Good luck!

Love this idea...

Happy to help pro bono. pranav [at] pranavpiyush [dot] com

hey, i believe anyone can leave the team from dropbox.com/team. the team feature in Dropbox, in its current form, is meant to be used for "work" teams. Check out this help article -- https://www.dropbox.com/help/9124

(Dropbox employee here)

I'm going to focus on the "no one knows you" bit since I don't know anything about the industry/vertical you're in.

Step 1 -- The first thing to do is to build some social proof. I hope you already have a few customers. Request them to be references for your product and feature them and their feedback on your front page

Step 2 -- Ask your customers about who else in their network they think could benefit from such a product and reach out to them.

Step 3 -- As you sign on more customers, repeat Step 1 + 2

Step 4 -- Figure out if there is a pattern in your customers and try to truly understand the market they exist in.

Step 5 -- Once you understand the market, try to figure out which channels through which you can best reach that market (e.g. google ads, billboards, tv ads, partners, etc.). Of course, word of mouth is the best bet, but there are often other really lucrative channels too.

Iterate. This is just the beginning!

One way of answering this question is to look at total number of service providers on odesk, elance, fiverr, etc...

This article has some stats - http://fortune.com/2012/11/27/welcome-to-the-age-of-the-free...

i think there is. consumer apps are hard though and require a lot of scale... i'd encourage you to treat this as a side project. still work on it, but don't think of it as a "startup" or "company" until it actually starts getting traction... see this -- http://blog.samaltman.com/projects-and-companies

happy to provide feedback... just got on the list.

This deserves to exist and flourish. We built something similar (skilldom.org) but it hasn't yet deserved the love it should have... :) partly due to me not being disciplined enough to dedicate time to it.

One app that I have used in the past is Screenflow. Has a lot more functionality naturally, but is also expensive.

This would be awesome for customer service reps who want to see exactly what the user is seeing. Main issue with current tools (remote viewing apps) is that they are often too slow and unreliable.

Looks promising. Lots of small UI/UX things: 1. Wasn't clear how to move objects around (the iconography for the buttons can use some improvement). 2. Delete/erase button is pretty confusing too - again, it wasn't clear how to actually erase something. 3. The bg music on voice chat is unnecessary in my view. I hate that in most conferencing solutions.. :P 4. If conferencing/collaboration is high volume use case, i'd be curious to know why you chose to hide those options under a menu...

Hope this helps.

We hope that this becomes the way people learn online. A flexible, mobile way to learn with others who are on the same path as you... The Best content is usually spread across 2 or 3 sources for any topic, so the goal is to curate the best possible structure for any skill. Also to make learning super actionable and easy to track...

We think that all college education and beyond should happen in this format!

Consider dropbox.com/bizops :) get in touch if interested...

All that is fine and kudos to you for having that ambition. Do remember that you also need to know how things work and what makes them work.

Internet, at its root, is a communication medium. Things like facebook, google+, pinterest, snapchat, etc. are part of a VERY natural evolution of this medium.

Being part of the chaos doesnt mean you cant see order amidst it. That's where great entrepreneurs come from. They dont go away from all society and magically, one day, reappear with a brilliant idea. They are in the middle of the chaos, figuring out what works, why it works and how to make it work even better...

I don't think so. Its a user acquisition cost. Instead of putting up Ads, they're offering a free service. Good tactic.