Sometimes. I think I’ve only listened to a few (like 2 or 3). For me most of it falls under the category of ‘magical voluntarism’. It surprised me in his conversation with Dr. Gabor Maté (who I’m a big fan of) how he was scared to really open up and be honest/real.
I think being in the Stanford engineering ecosystem has been a positive funnel into starting a tech company. Whereas in NYC it’s more likely you’d get recruited by a finance company.
We developed new features thinking each feature would cause the inflection point we were looking for. ‘Ticketing will be a game changer,’ or ‘this new mobile app will allow us to sell at a higher price point.’ Each time we barely pushed the needle when it came to growth. We dreamt silver bullets, but we were only pushing out what amounted to paper bullets.
Although I don’t know if the Harvard connection matters, I thought this was an interesting idea:
Perhaps there is some intrinsic value of innovation and creativity that we can laud as being more valuable than creating the newest financial mousetrap and the compensation that comes with it.
I think you are right with respect to the need to hit the accelerator on growth through sales and marketing. Great products do not sell themselves. I think that having some notion of how to get a product to market and how to market that product is essential.
I thought this article was interesting and touches on your experiences:
It's not a feature problem—Avoiding Startup Tarpits
Parts sounded very similar to the start-up that I was referencing most directly in my comment. The big difference was that in selling to large enterprises, marketing is very inefficient at reaching decision makers.
We thought we had this in hand because our founder and a couple of key early employees were deeply integrated into the CIO community. And, we did succeed in getting CIOs on board. The real challenge though for us was that revenue depended on adoption and ongoing use within large enterprises. While CIO's were telling us this platform is really great and we will have 20 procurement projects hosted on your exchange in the next 6 months, they weren't willing to force adoption within their organization. We would get delays and then maybe 1 or 2 projects and then nothing. There was still something missing or a unidentified barrier when it came to the needs of a VP or director 2 levels down from the CIO.
Eventually we ran out of money. The technical foundation was really good and allowed the founder to run it solo until he found a larger service company that wanted to retrofit the technology to support their business model. He got a smallish buyout which in theory made him and the investors whole plus a little. The last I heard they were having legal wranglings to actually get the money paid out from the acquiring firm.
It seems I am one of those in the tarpit.
I think the problem for us engineering types is that there is so much bullshit around marketing, that it's offputting to us. That's the case for me at least. If I spend time/money on a feature, I know how long it will take, how much it will cost and when it will be ready. Compared to this, marketing seems like burning money with voodoo rituals.
It doesn't help that marketing efforts are only meaningfully measurable on a larger scale. If you're bootstrapping something yourself, you don't have 12k to spend on marketing this month. You have $300. It's easy to burn that $300 on adwords or facebook ads and get zero signups, with no meaningful data whatsoever.
The usual advice goes: hire a marketing expert. But how do I hire a marketing expert that a) isn't full of it, b) will even listen to me if my current budgets are in the hundreds of dollars?
I think the article is right on point, but I wish it pointed me to a way to deal with the marketing problem.
