Marc Barros, the founder of Contour cameras wrote a great follow-up to my post on your company’s shift from a product focus to building out a sales and marketing organization that’s definitely worth reading. A few excerpts here: 1. Make A Clear Definition of Success Early on, often before you raise venture capital, you want to create a clear picture of what the future looks like. That picture can include a range of things such as how you define your culture, values, employee morale, size, revenue growth, market domination, etc. Equally how you define success could range from world domination (e.g., Square) to building a small company focused on great products (e.g., 37 Signals). Whatever the definition for success is, the best…
Category
Marketing
Introducing Colorado Entrepreneurial By Nature
When it comes to the question of nature vs. nurture for entrepreneurs it’s clear that both are important. While great entrepreneurs are born with at least the seed of that entrepreneurial spirit, it takes some encouraging – as well as plenty of guidance, help and support – to see that seed blossom. I’ve had the great fortune to experience the evolution and transformation of Colorado into a community that I believe is one of the most supportive of entrepreneurs anywhere in the country. In fact, Colorado has always had an entrepreneurial spirit – from before its founding as a state as a frontier territory supporting prospectors and pioneers, through its history of ranching, the oil and gas boom, as a…
The Freemium Myth – more data
My last post with some thoughts on product pricing has received a ton of traffic, comments and email. Clearly this topic is one that a lot of entrepreneurs care about (and struggle with). A few people pointed me to a great post by Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch on the Software by Rob blog that talks about freemium plans and why, in Ruben’s view, they aren’t always drive the results companies are looking for. It maps well to my thinking (I directly called the freemium model into question in my pricing post). There’s some great data in the post – definitely read the full thing. Here’s a few that caught my eye: Bidsketch started out with a freemium model. Ruben carefully…
Pricing models, the freemium myth and why you may not be charging enough for your product
I’ve been pulled into a number of product and pricing meetings recently (for reasons unknown I’ve become the Foundry pricing and productization guy). I thought it would be helpful to put some of my thoughts into a blog post and hopefully spur some conversation in the comments and over email. With any broad topic, there are always exceptions to the general rules. There are also few absolutes and much of this advice varies depending on your specific product and market. And keep in mind here that I’m dealing generally with web services of some kind in the advice below (not consumer apps and not enterprise software). With those caveats, here are some ideas on pricing models: – Beware of too…
The kind people at AdSense are easing our fears
I find it strange that Google felt the need to send the following note out to their publishers (are we going to stop writing/publishing because we fear the bottom has fallen out of the CPC market?!?). Dear Publisher, We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network. We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new…
Your chance to play designer
If you’re like me, you spend most of your days pining away for the life that would have been had you followed your true passion into product management and design. Ok – I’m being flip, but we all have opinions on the way the sites we visit look, feel and work. So here’s your chance to weigh in on an important design decision and help out a Foundry investment in the process. Lijit is coming out with a new thumbnail feature in their search results (very cool) and can’t decide how to best lay out those results with the picture. So they’ve tossed it out to their user base (and other interested – or at least opinionated – parties). So…