I talk to a lot of companies that are still hunting for customer #1, or a few sales have been made but the ball isn't rolling yet.
Most of them are making the same mistake: Their public persona is exactly wrong.
I know, because I made the same mistake! But I learned my lesson, and I'd like to share it with you.
Even before I had a single customer, I "knew" it was important to look professional. My website would need to look and feel like a "real company." I need culture-neutral language complimenting culturally-diverse clip-art photos of frighteningly chipper co-workers huddled around a laptop, awash with the thrill and delight of configuring a JDBC connection to SQL Server 2008.
It also means adopting typical "marketing-speak," so my "About Us" page started with:
Smart Bear is the leading provider of enterprise version control data-mining tools. Companies world-wide use Smart Bear's Code Historian software for risk-analysis, root-cause discovery, and software development decision-support.
"Leading provider?" "Data mining?" I'm not even sure what that means. But you have to give me credit for an impressive quantity of hyphens.
That's what you're supposed to do right? That's what other companies do, so it must be right. Who am I to break with tradition? Surely my potential customers would immediately close the browser if they read:
Hi, I'm Jason and I built an inexpensive tool for visualizing what's in your version control system. It's useful for answering questions like "When was the last time we changed this file?" Check it out and tell me what sucks!
I mean, can you just imagine a person with "Software Engineer III" on their business card taking me seriously if I just talked like a human being? What if someone gets offended by the word "sucks?" No no, big companies want to see professional language!
But I was wrong. I'll explain why from the point of view of selling software over the web, but the same lesson applies to every little company trying to get off the ground.
Now repeat after me:
My next sale won't be a 1000-seat order from Lockheed Martin. My next sale won't be a 1000-seat order from Lockheed Martin. My next sale won't be a 1000-seat order from Lockheed Martin.
I'm telling you this having sold software to every size of company from micro-ISV to IBM, and, well, to Lockheed Martin.
Your vision is to land $100k deals with big companies -- and you will! But not today. Today your product is a shaky version one-dot-oh with bugs you haven't uncovered yet, missing 80% of the features big companies require, and with no significant documentation like case studies or a proper manual or an ROI model or a large, reference-able customer.
Today, you're a complete mismatch with Lockheed Martin! But there's a nice big niche that's a perfect match: Early Adopters.
Early Adopters are people who want to live on the bleeding edge. They like new technology, even if that means it's buggy. They like working with teeny companies where they have a personal relationship with the founders, where they are showered with attention, and where their ideas are implemented before their very eyes. They don't mind putting up with a hundred bugs so long as they get fixed fast. They want to be involved in the process.
Tom is an Early Adopter. At Smart Bear I must have had ten or twenty of these guys before our product was stable enough and feature-rich enough to start getting attention from the big boys.
The best part is, this is exactly the moment in your company's life when you need Early Adopters to help you build the right product! You don't need people who download, get discouraged, and then never call you back. You need a chatty Cathy who wants to dive in and help out.
So now back to your website, your blog, your Twitters -- your public corporate persona generally. What do you put up on your website that screams out to those potential Early Adopter Cheerleaders that you are exactly what they're looking for: A cool new company with a fresh product and fresh attitude; a product that might be rough around the edges but is ripe for feedback and collaboration; a company that may be small today but is thinking big.
Well here's how not to it: Say "a leading provider of" and blather on about how you "Provide the ability to quickly and easily do XYZ so you can go back to accomplishing high-value tasks."
Puh-leeze. Can you be more uninspiring?
Balsamiq Studios is doing it right.Read their company page. It's says "Hello." It says "Yes, a couple of guys in a studio." They don't skirt the issues of being a small company:
I know, it sounds iffy: how can such a small team create, test, maintain, market, sell, and support a software company?
Well, that remains to be seen.
Balsamiq made $800,000 in their first year of operations, so don't tell me "big companies" need to hear garbage PR/marketing language. Balsamiq got 100 product reviews during their first six weeks of operation, so don't tell me "a couple of guys in a studio" isn't a good public persona.
You want that kind of success? Stop acting like a faceless, humorless, generic, robotic company!
Put yourself in the shoes of that Early Adopter. Does she want to see useless garbage phrases or does she want to hear about how you totally understand her pain? Should you come off as a big, established, safe company or as a cool, passionate, small team who wants to make a difference? Should you hide behind "Contact Us" forms or display your phone number and Twitter account on your home page? Should you promote features and benefits you don't really have implemented yet or should you promote your forums, blog, and weekly all-customer virtual meeting where everyone chimes in with feedback?
Be human. Stop hiding. Be yourself.
What do you think about how small companies should present themselves to their customers? Is it appropriate to be informal or is formality needed? Leave a comment!
Years from now us Austin Entrepreneurs are going to tell our friends we personally know one of the stellar entrepreneurial philosophers of our generation. That we were part of his community and got to meet with him on a regular basis in small intimate groups as well as 1-on-1's. That we got to listen to this journeyman change agent expand on an endless array of topics & ideas while enjoying a libation at a local watering hole. What is really impressive about this is that there will literally be thousands of people that were part of these gatherings with him over the years because Bijoy Goswami took the time to share his journey with us spreading the wisdom and knowledge he has been soaking up over the years. As a producer/director of entrepreneurial content, I am fortunate to film hundreds of entrepreneurs for TV shows and videos for featuring business owners and start-up mavericks and I can share with you that Bijoy uniquely stands out in his intriguing message, diversified upbringing and journey of discovery that he is sharing with us as it happens.
This week we featured this wandering Bootstrapping Prophet & founder of the Bootstrap Network on our show On the Road with iV because we wanted to share Bijoy's story, wisdom and learnings with others outside of the 512. It was definitely quite the experience to film and hope you watch the 4 segments we captured featuring Ingrid Vanderveldt (host of the show) and Bijoy discuss everything from start-ups to Stanford to song writing to mystic cab rides to tapping into the universe. He touches on his book and the MRE theory and how the Valley of Death is a wonderful place that is really good for the soul. Bijoy then goes on to say that we can all get a deep perspective of the universe by using your own bootstraps and how his bi-polar upbringing has taught him the value of living in the present and some of the keys that to being successful in life.
My co-producer on the show, Chance Carpenter, had this to say about Bijoy: - I was struck by the passion and spirit that Bijoy brings to the conversation about bootstrapping. One of the most consistent messages we have heard from the many entrepreneurs that iV has interviewed is that passion is a key ingredient for success in any entrepreneurial endeavor and especially when bootstrapping. While this might seem profoundly obvious, Bijoy really brings it home both how challenging it can be to stay in your joy and passion when the hurricane of a million tedious chores bares down on you AND how imperative and possible it is to continually claim and reclaim that passion when you invoke spirit into the mix.
iV had this to say: - Not only am I proud to have Bijoy as a friend, I am inspired by him as a colleague. Part of what is so profound about Bijoy is that before Bootstrap, he had put himself in a position to do anything in life he dreamed. He was a fast moving, highly accomplished tech entrepreneur who could have chosen a number of paths to follow. In listening - but more importantly following his calling - Bijoy created Bootstrap which has brought so much value to others. In my travels across the country, I find that when people talk about Austin, TX, it is widely known that this is the home of Bootstrap Network and Bijoy. I admire the great work he does for the community and entrepreneurs alike as well as his continous desire to learn more and better himself. Here are links to the Segments airing the CLUB E currently:
There is much to be learned from and entertained by this purveyor of community gatherings and we look forward to soaking up more of Bijoy's Bootstrapping wisdom in the years to come.
The other day I again ran across a major manager, in this case a CEO but this thought is not limited to the CEO class, who is a bully. I was reminded of something that Halibuton* said:
"A brave man is sometimes a desperado; but a bully is always a coward."
When you meet and observe driven individuals that you will have to interact with it is important to learn early which kind you are dealing with.
In business there is a strong lead and/or follow relationship issue in when two or more personalities work toward a transaction or common goal. Fundamental to the relationship is the issue of personal faith, that is in theory you both put faith in each other as an assumptive basis for the furtherance of your activity. It takes a brave person to deal with the truths frequently necessary to succeed, a bit of the desperado is not uncommon for part of the definition of desperado it to be bold enough to cast a fear aside, in this case to do what is right.
This is not the domain of the bully for he is a coward. The bully will use bluster to camouflage that character flaw, most commonly in the form of misleading you with their supposed fame. Bragging, name-dropping, innuendo, implying relationships, generally claiming what is not theirs are the tools they use and that you must watch out for.
As you build your business you are exercising bravery. For the faint of heart do not pick up the responsibility for their lives and the lives of others, they do not follow their dreams. They steal and claim dreams from others.
You will be besieged by bullies who will try to impress you with their skill, power, and virtue. This is always with the intent of getting their hand into your pocket, to acquire your power and resources, and to leverage you in the launch on to their next victim
This guy I met the other day reminded me that constant vigilance is the key to survival and success. Thus again, Andy Grove’s motto, "only the paranoid survive" comes home.
Building business in Austin despite a possible recession
How can we buffet the effects of a possible economic recession with regards to business growth in Austin? Recently there has been a bunch of press about the growing threat of recession coming to the US. The New York Times tells a story that all of us as entrepreneurs need to start preparing for called "As Lenders Tighten Flow of Credit, Growth at Risk" From the article there are two important paragraphs to note:
Credit flowing to American companies is drying up at a pace not seen in decades, threatening the creation of jobs and the expansion of businesses, while intensifying worries that the economy may be headed for recession.
The article goes on to focus on small business, and how small business is getting hit the worst. So why is this important? Small business is where all of our growth and job creation is coming from. From the NY Times article:
In recent months, smaller companies have been adding jobs even as larger firms have been shedding workers, according to the ADP National Employment Report, which tracks changes at companies with payrolls overseen by ADP. From May to October, 276,000 of the 378,000 jobs added were at companies with fewer than 50 employees, the report found.
It is the entrepreneurs that are building startup and small businesses that are contributing to the greatest growth of the US economy. Programs that are being structured by the government should take this in account- and support small business- versus focusing on solutions for large, slow moving corporations that typically are the benefactors of the pork coming out of Washington DC.
So what can entrepreneurs do in lieu of dealing with a drying up of financial capital other than make sure that they voice their vote strongly in the coming election? I and a number of international collaborators have been examining what can be done through how we organize our businesses together for the purpose of building our business... And given the continuing news of financial crisis, it is time to take action as business people and not wait on government programs. Even though financial capital might not be as available, social capital can be utilized to continue to build businesses. Social capital, called "human capital" in Paul Hawkin's book called Natural Capitalism can be a somewhat replacement in lieu of financial capital. Creating social capital is what we have been doing in Bootstrap Austin and other entrepreneurial social networks that we have been building. In fact, it has always been true in the US that social capital carried the day during financial crisis. A historical example of this can be found in our region's history of farming. In order to sustain their farms, farmers helped each other raise barns together... these farmers were creating social capital with each other ("I help you, you help me"). There are many examples in the past, including from my family, where farmers had no access to government support, nor other access to financial capital... but they could help each other, and survive the worst of economic downturns. It appears that the US is entering into a time that once again that entrepreneurs building social capital together will be the way that we will continue to build our businesses, as financial capital runs and hides during the storm.
Thankfully, Austin's wired technology community has been organizing into what I call "Enterprise Tribes" helping entrepreneurs build their businesses, recession or not. Research has shown that business that organize themselves as ecosystems (or as I say "enterprise tribes") positively grow each other much faster than businesses that try to stand alone. This social networking behavior with groups like Bootstrap Austin,Refresh Austin, Door64.com, Jelly in Austin (among others) are making a difference, supporting entrepreneurs to innovate at a level never before seen in Austin. Yet as much of our "tech elite" figure out these new ways of doing business and new ways of lowering the cost of work, we must as the community of Austin create broader integration between our businesses, cultivating a richer business ecosystem. Through this we shall build an even more vibrant Austin into the years to come.
