Tag Archives: startups

Entering Marketing at a Startup

With software eating the world, many marketers are deciding to enter startup organizations for the first time. CEOs, being told they need a brand, or to spend on paid acquisition or insert X marketing activity here, are trying to find marketing talent in a industry that has a dearth of it, so they’re happy to accept people from other industries or larger technology companies. Sounds like a win-win, right? Not exactly. The culture shock as a marketer from switching to a startup from almost any other type of company is hard to over-estimate. The switch chews up and spits out as many, if not more, people than it accepts. I’ll talk a bit why that happens and what marketers can do about it to be more successful.

The first thing you need to accept is that marketing is not understood as a function at most startups, and therefore it is not respected. These are organizations that have gotten to where they are without marketing, have probably never read a definition of marketing, and whose connotation of marketing is the seediest of snake oil sellers you can imagine. Starting from a position of distrust in a new position in a new company is never a fantastic option, but it’s where almost all startup marketers start. And they are not prepared for it. I remember a meeting my first week at GrubHub where one of the co-founders suggested firing me (referring to me in the third person even though I was there) to the other co-founder and just growing organically. The following week, I proposed doing email marketing to retain users after their first purchase and was met with a flat out “no, that’s not a good use of time.”

No one tells you to expect these types of barriers before you join, and many marketers never get past it. Marketer’s first instinct typically is to rely on the best practices argument. “But, every other company does this.” I can say from myself and watching several other marketers try it that it’s pretty much a worthless argument. If it’s a best practice in marketing, but your company thinks marketing is bullshit, then your argument doesn’t hold water. So, if best practices won’t work, you need to find arguments that will.

In the past, I’ve recommended AB testing with people, and I still do. In this scenario, there is one strategy that is almost guaranteed to work, and that is relying on data. Entrepreneurs live and die by metrics, and with most startups being founded by engineers, they trust data above all else. So, marketers first need to think about how they can generate data on their activities. AB testing is generally the best way, even if it’s pretty crude. The other is to write out a clear strategy. If something is a best practice, it’s because it’s logical. Breaking down the logic in detail can be the right way to help those not familiar with your craft why something is the right course of action. I prefer to write clear “because A causes B, and B causes C, and we want C, we should do A” type papers, but feel free to adopt your own style. In the email marketing example, I started sending emails manually and built the campaign up to drive thousands of orders before I proposed a technical solution again. It was much clearer the value then, and the project was accepted. In the Pinterest case, one of our marketers just started sending emails without telling people, and it’s now a significant re-engagement channel for us.

One caveat: don’t manipulate data for your own gain. This is a mistake I see many marketers make. In the absence of data, you need to work to generate reliable data, not appropriate available data to try to explain your impact in a way that is forced. For example, when you see a lift in metrics, I’ve seen many marketers jump in to grab credit e.g. “That’s because of our Mother’s Day campaign on Facebook!” when the campaign was only seen by a couple hundred people and only had a dozen likes. This further deteriorates credibility, as startup employees see through it. Only claim credit when you’re confident and have the data to back up your claim.

Currently listening to 6613 by DJ Rashad.

First to Product-Market Scale

I like to think of this blog as balancing between business school theory and startup execution. While there are many places they don’t add up, usually the combination of the two provides an insightful truth that is hard to see without the theory plus the experience of trying to implement it. One area where I struggled for a while between my experience and the theory was the first mover disadvantage as it relates to barriers to entry.

The first mover disadvantage states that, while being the first firm in a market to do something has its advantages in terms of brand recognition and speed to market, the firm bares an even greater cost of R&D, education, etc. that second movers do not. These second movers can fast follow without all of these additional costs the first mover had to deal with and quickly compete. See HBR for details. In my Chicago Booth studies, both Eric Lefkofsky (CEO of Groupon who taught Building Internet Startups) and up and coming economist Matthew Gentzkow (who taught Competitive Strategy) argued about how potent the first mover disadvantage would be for Groupon, and that now that everyone knew how profitable the Groupon model was, it would be copied as there was no competitive advantage.

In a case study about Groupon in Gentzkow’s class, I did a one man filibuster against this argument. I looked at the data. During the time of the class, Facebook and OpenTable were winding down their Groupon clones, Yelp called theirs “not a priority” six months after shifting almost their entire team to work on it. Living Social started having financial issues. Groupon was winning despite the first mover disadvantage. The question was not would Groupon win, it what the prize was going to be for being first. Why was that the case when economics would argue against it?

I saw this same phenomenon in my own work at GrubHub. Online ordering was not a hard technology to clone, and once we had educated restaurants on the value of online ordering and shown them the additional business we could bring them, a competitor would have a much easier time with their pitch. Yet, we were still winning in every market except New York and college towns, where competitors had entered well before us. After acquiring those competitors, we talked candidly about competing with each other. The folks at Seamless (the New York competitor) talked repeatedly about feeling boxed out due to GrubHub’s first mover advantage in the rest of the country, even though we weren’t first in many of those areas.

Having taken two classes emphasizing first mover disadvantage before hearing this, I knew something wasn’t right, but couldn’t quite nail the hidden truth. Last year, I read Andy Rachleff’s post on first to product market fit. Andy argued it’s not about first mover advantage, it’s about first to product-market fit. It felt warmer, but not quite right either. GrubHub was not first to product-market fit in many of the markets it entered and later dominated.

If we tweak Andy’s definition slightly from fit to scale, the model fits better. One thing about GrubHub is that everything we thought about we thought about at scale and with velocity. We would systematically try to grow every market we entered with the same focus and the same process. If we achieved this, we would overtake successful players that were already in the market. It also didn’t matter who entered the market and tried the same after that. We had already won. Product-market fit implies a product that works with a small product, and the next step in the company’s evolution should be scale. So, the target for startups or large firms entering new markets in order to be successful should not just be product-market fit, but product-market scale. If you achieve that, you dominate markets and cannot seem to be usurped no matter how few barriers to entry you have.

Value Trade Offs in Online Food Delivery

If you’ve been following the online food delivery space, now is a pretty exciting time. Multiple services are starting up, competing on different value propositions, and many corporations are theoretically launching businesses here as well. There is one clear giant, and it is unclear if any of the upstarts will challenge them. But what is so interesting is how large companies entering the space and new startups alike are confronting the different value trade offs in online food delivery. I’ll first describe the different types of services, their different components, and then their trade offs.

Types of Services

Marketplaces
Services: GrubHub, Seamless, Eat24
Marketplaces aggregates delivery restaurants and allow diners to search for restaurants that deliver to them. The restaurants do their own delivery.

Delivery Services
Services: Postmates, DoorDash, Caviar, Uber Eats
Delivery services offer delivery from restaurants that don’t do their own delivery and deliver the food themselves.

Delivery Only Restaurants
Services: Sprig, Spoonrocket, Maple
Delivery only restaurants have no storefront. They just make food that is available for delivery and deliver the food themselves.

Delivery Only Restaurants that Require Prep
Services: Munchery, Gobble
These restaurant services require some prep work ranging from microwave to stove or oven, but usually it’s only a few minutes of prep required.

Delivery of Ingredients/Recipe Only
Services: Blue Apron, Plated
These services deliver the ingredients and the recipe required to make a meal, but the diner has to cook it themselves.

Delivery of Groceries
Services: Instacart, Fresh Direct
These services deliver whatever items you want from a grocery store.

I won’t go into corporate focused services in this post.

Value Propositions

Variety
People rarely agree on what food they like, let alone on which food they want to eat at a specific time. While GrubHub is currently unmatched in its variety nationally with over 35,000 restaurants, different companies are tackling variety on both sides of the spectrum. Postmates will theoretically offer the most variety as it will pick up food from any establishment. Online food companies like Sprig, Munchery, and Spoonrocket limit options considerably each day. Doordash, Uber Eats and Caviar have the most confusing approach here, as their ability to use their own delivery network does not restrict them to restaurants who already offer delivery, but they curate the list to provide supposedly only great options. GrubHub works with every restaurant that does delivery already, and has expanded the market by convincing many restaurants to start delivery because they see how well other restaurants do by offering that option with GrubHub.

Prep
Convenience has two components: how much work you have to do to eat (prep), and how quickly the food arrives (time). Marketplaces, delivery only restaurants and delivery services deliver ready-to-eat food. Then, there are some that require a little prep, some that require full cooking, and some that require figuring out what to cook and cooking it.

Time
The other convenience layer is time. Delivery only restaurants target 10 minute delivery times by pre-pepping meals and loading them into the cars of their drivers, whereas GrubHub and Eat24 are closer to 45 minutes to an hour depending on the restaurant’s location and type of food. Delivery services tend to take over an hour as they require extra coordination with restaurants. I believe Uber Eats is attempting a hybrid of the delivery service model and the delivery only restaurant model, but I can’t confirm. None of the other services deliver food ready to eat, but they range on how much work is required. The some prep restaurants are more like 10 minutes to heat, and ingredient/recipe services require typically cook time of over 30 minutes to an hour.

Price
Price varies for all of these services. Delivery only restaurants target less than $15 everything included. While that is possible in some cities with marketplaces, it is not in others. Ingredient/recipe delivery services have plans that are under $10 per person. Delivery services tend to charge a fee for delivery or mark up restaurant prices, so they are typically more at $20 and above per person. This incentivizes group order to spread the delivery cost around to multiple people. This is why most delivery services end up focusing on corporate catering instead of consumers over time. Prep delivery only restaurants have different plans to entice regular ordering.

Quality
In marketplaces, the quality options are set by the market, and the diner chooses how good they want their food to be. Delivery services have the same option with perhaps a higher end than marketplaces as the very best restaurants tend not to deliver. The delivery only restaurants tend to be cheap and low quality so far. Whether you had a hand in making it yourself can also be considered a quality parameter, as some people to tend to prefer things they cook themselves.

Planning
With food delivery, one typically does not need to plan in advance to use it, but with new grocery delivery and ingredient/recipe prep services, diners need to plan ahead of time to use the service.

Trade Offs

As you start playing with these value propositions, you recognize some additional constraints. I don’t need to lecture you in price vs. quality. That’s pretty obvious. But what may not be obvious is the trade off between time and quality. Even if you are delivering food from an amazing restaurant, if it takes a long time to get to a diner, it’s typically not very amazing by the time it gets there due to the food being cold. The other interesting trade off is quality vs. variety. At GrubHub, our stance was akin to the saying “quantity is a quality all its own.” In that, if you organized all of the supply, even if you had many amazing restaurants and many not so good ones, the good ones quickly emerged to the top due to ratings and reviews and overall quality of the service improved. So, all GrubHub worried about was variety and convenience, with convenience mostly limited to the ordering and customer service experience. Price and quality were set by the market, but presumably, variety solved quality, with a cap on the high end.

What these new services are doing is taking constants in the marketplace equation and making them variables: prep, time, price, and quality. It is way too early to tell if changing the equation is valuable to the broader market as GrubHub does way more orders in a day than the rest of these services combined. But it will be interesting to watch.

How to Build a Marketing Team at a Consumer Technology Company

I receive many questions about how to build marketing at technology organizations. New entrepreneurs hear terms like growth, user acquisition, and positioning, and don’t know where to start. This should be a handy guide on how marketing looks for a healthy technology organization and why. To start, I’ll re-iterate the definition and explanation of the definition of marketing from my The Incredible Unbundling of Marketing post to understand how we cover everything that is traditionally considered a marketing activity.

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
Source.

Since that’s a mouthful, marketers tend to shorthand with a series of P’s (four to seven depending on who you ask). For products, those are product (the creating part of the definition), price (the exchanging part of the definition), promotion (the communicating part of the definition), place (the delivering part of the definition), positioning (the value part of the definition), people (the people who do the activity), and packaging (another part of the communicating piece of the definition). For services, those are product, price, promotion, place, people, process, and physical evidence.

At technology companies, the product piece is typically carved out as a separate team, and various approaches exist for carving up the rest of the P’s. The most typical is to have a CMO in charge of marketing, and two VP’s that split two types of marketing that tend to require different skills (change that to VP’s and directors if you like).

Brand Marketing
Brand marketing typically includes the strategic and soft skills of marketing. These include the positioning, the target market, packaging, and physical evidence. Positioning primarily transitions to what the brand represents for its target, which is why the group is traditionally called Brand Marketing. They also tend to include the promotional elements that are less quantifiable: PR, content, social, community management, events, campaign building, etc. To be successful in positioning and identifying target markets, market research tends to be in this group.

Growth Marketing
Also known as performance, internet, digital, or online marketing due to its heavy reliance on those areas (sometimes also acquisition and retention marketing), growth marketing typically includes price, process and the parts of promotion that are quantifiable. These include SEO, email marketing, loyalty programs, landing pages, paid acquisition in almost all forms (not just online), referral programs, direct mail, and analytics about marketing and product performance.

How does Growth Marketing work with Brand Marketing?
These two organizations need to work hand in hand, Brand marketing determines who the product is for, and Growth Marketing is primarily responsible for getting people to start and to continue using the product. Growth Marketing determines the best ways to find the target market and reach them, and they work with Brand Marketing to receive appropriate creative that reflects the positioning. Growth Marketing should see branding as increasing the conversion rate on all of their activities. Brand Marketing should see Growth Marketing as the distribution engine for their message.

What about the product?
As we saw in the marketing definition above, product is one of the key P’s that does not seem to be owned by marketing. Also, what is typical in many technology companies is that some of the best opportunities to get people to start using the product come from the product itself (SEO, virality, and landing pages are the main ones), and marketers typically lack the authority as well as the technical skills to make these changes. Product and engineering organizations own these areas. So, what has become common is creating cross-functional teams where growth marketers, engineers, and product managers work together to help growth the product. Depending on which distribution methods work best for the product, the product manager and growth marketer can be indistinguishable or the same role.

Early on in a technology company, there is so much opportunity with product driven growth, that just product managers and engineers work on growth marketing. Growth Marketing tends to emerge as product managers become too busy with core product features, when expertise becomes more of a necessity, and when channels that are less product driven (paid acquisition, email,etc.) become more important. Paid acquisition is usually only tried once a lifetime value can be established, so that growth marketers can be sure to spend significantly less than that to acquire a customer.

How should the Growth cross-functional team work with Growth Marketing?
Growth Marketing needs to become a key stakeholder in the cross-functional growth team in key areas. I have spoken of cross-functional teams before, and the key elements. As we grow, we need to expand a three to four person group to include a growth marketing lead. Not every sub team needs a lead to start. You should never hire to fill org charts, only to add additional value. It should only be where they add value, and the cross-functional team adds value to them. In many of these areas, the product manager is also the growth marketing expert in the area, so the position would be redundant. The first area where Growth Marketing should fit typically would be on paid acquisition or email marketing, depending on the company. This person would get support from the team on the infrastructure to make paid acquisition or email successful (tracking, landing pages, etc.), and this person would bring in knowledge on success from these channels that can be applied to organic channels.

How does Brand Marketing work with a Core Product team?
Brand Marketing should be an early voice in the core product development process helping to mold who the new products is for and how it is positioned. Once development is kicked off, typically the Product Marketer becomes a project manager designed to maximize launch impact of the feature and ongoing adoption, coordinating between the rest of the Brand Marketing team (PR, social, content, events, campaigns,etc.) and the Core Product team. It’s important a Product Marketer has short and long term metrics for adoption.

What does the org chart look like typically?

How to Get a Job at a Technology Company After an MBA

Having been working in technology and startups for a decade and completing an MBA in the process, a frequent question I receive is how can an MBA graduate transfer into the technology industry post-graduation, and many times specifically, into a startup. This question has broken my rule of four: once a question has been asked of me four times, I write a blog post answering it for the masses. This post outlines my advice to those people.

Let’s Say the Hard Thing First: Most Startups Don’t Want You
The thing you have to understand about startups is that they are about belief. A (usually first time) founder with (usually) not much of an understanding of an industry decides s/he can take it on and make it better. If someones has that type of belief in him/herself, that person also believes they can learn all of the skills necessary to execute on their vision, but they don’t have any of those skills when they start. If things happen to go well, the founder/s quickly realize they do have some skills they can’t or don’t have the time to learn that are necessary to scale the business. So, what they look for in people they bring onto their teams is someone with a skill set that can fill a weakness of theirs or their teams. This usually means previous experience in startups as the challenges are so unique.

Most MBAs do not have any startup experience, and founders won’t be impressed if you won your business plan competition during school. They probably never wrote one anyway. If you don’t have a skill they need right now, they feel like they are wasting their time talking to you. In fact, the more likely a startup founder is to talk to you, the less likely it is going to be a successful startup.

Most startups also pay below market values, and MBAs tend to have salary requirements to help them pay down their debt. I remember interviewing MBAs for a position that would report to me. Almost all of them asked for more money in salary than I was making. Essentially, what happens is they don’t want your salary, and they don’t yet need your strategic skills. They need executional skills you probably don’t have.

The Baby Step: Start at an Established Tech Company
Most MBA are deep in debt, and they want to go head on in a new direction. Some times, that may work. But my advice for people wanting to get into startups is to take a baby step. Instead of targeting companies with 15-50 people, target established tech companies. The main reason for this is to build up the set of skills startups needs. Where can you learn those skills? From people that previously worked in startups. Many of those people are still working for what was a startup and is now a successful tech company. The bonus of this situation is that since these companies are bigger, they are more likely to value MBA skills and more likely to have training programs to help you learn the skills startups need. So, if you work at a, say, LinkedIn, for two years, you probably learn a thing or two that scales down to a startup. The other great thing about established tech companies is they are likely to offer internships for MBAs, which are critically important during the summer time off.

What to Do at an Established Tech Company
The next question becomes what to work on at an established tech company. This is a trade off between how much of your skills translate to what they need, and what you want to learn. Let’s say you were in finance before your MBA, and you want to get into marketing. Perhaps an FP&A position that focuses on marketing spend would be an ideal option as it gives you exposure into all the marketing data and probably a lot of the marketers you want to learn from. Perhaps there is a marketing position available that they can train you in at the start. That is ideal. If not, you may be able to transfer later as you learn the lingo.

The Bottom Line
Changing industries is a long term play. You can’t expect to just hop into a new industry with no expertise and get your ideal role at your ideal company. If that role is a role at a startup, play the long game by building skills at a larger company first and working with the right people to make sure that can translate a few years down the line.

The Startup Marketing Funnel

Quite a few startups have asked me how to approach their marketing plan. They hear that it’s important to do specific things, but that list eventually grows long, and they don’t have a plan of attack or a prioritization. While my post on three phases of startup marketing helps, it doesn’t go into enough detail on the framework behind that prioritization, and what to do with a new idea not represented there. Well, the good news is there is a framework you can apply to evaluate a list of ideas and prioritize them, and it’s not too different from the traditional marketing world. It just may be a bit inverted.

You may have seen a marketing funnel like this before (everyone calls the stages different things, but it’s generally something like this):

Startup marketing is a bit different. Instead of products being driven top down as in the above diagram, startups have to work bottom up due to budgets and what will be effective. Also, startups need to focus more on the inverted funnel post-use not seen in the above. So, your startup marketing funnel looks like this:

Now, instead of working top down here, startups need to work inside out. You work on the on site experience to make sure the few users who come convert and have a great experience. Then, you get them to come back and have another great experience. Once they are hooked, you ask them to invite friends. At this time, you also target those who came and didn’t convert. Then, you target those with a need for your product that haven’t tried. Then, you can define your core audience well from those using the product and do core audience targeting to find more like them. After saturating all of those methods, you finally work on general awareness.

Now, how does that translate to tactics. Well, let’s have a look:

Making sure people convert is all about conversion rate optimization. Email and push can help trials turn into repeat purchases, but the big winner there is an engaging product experience or a community. To get those who checked the product out but didn’t convert, you use use retargeting. To find others in need of the product, you focus on search (paid or organic). To find more people like your current audience, you can use Facebook lookalike targeting or interest targeting (thousands of other options here as well, of course). to pursue general awareness, that’s typically when you work on larger spend initiatives like TV, radio, outdoor, and sometimes PR.

Follow this funnel, focusing on each step until it saturates, and you can be sure you’re always working on the most effective and impactful projects to grow your business. Conversion, product, and community never tend to saturate, so you’ll almost always have dedicated people working on that even as you move further up the funnel.

Currently listening to Sonnet by Benoît Pioulard.

A Primer on Startup SEO

As I advise startups on growth, one of the most common questions I receive is “should we be working on SEO?”. At this point, I tend to remind them of the three phases of scaling startup marketing or show them Andrew Chen’s great post on the few ways to scale user growth. In today’s mobile-first landscape, with the limited scale of the App Store/Google Play, the answer is actually a bit more nuanced. So I created a guideline on how to answer this question for any startup.

Step 1: Keyword Research
The first question to answer when thinking about SEO for your business is “what should my business show up for?”, which really is asking the question, “what is my business about?”. Unlike branding, where the point is to synthesize that answer into as few clear words as possible, keyword research is about generating as many answers to that question as possible. These will be your potential keywords. I like to use the framework: who, what, when, where, how to answer this question. Let’s take the example of GrubHub:

Who: GrubHub, restaurant names we represent
What: food, delivery, menus, pizza, thai, indian, chinese
When: breakfast, lunch, dinner, late night
Where: every city, neighborhood, zip code, college covered
How: online ordering, mobile app, iphone app, android app

Take these words, combine them all into new keyword combinations in Excel e.g. “late night pizza delivery berkeley”, and check to see how much search volume they have. To do that, use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner. Click “Get search volume for a list of keywords”. Take the keywords from the exercise above and paste them in. Click “Get search volume”. Click on Keyword Ideas tab. You can also do this process again to find new keywords by clicking “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas” at the beginning.

You can now see how much search volume is closely related to your business. Search volume determines how much your prioritize SEO for your business. Now, there is no hard and fast rule for how much search volume there needs to be for you to get excited about it as an opportunity. It depends on purchase size, how much you want to grow, etc. Generally, I recommend taking all of those keyword’s search volume, assuming you can get a very small percentage of it to your site e.g. 1%, and seeing if that would make an impact on your business.

Now that you have an idea of the search volume for your business, you need to know how competitive that real estate is. Fortunately, Google estimates how competitive they think each keyword is next to the search volume estimate. It lacks the granularity I’d like, but it’s a good starting point. What I do in addition to looking at this gauge is do some spot searches and see what the results look like. Here, I’m looking for two things:
1) Are the results primarily businesses you would consider competitors or blogs?
2) Are the pages that are showing up well optimized for the keywords you searched or not? Are they dedicated landing pages or home pages? (I’ll go into more detail on how to measure this a little later in this post)

Step 2: Picking an SEO Strategy
Now, you should have an answer to two questions:
1) Do my keywords have a lot of search volume?
2) Are those keywords competitive or not?

This creates four scenarios:

High Search Volume/Low Competition: Make Priority
This is a rare opportunity, and you can build a great business just off of SEO here. You should make SEO a priority and one of your primary growth strategies.

High search volume/High Competition: Play for Long Term/Make Core Competency
This means the ROI is there with SEO in the long run, but it will be hard to get it as a startup. You will need to organize the entire company around SEO to win, by making SEO a core competency of the company.

Low Search Volume/Low Competition: Content Marketing
This is common with startups that are creating new products or product categories, especially in mobile apps. They do not have enough demand yet. The general approach here is to expand your keyword target to the broader industry that does have high search volume, and pursue a content marketing strategy around those keywords that mentions your product/service occasionally in them.

Low Search Volume/High Competition: Ignore
Feel free to ignore SEO as a strategy here unless something changes.

This allows us to build a 2×2 to express SEO strategy options:

Step 3: Actually Working on SEO

Assuming you’re not in the low search volume/high competition bucket, you’ll want to start figuring out how to work on SEO. To do that, it’s helpful to make sure we define what we’re doing. Search engine optimization is the process sites use to appear in the organic results of search engines. To have a process, you need to understand what search engines do.

1) Search engines use crawlers to discover pages across the web.
2) They read any content they can find (mostly text)

So, in order to succeed, you need to be discoverable and readable. Once your page is discovered, search engines determines the authority of the page
Once your page is read, search engines determines what the relevance is for certain searches.

Determining Relevance: On-Page Factors
So how do search engines determine relevance? Well, here’s a rough hierarchy. They look at the title tag of the page first then the H1’s and H2’s, thing that typically indicate importance in HTML. Then they read normal text, and they look at what the URL says. They also look at this page compared to all the pages in their index and see how unique this page is compared to the rest. Search engines prefer unique content. They also look at the last time the page was updated. Frequently updated pages are seen as more reliable to Pinterest. They also look at the # of links on the page. A page with a ton of links is associated with a worse user experience and having less relevance. They also look at where the keywords are on a page. Google breaks up the page into header, footer, sidebars, and content area. Keywords in the content area are weighted higher. They also look at the # of content types. A page with text, video, and images is seen as better than just a page with one of those. They also look at the # of ad blocks on the page. A page with a bunch of ads is seen as less relevant. I know that sounds like a lot to pay attention to, so just keep this short list handy:

  • Title Tags
  • HTML Tags
  • Text
  • URL of the page
  • Uniqueness
  • Freshness
  • Number of Links on the Page
  • Keyword location on the Page
  • Diversity of content types
  • Number of ad blocks on the page

    • Make no mistake about it. This is mostly engineering work. You have to be messing with your site to get it to rank better. Mostly, this means creating pages specifically for keywords you want to target, and optimizing the above for these pages. I have seen so many startups think they can cover SEO by hiring a marketer to manage it. Unless they get engineering help, it will not work.

    Note: this is what you check to answer if your keywords are competitive in Step 2.

    Determining Authority: Off-Page Factors
    So, how do search engines determine authority? Well, the main two things are quantity and quality of external links to the page and domain. Search engines see links as votes, so if another site links to you, that’s a vote that you’re an authority. Now, not all votes are ranked equal. A link from the San Francisco Chronicle will be worth more than a link from my blog. They also look at how other sites link to you. So, the anchor text is very important. If a link says home decor, that will help more than a link that says click here. They also do look at internal links within a site. So, us linking to something from our home page indicates that we think it’s very important, where as a link from our Help page is not as important. Search engines also look at the data they accumulate about a page. So, when a page gets clicked from Google, they look at the bounce rate. When Google shows a page in a search result, they also look at its click through rate. They also look at which parts of the page people link from. A link from the content area of another page is worth more than a footer link. They also look at the diversity of link types. A page that gets links from blogs, news sites, and social media will be better than just a bunch of links from blogs. Too much detail again? Don’t worry; I have you covered with another list:

  • Quantity of external links pointing to page/domain
  • Quality of external links pointing to page/domain
  • Anchor text of links
  • Internal links pointing to the page
  • Metrics from search engines (bounce rate and click through rate)
  • Area on page of internal/external links
  • Diversity of link types

    • If you’re building a good company, this is mostly public relations and business development work. Also, if you’re working on content marketing, the quality of the content alone can drive links, which is why you see every company trying to push their infographics everywhere. Widgets have traditionally been a strong strategy here that may be waning in importance.

    Appendix: Tools at Your Disposal
    Now, search engines give you some tools to help you do this. So, I’ll describe them.

    Google/Bing Webmaster Tools: These destinations give you a host of information on keywords you rank for, crawl rate, errors etc.
    Meta Tags: By default, search engines will use your title tags and meta descriptions to populate how your listings appear on their sites
    Sitemaps: This is a way to send search engines every page you want them to index instead of waiting for them to find a link to it. No guarantee they’ll index all those pages, but they’ll look at them.
    Nofollow Tags: With the explosion of user-generated content and social media, spammers started flooding these sites with links to rank on search engines. Given that it’s very hard to monitor all that content, search engines allow sites to add rel=nofollow to outbound links, saying you can’t vouch for the site you’re linking to. Pinterest uses nofollow to external links as do most other social media sites.
    Canonical Tags: another cool tag. As we said before, Google likes unique content. But Google may figure out how to access the same content from multiple URL’s. If that happens, when Google finds a duplicate version of a page, you can add the rel=canonical tag in the head to indicate that if this page gets a link, use it for this other URL with the same content.
    Hreflang Tags: helps tell Google which version of a page to show users in different languages and countries.
    301 redirects: URL’s change all the time. But if a URL changes, normally that would be considered a new URL that needs to generate its own authority. If you 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL, Google will transfer some of the authority of the old URL to the new URL.
    robots.txt: Search engines obey operatives in your robots.txt file or in meta robots on which pages to crawl or index.
    Rich snippets: This will show different content under your listing, like star ratings and other meta data to help your listing stand out.

    Three Phases of Scaling Startup Marketing

    Quite a few people have asked me recently how to scale their marketing efforts. The short answer is: as leanly as possible. I have realized that while many entrepreneurs intuitively understand that statement, they do not understand what that means in terms of what types of marketing you try and in what order. I have developed a framework to easily identify how to think about this process that scales across different types of startups that I will present below.

    Pre-amble I: The Three Costs

    The first thing that’s important to understand before delving into this framework is that lean = with as little cost as possible, and that costs come in three areas: marketing expenses, development expenses, and payroll expenses. Marketing expenses are pretty easy to explain. If you spend $5,000 on Google AdWords this month, and each ad promised $5 off, your marketing expenses are the $5,000 for AdWords plus $5 times the numbers of conversions that redeemed the $5 off promotion. Development expenses are a little more difficult. If you outsource development, it may be easy to think that the development expenses are how you paid your developers, but that would be incorrect. The real issue here is the opportunity cost. Whether you have your own developers or outsource, if your developers work on, say, SEO initiatives, that is time they are not spending on new features for your customers, infrastructure scalability, et al. The third cost is payroll expenses. This is the cost relating to paying the marketing people on your team. Early on in startups, payroll can be the largest expense, so adding people to your team, especially in marketing, needs to be carefully considered as payroll expenses are harder to adjust than marketing or development expenses. The only way to adjust them is to fire someone or reduce their salary, and both can have a negative effect on employee morale and company culture.

    Pre-amble II: The Metrics

    After you understand costs, you need to understand the metrics on how to evaluate marketing decisions. For startups where a customer pays you for a product or service, this is a little bit easier than if you have yet to determine a business model. A couple key metrics for me (forgive me if some of this is basic):

    CPA (Cost per Acquisition): For this metric, you take the amount you spend in marketing expenses, and divide it by the number of new customers you acquired. So, in our previous AdWords example, let’s say I acquired 500 customers with that effort. That would make my CPA:
    Cost: $5,000 + ($5 * 500) = $7,500
    New Customers: 500
    CPA: Costs/New Customers: $15

    Revenue/User/Time frame: The CPA is not very meaningful until you know how it compares to the revenue those new customers brought you. The important thing here is not to just compare the revenue of the initial sales of that customer if they are likely to purchase again. If they are likely to purchase again, use cohort analysis to determine how much in revenue those new customers will make you over a certain time frame. The obvious question is how long a time frame should I use to compare against CPA. The short answer is as long you can reasonably predict. So, if you have enough data for a marketing channel to accurately predict how much a new customers from a new channel will make for your business over a two year time frame, you should feel comfortable comparing to a two year value. In reality, a startup almost never will have the data to accurately predict that far ahead. At the start, you may only have three months of reliable data. Reliable means both statistically significant i.e. not just 12 customers, but a reasonably sized population, and a situation where historical customers are representative of the newest customers. Once a startup reaches some scale, the latter requirement is the hardest. As a startup attracts more and more new customers, it typically has to start targeting customers that are less likely be early adopters and less likely to experience the pain your product solves as acutely as those who found it early on. Both of which will likely make new customers today less valuable than new customers from a year ago, keeping all other variables static. I almost always advise startups to keep their revenue metrics to a year or lower. After a year, you are waiting a very long time to prove your assumptions correct, and need to start discounting for the time value of money.

    Volume: This basically asks is a marketing channel generating 12 customers or 1,200. This will determine how to prioritize resources among marketing channels.

    Potential: This asks if a marketing channel has room to grow, and just needs more budget/people/development resources to achieve that potential, or is it already maxed out.

    Marketing Profit: In this sense, profit equates to Revenue/User – CPA. Channels that have high Marketing Profit are going to be the areas you want to invest more time/money/people in, if the potential has not been reached and the volume is significant.

    Note: Some marketers may want to add in the promo costs not in CPA, but subtract it from the revenue side. I dislike this approach, as it increases variability on both sides of the CPA vs. ARPU model, which makes it harder to compare the effectiveness of specific marketing channels just by looking at CPA.

    Phase 1: Product Driven Growth
    Scalable, Measurable, Engineering Opportunity Cost Driven

    The leanest way to acquire customers is not to spend any money on them and not spend any money on marketing people. The chief ways to do that are to use the product you have already built to acquire more customers. There are four main ways:

    Product Quality: This is the case where your product is so damn amazing that every person that uses it naturally tells everyone they know about it, and that’s what drives growth. In another, this is the build it and they will come strategy. Also known as a pipe dream. But improving the core product every day helps grow it, and people sometimes forget that.

    Search Engine Optimization: This is the process of designing your site to appeal to search engines to rank for relevant queries to your business. Depending on the business, this may be a large opportunity or a very small one, and a very crowded space or a relatively sparse space. The main question to ask is: are people on search engines currently searching for keywords that closely match the product or service I provide? If so, can I reasonably expect that by designing by site using Google best practices with some well placed content that I could rank in the top five for any keywords that in aggregate would drive a meaningful amount of new customers? You may offer a product with a ton of keywords, but heavily competitive for SEO e.g. consumer real estate, or a product with no keyword volume, but also sparse for SEO e.g. a technical solution for resin casting.

    Referrals/Viral Loops: This is the tactic of asking current customers to invite others to the service, perhaps offering a financial or psychological incentive. This is a fairly low development tactic with high upside and little downside, so it is very popular.

    Conversion Rate Optimization: This is the process of making continual changes to a website/mobile app/landing page with the goal of increasing the amount of visitors who turn into conversions. The only costs here are development costs, but the effects are very measurable. This may be difficult to do until you have enough traffic on your site accurately measure lifts in conversion rate.

    Main constraint: Development resources
    What should happen here: You start here, iterate as much as you can until your development pipeline gets too clogged. Then, as you wait for development to catch up, you move onto Phase 2.

    Phase 2: Performance Marketing
    Measurable, Scalable, Marketing Budget Driven

    The next leanest way to acquire customers is to develop marketing systems that, once created, can scale from driving dozens of new customers to thousands with the only additional input being more marketing expenses. Early marketers in a startup can focus on marketing efforts that scale without having to hire more marketers and have vast potential. If you don’t have a business model yet, most of these tactics (besides email or push notifications) will be off limits, as you will have no Revenue/User/Time frame to compare CPA’s against.

    Search Engine Marketing: This is targeted specific keywords on Google and Bing and bidding to show an ad for your product or service to potential new customers at the top of the page. Like SEO, you need to determine if the search engines have enough search volume to make this an effective channel. You also need to determine how expensive it is for you to bid on keywords and convert them. If there is a lot of search volume and not a lot of competition, this can be a very effective way to drive customers, and is very trackable to CPA goals down to the ad and keyword level.

    Email Marketing: This is sending either mass or, preferably, targeted and personalized emails to your existing user base to either convert them into a paying customer or entice repeat purchases. This is probably the most cost-effective and under-utilized tactic for most startups.

    Online/Mobile Display Advertising: This is showing banner ads on websites and mobile apps. Most startups use retargeting to reach people that have already been to their site but not converted. More sophisticated startups are experimenting with real time bidding to find ad impressions that are likely to reach their target market. The challenge here is determining effectiveness of spend as few people click ads, and correlating views to purchases is a dicey proposition. There is near limitless inventory to spend on if you can determine effectiveness.

    Main constraint: Money and diminishing returns
    What should happen here: You experiment with a few paid, scalable channels, find the ones that work, and scale them until you see diminishing returns. If your team still has bandwidth, then you have them contribute with Phase 3 tactics. If your team doesn’t have bandwidth to scale these techniques, but they work, you should hire a dedicated resource for them.

    Phase 3: Brand Marketing
    Non-Measurable, Non-Scalable, People Driven

    These are techniques that have one-time value, and/or require not just increased investment, but also increased resources (read: people or development) to scale. They are also frequently going to only work in one market or for one type of customer.

    Content marketing: Content marketing has many names, but is the creation of blog posts, articles, videos, of infographics that are of interest to your target customer. They can be great content to help rank for SEO, especially if your business does not have more direct keywords to target. It is even more impactful as content for social media or distribution to media outlets. It is non-scalable because if you want to do more of it, you have to produce more of it, and it’s time consuming to do it well unless it’s user-generated.

    Out of home: This is the process of buying billboards, bus shelters et al. out in the real world and placing ads for your business in them. This can be very expensive, but also very valuable if there’s a way to use them to target a very valuable audience e.g. hungry urban professionals right before dinner in GrubHub’s case. It’s non-scalabale because only certain geographies will have good opportunities, and what will work in one geography may not even be an option in another.

    Community management: This is either using a section of your site/app or more likely social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook to communicate with your audience in conversations they are interested in having with you. This is a great way to provide quality customer service and create evangelists. It is non-scalable as it requires a dedicated resource to monitor these channels, and as you scale, to keep up quality, you need to add more dedicated people for it.

    Public relations: This is the process of getting news outlets to showcase you. It is non-scalable because it provides a bump, not an engine, requiring constant efforts to make it a consistent source of traffic.

    Marketing promotions: This is the process of a creating a compelling campaign that attracts people to your business, whether it’s a contest, event, etc.

    Main constraint: People
    What should happen here: Use your existing team to determine which of these is important for your company, and then staff accordingly.

    Running All Three Phases

    These phases do not imply that you focus all of your efforts on phase I, max out, and then move onto the next phase. The reality is that the constraints of the various phases set in quickly. So, it could that in close to no time at all, you are executing programs in all phases. This blog post just provides the framework for prioritization and best practices for maximizing how you grow your marketing programs.

    Make Choices (And Stick By Them)

    Above is one of my favorite scenes from Wonder Boys (2000), about a writing professor who can’t seem to finish his new book because he keeps writing so many different parts. Now, at over 2,000 pages long, he sees no end in sight. I see this problem in the world of startups quite a bit. Growing startups see someone else doing something that is gaining traction, and then they add that use case to their company as well. Instead of sticking with the earlier choice of their business’s direction, they now try to remove that direction and accommodate more choices. Need I remind you of every company launching their own daily deals arm, or Facebook copying every social startup ever.

    For growing companies, it’s a very common feeling in a business to always be jealous of what another business has and neglect all the things your business has going for it that the other one does not. But it is still wrong. You made a choice, and it looks like it’s working. Don’t undo those choices you made and ruin your growth. For companies with some growth, the lure of an attractive market segment can be overwhelming at times, but choosing to focus has more advantages. The first is that you develop a concrete brand for your customers. They know what you stand for, and what you are trying to achieve. What the risk of expanding too early? For growing companies, the main one is alienating your core customers. Let’s say you operate a luxury good, and to expand your market potential you offer a lower cost offering. What your brand used to stand for (exclusiveness, personal service) changes as the market is expanded. Those core customers may no longer identify with your company of your other customers and may now seek alternatives. What also happens is all that thought and development time that went into the expansion did not go into your core business.

    I would argue you should choose to focus on one use case for one customer segment for as long as humanly possible as a growing company. That runway ends when you anticipate either a technology shift away from your use case (for Dropbox, that would be something like less reliance on files due to cloud services in the future), you are running out of ways to add value to your core segment’s core use case, or your use case stops growing for that segment (note: this is different from the game theoretical or innovator’s dilemma problems of more established companies where action should be taken quicker, but isn’t). I think a lot of startups fall into the trap of “this isn’t a large enough market”, as if acting like venture capitalists responding to their pitch. First off, market size only matters if you capture a meaningful piece of a market, so you should focus on capturing a meaningful piece first. That will also give you a much better understanding of how big the market could be. Second, you are most likely not a VC. You don’t need a home run to be successful. VC’s do, because most of their other investments will fail.

    To wrap up, starting a business a is a choice, and you should make sure the product of your business reflects strong choices as well. You need to give that product a chance to show you made the right choices, and if you did, don’t second guess your direction because another business has made some good choices as well.

    The Contradictory Nature of Mobile Unbundling and the Emergence of Niche Marketplaces

    Two specific, but highly related, points of view are gaining widespread acceptance among venture capitalists in the technology industry. The first is succinctly explained by venture capitalist Albert Wenger in a post called Facebook’s Real Mobile Problem: Unbundling. The gist of the post can be summed up by this comment: “Mobile devices are doing to web services what web services did to print media: they unbundle.” Fellow venture capitalist Andrew Weissman expanded on this idea in a post called The Great Fragmentation. In it, Andrew goes further, arguing that unbundling might be a core feature of the internet.

    A second, but related point, is the emergence of the niche marketplace. Venture capitalist Andrew Parker has a post called The Spawn of Craigslist in which he shows how the behemoth marketplace Craigslist is getting slowly disrupted in a vertical-specific way. Venture capitalist Chris Dixon expands on this idea, saying that the only way to be successful as an online marketplace now is to take a vertical-specific approach.

    Together, these venture capitalists describe a future in which there is a specific app or specific marketplace for every need a user might have. Instead of going to Craigslist to find an apartment, movers, a maid, a freelance web designer for your home business, a date, and last minute tickets, a mobile user would instead have an app for Padmapper, TaskRabbit, Homejoy, ODesk, HowAboutWe, and WillCall. The key to being a successful venture capitalist then shifts from finding businesses that tackle very large markets e.g. Craigslist to finding businesses that target markets that could be much bigger with unbundling e.g. Airbnb.

    All of these VC’s are clearly smarter than me, but I take a somewhat contrarian view here. I hope the above example points out the main problem with this theory. In the above picture, in order for this mobile user to accomplish his/her goals, instead of needing to just know about and have an app for Craigslist, s/he now needs to know about and have apps for six separate businesses. One other thing venture capitalists agree on is that mobile app discovery is hard, and that the amount of apps mobile users will download and use is limited by both device memory as well as human memory. This same problem faces the sellers of services on marketplaces. With no aggregate marketplace, it may be harder for a seller of multiple services to know which ones exist for which product/service they are selling. Marketplaces thrive on a multitude of buyers and sellers. Unbundling of marketplaces makes building that two-sided network harder.

    Something has to give here. You can’t have a future where everything is accomplished online via a mobile device, consumer’s preference on mobile is for apps, there will be hundreds of specific services for anything a user needs that are more powerful than aggregate services, app discovery is difficult, and people will only have 41 apps per phone. I think there is some sort of equilibrium here. Even if app discovery is solved (and that’s a hard problem), the rate of successful unbundling certainly seems like it has to be limited by 1) the amount of space on someone’s phone, and 2) user’s inability to be aware of hundreds of niche services they may need at any time. If you think a recommendation engine could solve this with big data, I recommend you read this article about how successful that’s been for other services.

    If I had to guess, I would surmise that user unbundling will not be a trend in and of itself, even if it is a trend in technology startups building new businesses. Unbundling will continue when either 1) the frequency of the activity that is being unbundled is high (my standard would be weekly), or 2) the advantage of the unbundling is exponentially more valuable than the bundled version of the same activity. For criterion 2, that advantage will also be a moving target where the advantage has to become greater and greater to justify phone/brain space as more apps improve their utility. Number of apps per phone will continue to grow, but a decreasing rate, and with that growth, there will be a decreasing state of awareness for both apps that are on a user’s phone and ones that are not. If you doubt this, just think of how many websites you visit regularly. Think hard. It isn’t that high, is it? Now think about apps? Even less? Me too.

    So, what does this all mean? Well, my take is that high frequency services like chat or picture taking continue to become unbundled from any aggregate services consumers use for them because of the ability of mobile to create superior user experiences for succinct actions. But, marketplaces that aggregate niche activities that users need only occasionally can continue to thrive e.g. eBay and Craigslist. One should expect only a handful of the dozens of services hoping to disrupt Craigslist or eBay or Amazon to survive, because of fantastic user experience or a high frequency of use. Finally, one should not be so quick to anoint the niche marketplace model as the emergence of mobile presents as many limitations to their success as it does opportunities for growth.