Marketing

Paul who I met at Reboot is starting up a new web service SiteVista for checking out what web pages look like from a whole range of web browsers. It’s pretty cool and extremely useful.

In this blog post he is debating openly about pricestructure for his service. This is one of those subject areas that are very scary to open up, so congratulations to Paul for having the guts to do so.

I want to do so for StakeItOut as well, but will wait until such a time that I have a few more features in it for me to tell the StakeItOut story better.

During the Reboot 7 conference one of the most interesting sessions was Jason Fried from 37Signals titled “Doing big things with small teams”.

It is the story how they have managed to roll out:

• Basecamp
• Tada-list
• Backpack

Using very few resources and quickly. It was basically a tale of bootstrapping successfull commercial web services.

Much of what he said runs along the same thread that I have been pushing here. In fact there was really very little I would be in disagreement with.

The main things that where enlightening for me was their tech support strategy. Jason does most of the techsupport for all of their sites himself. If someone has a suggestion he replies back to them thanking them for the idea and immediately deletes the mail. If enough people suggest a feature it will be memorable enough that it will make it on the todo list.

He also stressed the importance of leaving applications as simple as possible, allowing people to structure things their own way and not imposing structures upon them.

Several people asked him if they didn’t want to grow bigger. He replied that currently that would not be a priority for them as that would take the enjoyment out of it. I am absolutely in violent agreement with this.

The reboot participang notes from Jason’s session

James and Johnnie gave their OpenSauceLive seminar at Reboot 7.

The basic idea is to not just open up your marketing but also how to open it right. They had some clever little exercises we did to examining the process of collaborating and how to deal with the uncertainty.

The following is the result of one of these exercises I had with Alexis . We had to each draw a line at a time trying to create a face. It was quite interesting, including the analysis. It is sort of like throwing an idea out into the blogosphere and watching it develop into areas you would never have thought. This applies to marketing as when you do collaborative marketing you really need to expect the unexpected and learn how to see where it’s going.

del.icio.us/tag/opensaucelive for links from the seminar.

Joseph writes this peice Look for competition last where he postulates that worrying about competitors at an early stage is a bad idea.

I find a lot of people that have great ideas and concepts, but they throw them out because they do some research, and find a plethora of competition. That’s a big mistake.

If there weren’t competition in an industry, there wouldn’t be a market. So, when you’re thinking about ideas, DO NOT plan your business by looking at your competition. Plan your business by using your mind and your own resources. Think about what you and other people would want as customers of your new business and build from there.

This is all excellent advice and fits right into my rants about The evils of business plans and bootstrap a business versus playing a business .

My Task: Explain StakeItOut in a size suitable for a rss feed item.

Word and Excel files are just so old school. Now we share information in our blogs, wikis, backpackits and Basecamps

Startups and other projects need secure places to share their online stuff. They need their stuff to work together even thought the stuff is served from different services and vendors.

StakeItOut allows small groups to work together building and shareing their particular assets to grow and manage their goals.

It is not a project manager, for that use Basecamp. Rather it is a way of gluing it all together.

Your Task: When you are deep in something it is often difficult to explain what you are thinking and doing to people who are outside your brain. It is however important. Therefore I would like to publically edit and maintain this RSS (Elevator) pitch with your help.

Does the above pitch make any sense at all? I know that I have only let a few of you in yet. So it would be cool to build up a pitch that someone who is not I and hasn’t tried it can understand.

So please break my heart and tear it apart either in your own blog (trackback please) or in the comments. If you want to feel free to rewrite it in your own words.