Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 14 Dec 2006 03:15:00 GMT
renkoo just spammed me with 3 emails about their service.
so naturally I went and looked. I heard of renkoo a while back, but can’t remember what it was all about.
We’re sorry, but you seem to be using a browser we don’t support yet.
Supported browsers: Firefox 1+ and Internet Explorer 6+. Safari and Opera are not currently supported due to their buggy implementations of progressive rendering. Please whine to the Safari and Opera teams, not to us.
screw that.. I’m not whining to anyone. I’m just not bothering to use your site.
you need my eyeballs.. I don’t need your site.. don’t entrepreneurs get that yet? thats the economics of abundance at work.
If you don’t care to support the browser I’m using I’m not going to even bother. shit the go away message doesn’t even tell me what renkoo is about, or give me an idea on what I’m missing.
oh.. and stick a never-mail-me-again link in your spam email.
Tags marketing, renkoo, safari | 3 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:50:00 GMT
I forgot an important lesson yesterday.
Your Customers are not always the same group as your users.
This is especially relevant on ‘free’ web sites, or for people who offer ‘free’ services, and it sucks if you don’t realize this.
The customers are the ones who pay you (intrinsically or extrinsically). The users are the people who view your site. you need to remember (and I didn’t) that your site or service is also aimed at the customers.
I’m not saying the people who view the site aren’t important. The users are important as they perform a function the customer is willing to pay for, but so are the people paying the bills.
It can also help to remember this when you write your value proposition section of your business plan, as it opens up a line of thought and dialogue which you might not have had otherwise
Posted in Business Related | Tags bplan, customer, marketing | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sat, 27 May 2006 14:31:00 GMT
I’m sure not going to give this justice, but I thought there was a need to blog about this. This is just a summary of the marketing subject I did a while back.
first of all.. marketing is not just PR or advertising, although that is what most people think, by the time you hear about it the marketing is about over.
ok marketing starts by figuring out:
1. who uses / who do we want to use our thing
2. what our thing should be (the 4 or 7 P's you may have heard about)
3. how do we tell people about it in a way they will understand
who uses it?
—-——
this is done via market research.
The aim here is to figure out how to group the people together by certain features they have.
this could be:
- age / salary (demographic)
- lifestyle (physographic, yuppies, dinks etc)
- size of business (smb/fortune 500 etc)
these are called segments.
each of these segments/groups have different requirements and ‘profit’ potential. The hard part in this is figuring out how to divide everyone up. Smart Marketing people are the ones who see similarities/groups where others don’t.
market research also determines what each group need/want. while each individual’s needs would be different, statistically there should be a commonality inside of the segment.
what our thing should be/the marketing mix
—-—-—-——
your 2nd job in marketing is figuring out what features are important to each group / (or just the group you are interested in chasing). and mapping out how your product addresses each of these features (and how your competitors do it as well)
while we might suck at ease of use for instance, the segment we are ‘targeting’ don’t care about it.. but they do care about ease of integration.
this is usually divided into the 4 P’s (for a product) and 7 for a service
- Place
- Product
- Price
- Promotion
(and for a service the extra are)
- Process
- People
- Physical evidence
I’m not going to go into each one.. go google for ‘marketing mix’ or 4p’s for more info.
I just want to say that Price is still important to OSS. it isn’t about the sticker price.. it’s about the total cost of ownership.
so marketing isn’t all about what features goes into the product, it’s about how you ‘position’ it in relation to others as well.
eg..competing product ‘F’ may have XYZ, but we know through our analysis that our group really only care about X and Z and have a unmet need W. so we design something around XWZ.
now in some cases just because people want something doesn’t mean we have to provide it either.. (eg low switching costs) especially if no one else is doing it.
how do we tell people about it?/communication
——-
this is where PR comes in, but that isn’t the only thing.
communications is all about getting our message to the right people.
remember we are not after EVERYONE we are just after the people in that segment, and that we might have different messages to different segments.
this might involve mass-media advertising (pages in magazines that our segment read)
or showing up in trade/developer shows, or going to a client’s workplace and giving a presentation to their executive staff,
or even hosting a presentation at a conference saying why feature ‘W’ is so important (and being impartial never mentioning our product, knowing full well ours is the only one who does ‘W’ correctly) and why ‘Y’ is a waste of time.
This is why you sometimes see different ‘campaigns’ stressing different features.
ie .. car XYZ is safe in someplace, and car XYZ is cheap/fun in others.
note.. this is not selling.. all marketing does is create/define a need within the certain group. Selling involves people showing how our product meets those needs.
anyway.. thats my understanding.. feel free to comment about how wrong it is.
Posted in Business Related | Tags marketing | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Fri, 12 May 2006 15:07:00 GMT
In a recent post to one of the private member lists inside of the Apache Software Foundation, we were told that one of a project’s major contributors (of the project, not the ASF itself.. don’t get alarmed) was pulling out, due to the company he is currently working for switching standards.
The poster was a bit glum, about it, but as one of the other members mentioned:
Fortunately we have strong support from many sides.
This is the key to open source. It isn’t about a individual or a particular company.
When reviewing your open source project for possible use in your organisation, you need to ask:
Is this project a Hydra?
If one of the heads gets chopped off, will 3 others grow to replace it?
If not, avoid it.
This is one of the key reasons for the incubator in Apache, and what makes Apache projects what they are.
Don’t get me wrong, there are other factors you need to consider, (the Hydra was vanquished after all), but I believe this is what seperates True Open source projects, and open source ‘marketing’ wannabe’s.
Posted in Business Related | Tags hydra, marketing, opensource | 2 comments | 1 trackback
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:53:00 GMT
On The relevance blog
today, Stuart mentions how his company underbids his competitors by 30-50% for projects. and how rails lets him do this.
Personally I’m not so sure I would be doing this. (disclaimer: I haven’t placed a bid for anything for a long time).
why not?
price = quality for a lot of people, and by being so far out of whack of your competition it signals to the potential buyer that you are going to do a shoddy job. your sales guy now has to convince them of your quality, and of the quality of rails itself. Until you have educated your potential buyer that rails CAN actually deliver quality at such a low price point, I would be going for a price more inline with everyone else.
cost != value. just because it costs you half to build something doesn’t mean you should be charging half for it.
you are driving the market price down and starting a price war. For this contract you might get the deal, but in the long term you will force the java guys to go hungry, and they will in turn be forced to lower their prices to compete, and probably switch to rails/django as well. so.. all you have done is given your self a year of ‘ok’ profits, and then you will be subject to intense competition at the lower price point. The only winner there is your buyer. not you or the java guy.
If I were the marketing person in your company (or the person who ends up figuring out the price) I would be bidding at 5% under the java version (give him a bit of help, and estimate how much the java version would cost), and not even mentioning what language you will deliver it in.
If asked, mention rails or django then, with a focus on the quality aspects of it and how it enables you to write bug-free code (NOT the efficency ones).
and then donate the extra 25% margin you just got to some charity or to fund open source development.
or keep it in your own pocket :-)
Posted in Business Related | Tags django, marketing, rails | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 13 Dec 2005 22:29:00 GMT
names hidden to protect them.
do PR type gets blogs? or do all they see is buzz and viral marketing?
here are 2 examples I have seen in the last day or two.
As this announcement will be made XXXXXXXX, please do not discuss / blog / publicize this before then. After then, please do! :-)
Thank you again for your very quick response to my very late request.
and
So, now’s the time for you to share what you’ve been working on during the secret beta test. Email your lenses to friends. Post a lens to your blog. Tell your mom. And, for a limited time, your friends will be the only people to know that XXXXX is finally live.
gees.. if I like it I might blog about it, i don’t need some PR person to tell me to do that ;-)
worse yet.. If I hate it I DEFINITELY will.
Posted in blogging | Tags marketing | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Mon, 05 Dec 2005 15:36:00 GMT
With the current trend of companies releasing the products for free and calling them ‘open source’ I think it time that we start differentiating what exactly the different type of open sources offerings there are.
I see 2 different types:
- open source 1.0
and
- open source 2.0
The difference is who participates in the development of it, and how many different companies make up the development community.
The easiest way to determine this is to ask what if a single Company ‘X’ went out of business (bought out, chapter 11, etc), and the people being paid by them stopped working on the project,
what would happen?
For open source 1.0, the answer is usually something along the lines of: it’ll hurt, but we’ll survive.
With some of the new ‘open source’ companies announced over the last 2 years, the answer would be closure.
Sure the source is open, but it would be like getting shot in the chest.. Only a few like Vista get reincarnated into a ‘open source 1.0’ project.
My fear, is that the open source brand and what it stands for is getting muddied and corrupted as more ‘2.0’ products get released out into the wild, and think that the open source 1.0 should rebrand them selves with another moniker now so as the user base can easily differentiate between a sustainable project with multiple suppliers available to service their needs, and a one supplier model where they are dependant on the whims of a single entity.
And if you are a 2.0 CEO reading this, my message to you is set your product free.
Open up the decision making in your project. Foster multiple companies to support your product, make it so that your company is not the centre of the products universe. By doing this you will get innovation and stability in your offering, and you will grow the pie , similar to how you get VC funding instead of just using your own cash.
It will take your product (and you) onto the next level (ubiquity).
Posted in Business Related | Tags branding, marketing, opensource | 1 comment | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Sun, 20 Nov 2005 13:20:00 GMT
So while I was investigating django’s built in comment templates, and trying to get them working (the documentation is on Adrian’s VERY long todo) I checked out LJWorld and how they use them.
The first thing I noticed was their cool idea for User registration. Instead of making me fill in all the details and then having to wait for a some key-code (and creating a record in their database which for a big percentage would be just crap as people put in fake emails, or forget to register).
They ask for the email address first.
This is a great idea as no database activity is required. you can just encrypt the email address and mail that back to them. If they click on it you then create the record.
and BTW.. the comment stuff is pretty cool as well, it basically is a self-contained review/comment application just waiting for a product to hang off.. you just need to add some templates and it works.
Posted in Development | Tags development, django, marketing | 4 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Thu, 10 Nov 2005 17:41:00 GMT
from The Farm
Here are the tag lines of 3 frameworks
Rails: Sustainable Productivity …
Django: … for perfectionists with deadlines
Symfony: … for lazy folks
I think the tag lines speak a whole lot about the general ideals about the framework.
what do you think?
Posted in Development | Tags django, funny, marketing, rails, symfony | 7 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Ian Holsman
Tue, 01 Nov 2005 04:38:00 GMT
Just come back from the supermarket where I saw a pack of parmesan cheese (125g) for $2.21.. on sale for a saving of >1c<. yes. .. 1 cent!..(which would have been rounded away at the checkout anyway) and of course the next size up (250g) was for sale at $3.57 (not on sale).
now before you laugh and say stupid pricing systems…
The sale thing actually worked.
It drew my eye, and I put it in my shopping cart because all I saw was the ‘sale’ sign, and didn’t bother shopping around for prices.
How many of you stop and look at the prices of alternatives (and sizes) when you shop? Since taking the marketing course I have a new respect for advertising, and and how effective it is.
If you really have some time on your hands take this weeks supermarket receipt with you and see how much you can save this week on the same basket of goods. I bet it is around $10-20.
I now try to actively look at the promotions and the different products on offer, trying to find the one which is best for me to buy (as opposed to what is best for the store).
So the next time you need to sell something offer it at a high price and give them a discount back to your actual price… everyone likes getting a deal..
even if it is only 1c.
Posted in Business Related | Tags funny, marketing | no comments | no trackbacks