SmoothSpan Blog

Okay, it’s time for somebody to call BS on a practice I’ve seen for a long time.  This will probably get me some negative press, but it needs doing.  The practice I’m tired of goes something like this:

–  Entrepreneur starts up a bootstrapped business.  Enjoys modest success and quits Day Job.

–  Suddenly, they are the World’s Foremost Expert on Marketing, and they want to sell that expertise.

–  Often the expertise costs more than the product that let them quit their Day Job and often they make more on the marketing advice than on their “real” business.

I see this happen countless times, and it just strikes me as wrong.  Sure you made a few bucks with that obscure product that teachers love.  Sure you’re on a jihad against unicorns or who knows what.  Sure you quit your Day Job.  But are you really that big a deal that people should be beating down your doors to buy your marketing advice?  Well maybe.  Perhaps you even say you’re kind of a big deal, and in that particular case, you probably are.  But a lot of these folks just haven’t enjoyed that much success.

Ask some basic questions:

1.  What was their signature success that qualifies them to be your marketing mentor?

2.  How big was that success really?  How does that compare with what you hope to achieve?

3.  How many times have they succeeded like that?  Silicon Valley is filled with one trick ponies.

4.  Did they succeed only in frothy bubbly times, or do they have some success when times were tough?

5.  Did they product a big liquidity event or earn a great income year after year?

6.  If their core business is so great, how come they have time to be selling marketing advice?  Why are they selling marketing advice?

7.  If this advice is so special, are the other marketing luminaries quoting them?  Are they even part of that set?  Or are they just being quoted by their customers?  You know, the people that buy these things because they don’t know?

Young Entrepreneurs are vulnerable.  They’d have to be to give up a big chunk of their company for very little cash just so they can be part of an incubator they can learn from.  That’s another one of these deals that’s in the same category for me–you’re paying a lot for some advice that seems mediocre relative to what you can get absolutely for free.  Yeah sure, maybe you’ll make contacts that matter.  Guess what?  It’s not that hard to make contacts and there are cheaper ways to network.  Most successful people are surprisingly generous with their time and advice if you approach it right.

OTOH, maybe this incubator thing is just something you do so somebody will hang a credential on you that dispells some of your insecurity. You think that credential is so others will respect you, but mostly people respect success, not the promise of success.  A lot of this stuff is just getting in the way of getting on with it.  There is no group you can join, no person you can talk to, no degree you can get that will guarantee success.  It’s all up to you, and one of the first things you have to learn is how to sift through all the inputs and get what you really need while ignoring the rest.

I just hate to see people being taken advantage of out of ignorance or insecurity.  I’ve done 7 startups now, founded 4 of the 7, had 3 successful Big Exits (2 acquisitions and an IPO), 3 failures, and 1 very happily still going company.  That’s a pretty reliable track record where small business is concerned.  You don’t get that many hits accidentally.  I did my first run straight out of college in Houston, Texas at the tender age of 23 where there weren’t any incubators or anyone to ask for advice.  Most people thought I was weird or nuts for trying to start a software company instead of getting a real job.

When I was first getting my current bootstrapped company, CNCCookbook, going, I bought a bunch of those marketing products I’m railing against.  6 or 7 of them.  Each one was $75 to $300.  There was LOTs of information there to read.  Lots of formulas for success.  I was hungry to find the knowledge that had to be valuable because it wasn’t available for free.  I had everything from how to get 10 zillion followers on Facebook overnight to the you-betcha-sure-thing Guide to SEO.  But a funny thing happened.  Not one single one of those expensive products taught me anything I hadn’t already learned for free–not one of them!

We live in the age of Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, or whatever you want to call it.  Many people are giving away extremely high quality information for free, just to get your attention, so they can sell you a real product or service.  You don’t need to pay a bunch of money for Joe-Average-Entrepreneur’s-Startup-Secrets-Snake-Oil-Course.  Real success stories are dying to tell you everything they know.

How can they do that?

It’s a time honored tradition in modern marketing.  So long as they have something else to sell, they give away valuable content free to earn your trust, interest, and attention.  I’ve used this method to build my CNCCookbook web site up to 2 million visitors a year–huge for the CNC Machining niche market.  It’s not that hard to do, but it takes some time, it takes some determination, some love for the subject matter, and the ability to write.  Personally, I think establishing contact with an audience via your content is a critical first step every startup needs to take–even before they have anything to sell.  I didn’t invent this idea–really talented marketing people did, and they’re out there today desperately trying to give away their best ideas to you!

Where’s the good free stuff?  Metaphorically, it is falling from the Internet sky on marketing blogs everywhere.  Seek out the most successful marketing software companies.  You know, the ones that really get content marketing.  There is a vast amount of great information pouring forth from their blogs.  You can even get materials a lot like the “marketing courses” these other guys sell by signing up for a white paper–no charge, they just want you to fill out a contact form.  You gotta believe marketing people who can successfully sell marketing software to other marketing people might just know a little something about marketing!

Here’s my short list of great blogs from marketing software companies:

KISSmetrics

Unbounce

I love split testing

MailChimp

ManageWP

SEOMoz Daily

Buffer Blog

Totango Blog

WordPress.com Blog

ComScore Voices

Get Elastic

Next, find companies selling marketing services such as SEO or other services.  Or they may be marketers that don’t sell anything to other marketers, but they’re just driven to write.  I guess I consider myself in that category.  I love to share information and ideas.  Again, there’s a ton of them with great blogs:

Analytics Talk

Chris Brown’s Branding and Marketing

Convince and Convert

Digital Marketing Blog

Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen

Heidi Cohen

Seth Godin

Quick Sprout (He’s Kind of a Big Deal)

IdeaLaunch

Jeff Bulla’s Blog

Marketing Tech Blog

Marketing Experiments Blog

SaaS Growth Strategies

Spatially Relevant

These people know each other.  They quote each other.  They respect each other.  If you want to learn from an expert, see who the other experts listen to.

Entrepreneur Resources abound too.  Get the word from fellow entrepreneurs and VC’s, but don’t pay for it.  You’ve got Hacker News full of from the horse’s mouth information by entrepreneurs and for entrepreneurs.  You’ve got more and more VC’s going on line to tell you what they think.  You’ve got tons of bootstrappers from 37Signals to SmugMug on down to guys like me, all telling you what they think and how they did it.  And they’re telling you all of that for free, or in some cases for the modest price of a cheap book like 37Signals or Seth Godin.

Stick all of those feeds into your RSS reader, then go find more.  Click through the links in the articles from these blogs–they lead to other rich sources of information.  Fill it up until you’ve always got a few hundred unread articles.  But try very hard to at least scan everything until you’ve got a good feel for what you’re missing if you don’t read.  While you’re scanning, start a ToDo list.  These are ideas from the articles you want to try and topics you need to research more fully.

Too much to read?  What’s the matter, you don’t have time to actually learn what it takes to be successful?  You need to be like a sponge early on, and none of those wanna-be-pay-me-for-my-sure-thing-courses are going to make that any easier than just reading this stuff that’s available for free.  In fact, they’ll make it worse.  They will also bury you in content, then they’ll send you endless emails trying to sell you even more content.  The difference is you are paying them your cash before you even know what you’re really getting.  Plus, you’re reading from one or a few sources and you don’t get to see what correlates and corroborates and resonates across many sources.  These guys I’m pushing above are giving it away for free and you can scan it and delete it if it isn’t of interest.  You’ll get the Gestalt view of it.  You’ll get a gut feel for how it all fits together.

What could be a more valuable way to invest your time?

Still not enough time?  You can add my own clippings blog, Firehose Press, to your RSS Reader.  Those are articles I culled from the Firehose–I subscribe to about 200 blogs–on marketing.  Articles that were good or that moved me to add something to my own personal ToDo list.  It gets updated less and less frequently because once I’ve learned the lesson, I don’t bookmark the same lesson over and over again.

Once you reach the stage where your ToDo list is getting long and you are skimming and deleting more than you’re seriously reading, you’ve lifted the plane off the runway.  Hopefully you’re reaching and audience and your next challenge is to get better at it.  You’ve now got an RSS Feed that’s filled with new ideas for your hopper every single day.  New A/B tests to try.  New tactics and strategies.  New ideas for content.

Good for you.  Instead of buying fish, you’ve now learned how to fish.  Go forth and be prosperous.  But don’t package up what you learned into some cheezy course or seminar.  You got there standing on the shoulders of others.  Help the next guy–reach down, grab their hand, and boost them up.