April 2010

How Not to Market Your Startup

by Neil Patel

Marketing your web-based business is never an easy thing to do. You’re bound to make a lot of mistakes and waste money on things that just don’t work.

Over the past 8 years, I have worked with dozens of startups. Many of these startups got acquired, but most of them failed. And one trend that I noticed between the successful startups and the failures, is that the failures made a lot of marketing mistakes.

Here are 7 marketing tactics that you should avoid with your business:

1. Useless splash pages

splash page

A common trend on the web is to create a splash page before you launch your startup. On this splash page you’re probably a bit vague on what your company is about and you have a message saying that you are launching soon.

The problem with creating a splash page like the one above is that it isn’t useful to the people visiting your site. If you create a minimalistic splash page like the one above, the chances that someone is going to come back to your website in 30 days is slim to none.

Here is how you can create an effective splash page:

  1. Grab people’s attention – you only have a few seconds to grab someone’s attention. A catchy headline that’s relevant to your business is a good start.
  2. Don’t be shy – tell people what your product or service is going to be before you have created it.
  3. Include visuals – if you have a screen shot of your product or service, include it. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to visually explain what you are creating.
  4. Promise a solution – tell your ideal customer what you are going to do for them.
  5. Collect emails – at the end, you should collect people’s name and email address. This way, you can send them an email when you launch.

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7 Things Seattle Taught me About Business

by Neil Patel

seattle

Out of all of the cities in the world, I live in Seattle. You’re probably wondering why I decided to move up here from Orange County, right? Well as you probably already guessed I didn’t move up here for the weather. Instead, I moved because of the strong community of entrepreneurs and more importantly the knowledge that they were passing over to me.

Here are 7 things I learned from living in Seattle:

1. How to acquire companies

Acquiring companies may seem fun and sexy, but boy it isn’t. I led the acquisition of a business around a year ago and I quickly learned that it is a ton of work. Even if you hire a good law firm to do handle an acquisition, there is a ton of things that you have to do.

With my first acquisition I had a ton of help, but it took roughly 5 months. We had to do things like:

  • Analyze bank account statements – if you want to find out how much money a business is really making you can’t just look at a tax filing. You have to look at each line item in a company’s bank account statements.
  • Deal with lawyers – although lawyers are smart, they don’t know everything. You can’t just tell a lawyer that you want to acquire a business and call it a day. There are a lot of small details that go into acquisitions such as the terms of the buyout, checking if a company is in good standing, and protecting yourself from potential lawsuits.
  • Deal with the other party’s lawyers – in most cases you would hope that the other party has bad lawyers, right? Well when you are acquiring a business, you want the other party to have smart lawyers as it makes things a lot easier. If they don’t, you’ll end up spending a lot of time dealing with the other party’s lawyers.
  • Finding business partners– with my first acquisition I needed help, so not only did I have to ask people for advice, but I also had to convince them to put in some money as well.

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