So the question is, how often do you lie to your customers? I’m not talking shady business practices or manipulation. I’m talking about the simple truth. For instance.

• When a customer asks for a feature you know you’re never going to build, what do you say?
• When a customer outside of your market wants better pricing or has trouble using your service, what do you tell them?
• When you mess up and ship a bad or buggy product, how do you handle it?

Do you make excuses? Do you tell them the feature is “on the list”? Do you try to talk your way out of a mistake? Or help a customer even though you know you’re not the right fit?

One of the questions we used recently when hiring for customer service was, “When should you fire a customer?” It’s a hard question. We got a lot of “Never!” answers. That’s just plain wrong. Of course you’re going to fire a customer, whether you like it or not.  The point was, we were looking for someone who was willing to be honest. Take the blame, take the heat. Tell the customer, “Hey, we’re just not the right fit for you. Try this other great company instead.” Or, “That feature just isn’t going to happen any time soon, or ever.”

It can be harsh but this attitude and honesty creates such a better relationship than dragging someone along. I recently had a call with one of the companies we use and had a very frank conversation with my account rep. Since last year they had grown at an astounding rate and the market they were going after had changed. Although we could still use their service at the same (heavily discounted) price we really just didn’t fit into where they were headed. He was great about the pricing but very honest about their future. This was hard to hear, and caused some additional work on our part, yet we parted ways on great terms and I’ll continue to support and recommend that company. The alternative could have been much worse.

Be really honest with yourself for a minute. When you interact with your customers how honest are you? Do you tell them the truth or do you sugarcoat it? If they’re not a great fit do you say it and help them move on or do you tweak your sales pitch to compensate? In my opinion, life’s way too short to BS. Tell the truth and move forward. Your business will benefit and we’ll all be happier in the end.

When I first started writing these blog posts I had no idea how to do it. No idea what the title should be, how to optimize for SEO or what type of format is best to use. And honestly, I still don’t, at least not very well. So I have three choices. I can really think through how to solve those problems, do some basic learning, or just ignore it and write anyway. You should always ignore  your hurdles to start off with.

Getting stuff out the door is the hardest part of starting a company. It’s very easy to get bogged down because there are so many opportunities and possible improvements. The more you can focus on just doing the basics the better you’ll be. Trust yourself to fix the bugs that come up, or your ability to learn what you need to know, when you need to know it. I’m very confident I’ll figure out how to do SEO or title my posts once it becomes necessary. But for now, it’s just one more excuse not to write them.

It’s easy to fix something that’s broken, very hard to fix something which doesn’t exist.

Listen to experts in every field but your own. And I mean every field. This includes other types of businesses such as a 100+ year old company, or a company which produces a physical product (if you don’t). Or how about that new cutting edge genetics company? Read some medical blogs, marriage counseling blogs (doesn’t matter if you’re married), architect blogs. Read about the arts, space travel, psychology, traveling, a zen lifestyle, etc. The list is really endless. And don’t just find a random medical company or a random traveling blog, find the best blog, the best company. Find the most cutting edge, or the most respected, find the leader in that industry. Then listen, learn and copy them.

Bring what they do best into your company and your industry. Learn how to adapt their practices to your goals. While everybody in your industry is out copying the leader, always one step behind, you’re bringing in something new. You can leapfrog the current trends, build your own path, while still following tried and true methods. You’ll be amazed at how the owner of the leading local coffee shop is already doing all of these supposedly new ways to run a company, preached by your industry. Or how that old geezer running that supposedly outdated company has more insight and understanding of your business than you’ll have for years.

Bottom line, there are a lot of really smart people out there. Don’t constrain yourself to one small industry. You’ll be amazed at what you can learn from the leaders in completely unrelated fields.

But what if you don’t fit in a title? What if your skills combine two positions, or three? Or don’t fit into any title, what then? What if you have one title and see an opportunity, yet it falls under someone else’s title, what do you do? Even if you’re an extremely proactive A-type personality, I guarantee you’ll think twice before going outside your title. Or worse yet, you’ll subconsciously limit your thinking to within your title. And if even the best of us fall prey to our title constraints how hard do you think it’ll be for that new hire to break out of his or her title?

Companies hire for titles. They say, “We need a director of marketing”, so they go find themselves a director of marketing. It’s completely ass backwards. Sure the intention is good, we need more marketing resources, but it’s a cop out. It’s the easy answer. We need to do more marketing so let’s hire someone for a set position in marketing. It allows the company to ignore the real reason they’re hiring.

Why not reverse it? Why not focus on the need first, outside of titles or departments. Then hire for that need. The title shouldn’t come up once during the hiring process. Hire someone with a passion for marketing and say, tell me what you’re amazing at and own it. Titles attempt to give ownership but they’re horrible at it. Not to mention, companies are dynamic and fluid, their needs changing constantly, especially the smaller ones. What happens when you need more resources in a different area? Do you hire for a different title each time your needs change?

Forget titles, forget departments, focus on your employees’ passion and let them be amazing without the handcuffs.

New markets start on value. A company solves a new problem or solves an old problem a completely new way (think Ford, Apple, Twitter). No one cares if they spend more to use the service or buy the product, the value is so high it really doesn’t matter what the price is. At this point pricing usually comes down to a guess by the company or some perception of the new value, also a guess.

Then the competition starts. Other companies come in, provide the same value as that first company but cheaper. They might provide some new value here or there but the main focus is to copy and cut pricing. This turns the whole market into a pricing war with little to no innovation.

And finally, someone innovates again. The problem is solved yet again, new value is provided, pricing is meaningless. It’s okay to compete at any stage of this cycle. If you can provide a service for cheaper, go for it. If you can add value, do that. The question is, do you know which one you are? They are two very different mentalities and two very different strategies. You can’t do both.

An easy litmus test is to ask yourself, “Do I/ Can I  provide 100 times more value than my competitor?” If you do, then go crazy on value. If not, focus on your pricing as you wont win on value.

If you’re selling your product as is, without understand the larger value behind it, you’re selling yourself short. You’re only touching on the surface values of your product and losing out on all the emotion and larger picture reasons. Which exist whether you conciously acknowlege them or not.

GoPro does an amazing job of selling a lifestyle, not their product. Their product merely fits into the lifestyle. Take a look at their latest ad and think about how it makes you feel.

What lifestyle or value does your product or service represent?

There’s a lot of great advice floating around the blogosphere about how to grow your website, startup, business, whatever. But there’s something important to keep in mind when reading all this advice. Something nobody ever talks about.

99% of the advice you’re getting is written by already-successful entrepreneurs. And because they’re already successful, their advice is rarely applicable to the fledgling, green entrepreneur (that’d be you, my friend).

For example, do any of these blog headlines sound familiar?

• 5 strategies for improving your marketing
• Why blogging is the best way to acquire new customers
• How to become a thought leader in your industry

Harmless, right? Why wouldn’t you want to improve your marketing? Why wouldn’t you use blogging to acquire new customers? It sounds so harmless. But if you’re just starting out, this kind of advice is lethal. Here’s why:

• If you haven’t even started marketing, you shouldn’t be worrying about how to improve it. Just get started, do something, anything! Reading marketing blogs is just going to confuse and slow you down (yes, even this one).
• Many successful entrepreneurs admit blogging is a terrible customer acquisition strategy when first getting started. You’re better off focusing on email list building, or other more basic marketing strategies. Yet these same successful entrepreneurs already built their email list years ago, so writing about these basic strategies is boring, old-news that won’t increase their RSS subscriber count.
• If you’re a nobody just getting started, becoming a ‘thought leader’ isn’t going to do you a damn bit of good. First, focus on the basics. And then when you actually know something worth sharing with the world, you won’t need to read blog posts about how to become a thought leader. You’ll already be one.

Bottom line: Every successful entrepreneur you’re trying to emulate slogged through a lot of shit before they started writing the blog posts you’re reading. The advice you really need is how to slog through the shit, but because they were busy slogging, they weren’t writing about it. Why? Because you can’t slog through shit and write about it at the same time – you’ll drown and die.

It’s a blogging catch-22 rarely discussed. You’ve been warned!

The best way to build a simple, focused product is by first building a simple, focused team. Create a very simple vision your entire team understands and can get behind. Give them simple tools and simple focuses. Get rid of feature lists and bug lists. In fact, get rid of any list longer than a few immediately actionable items. Get rid of unnecessary services or processes. Get rid of titles and hierarchy. The simpler you can make your team and your company, the easier it will be to create the ideal product.

Talk to your team about simplicity inside and out. Their focus should be on simplicity in everything they do, not just what they create. Enlist them to help you cut the fat. It’s very easy for everybody to get caught up in unnecessary tasks or get overloaded by the sheer number of things to do. As long as you have a good vision, allow your employees to ignore everything beyond their immediate goals.

Simple does not mean easy. This is much harder to create than a complex company. But the ROI on simplicity is definitely worth the effort.

So who’s using it? Lots of companies. I’ve been retargeted by BigCommerce, iContact, NewRelic, and countless others. Most notably, I’ve recently been retargeted by 37signals. Which is interesting, because if you follow them you know they are pretty against advertising. So is retargeting so good even word-of-mouth based companies like 37signals can’t pass it up?

If you’ve tried retargeting, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And I’ll be sure to post about our experiences should we try it in the future!

That’s what makes startups so fun. They’re doing something new, they’re doing something no one else has done. Or they’re doing it differently, better. They don’t usually have data to back their decisions. And if they do, it’s one of those fun spreadsheets which shows how taking just .5% of the market will give them $100M in yearly revenue. Yet even without any supporting data they still go full steam ahead, ready to take on the world.

But how about if you’re not a startup? What if you’ve been in business for years, how do you justify a reposition then? You have no data to prove it’s better than what you’re currently doing. You might have a few customers in your new market but that’s nothing compared to the thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers you currently have. You can’t prove the new revenue will supersede your current revenue. You can’t prove your new market will even like you. And if you can prove the new vision is better, then you’ve already repositioned.

So how do you reposition? Same as a startup, you just do. You sit down, figure out what you absolutely love to do, and do it. Of course you want to take into account as much data as you can. Is there anybody out there who will give you money right now who resides in the new market? Are you in this new market? What part of your current customer base fits into your new market? How knowledgeable are you about this new problem you’re trying to solve? Why don’t you like the current problem you had been solving? How do you repostion without running out of money? The list is really endless. But at the end of the day, it’s not possible to absolutely prove one way or the other. There’s no right answer. You just have to go with your gut.

Have you ever repositioned a company or been part of a company which has repositioned? How’d it go?

Check out Balsamiq’s about us page (screenshot below). It’s filled with marketing insight you can apply to your own organization. What do you stand for? How are you different? Why should I buy from you? Simple questions. Hard to answer succinctly.

I’m a bit jealous of Balsamiq. For a startup, they’re doing so many things right:

• nailed their messaging
• are communicating clearly
• know exactly who they’re speaking to

We’re still struggling with this – but learning from industry leaders like Balsamiq really helps. Keep reading below to learn five areas of the page that stand out as brilliant marketing. 

Here’s five areas of the page that stand out

The corner bistro

They’ve been using this analogy for years. I love it. Everyone has a favorite little family owned restaurant they just love going to. A perfect two-word analogy that gets to the heart of what Balsamiq is all about. It differentiates them too. So many software and web companies want to be the next Google or Facebook. Not Balsamiq! This immediately catches my attention, and I remember them for it.

The manifesto

Many small internet companies I look up to have a clearly articulated manifesto. Not only is a manifesto useful for communicating what you’re about to the external world, it helps align your team as well. And publishing a manifesto to the internet gives it some officialness, which is a good thing.

Contact us, we’re friendly people

You might know your company is friendly, but nobody else does! Your prospects probably think you don’t want to talk to them or answer their questions! Why? Because most companies go out of their way to avoid talking with their customers!

Telling customers and prospects you’re friendly is smart. It gives your audience a warm feeling. When I read this page, I’m not afraid to contact Balsamiq with a question because they’re friendly, and practically asking me to reach out to them!

Keeping it small and real

If you’ve ever started a club, organization, or business this line will resonate with you. Since startups are one of Balsamiq’s target markets, this is a brilliant paragraph. Much like 37signals, Balsamiq doesn’t apologize for being a focused, point-solution that solves a single problem. This is brilliant marketing AND a great strategy for becoming the best in the world at one thing.

Pictures of the *entire* team

A lot of companies have headshots of their executive team. The smart ones introduce every employee. The really smart ones have a picture of every employee. When your entire company is virtual on the web, this really helps customers, vendors, and the press get to know you. It’s amazing what a few pictures will do to personalize and humanize a company.

What do you think?

Do you like their about us page? Any other examples of great about us pages? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments!

Every interaction you have with fellow employees, no matter how small, is a huge opportunity to create the culture you want in your company. If you’re rude, or distant, or unwilling to help, then that’s the culture you’ll have, no matter what the culture document says. On the flip side, if you’re excited to help, always 5 minutes early, always prepared, always positive, you’re culture will look drastically different. Asking, “what can I do to help?” will create a much bigger impact than a company lunch each week.

It’s easy to write down what you want to be and forget about it. You feel like you’ve done your job and you can simply point each employee to your document so they know what the culture should look like. But your culture is your habits. What you do, who you are. It doesn’t matter what any document says.

Each person in the company creates their own culture. And each person is effected by everybody else’s. The combination of these individual cultures creates the overall company culture. It’s an organic thing, always growing, always changing. All you can do is focus on yourself and ensure the people you work with already embody the culture you want to be a part of.

So what’s your individual culture?

And since you’re running an internet-based business, not a brick and mortar business like Nordstrom, maybe this isn’t the best example.

So let me tell you about our return policy. It’s liberal. It’s expensive (for us). And lots of people abuse it. Yet it’s totally worth it. Let me explain…

We’ve had a super-liberal return policy since the first day we lauched Printfection back in ’06. Every piece of custom printed merchandise we send out on behalf of our store owners comes with a 100% no-questions-asked money-back guarantee:

We do whatever it takes to make sure your customers are happy. We even pay for exchanges, including re-printing and re-shipping costs. Instead of shipping the old items back, your customers can donate them to a local charity or give them to a friend.

So imagine you’re using Printfection for your company merch store. One of your employees or fans orders a small t-shirt and realizes they should have ordered a medium. We don’t even make them send back the small. We let them keep it, and send them a medium free of charge. Same for returns: we give refunds without making the customer send back the item. It’s basically honor-system refunds.

Obviously this is really expensive, even at just 1% of orders returned or exchanged, it adds up fast.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve talked about “tightening up” our return policy. It’s a frequent conversation at our monthly financial review meetings. Especially since we know some people take advantage of us, blatantly abusing our generosity.

But I’m thankful we haven’t caved. This kind of policy is basically a super-cheap marketing expense. Similar to how Zappos upgrades everyone to next-day-air shipping free of charge to WOW them.

So if you’re thinking of liberalizing your policies – do it!

Best of all, liberal policies work for more than just returns. All of your policies should be remarkable. Not many companies do it.

Even though it’s hard to measure the ROI of our policy, we try to do it qualitatively. Anytime you have a program that’s hard to measure, make sure you’re sharing the remarkable feedback (you will get tons of it) across your company, especially from the bottom up, so management can see how it’s working!

Here’s one recent example (of thousands) of how a customer was taken aback by our return policy:

Dear Printfection,

Thank you for your generosity. You are truly a unique company that I am bragging about. I purchased one shirt from you for my daughter. It was too small. My husband quickly ordered another one so that it would be here for Christmas. Unfortunately, it was too big. Ugh! We showed her the shirts on Christmas Day and she loved them. At 10 years old, she understood that it was the thought that counted. We told her we would get her the correct size. When my husband called yesterday to reorder and complete a return, he was shocked that you were so kind and generous. He quickly called me on my cell phone and shared the news with me.

Never in our lives have we done business with such a friendly and cooperative company. We will be sharing our story with our friends and family. You have blessed us.

Sincerely,
your happy customers,
The Browns

If that’s not return policy ROI, I don’t know what is! Thoughts?

During interviews, the number one reason I’m told why employees left their last job was they weren’t given ownership. They had no power over their job or over the company in general. When someone has no ownership, they’re not going to work very hard. Instead of getting a 10x boost from each new employee you only get a 1.5x, if that. Because of this, you’re cutting your legs off every time you give an order or make a decision for somebody.

If you are able to give up ownership, the return is unreal. You’ll have way more fun working with peers versus drones. The excitement you’ll all create building a company together, where everybody owns their success, is electric. Your stress will evaporate and your personal output will skyrocket.

You know you’re successful when you can leave for a year and when you return, your company has grown above and beyond your vision. I’m not advocating for year long sabbaticals, but this should always be in the back of your mind.

And this starts with employee number one.

Often times, I ask myself, what marketing strategy are they really using? Sure, you can visit Balsamiq’s website and even sign up as a paying customer. But this won’t help you figure out how Peldi went from $0 to $5 million in sales in just a few years.

How these companies appear on the surface, to the naked untrained eye, is much different from the underlying marketing strategies these entrepreneurs are using.

But I think I’ve finally figured out a key aspect to their success. It’s called “the crossroads” strategy:

Basically, you take two ideas that don’t seem to be related, but you find the intersections and you build a business around that. Copyblogger is a crossroads blog. It’s a combination of social media and direct response copywriting. Most people think those two things are quite different. In fact, when Copyblogger started, people thought they were mutually exclusive. So, it’s how to use traditional direct response advertising technique with social media, which is traditionally very resistant to commercialization… there are a lot of places of connection there, but no one’s really done that before. No one’s combined those two before. They’re a very good combination.

- Sonia Simone, CMO of Copyblogger

Copyblogger isn’t the only company using a crossroads strategy to make millions. 37signals is doing the exact same thing. They’re at the crossroads of multiple ideas that don’t seem to be related, and are sometimes even thought to be mutually exclusive: bootstrapping a high tech company, writing software that is not downloadable, and building a super profitable company selling software without many features.

We’re using a crossroads strategy too. SwagLove is part high-tech internet startup, part low-tech promotional merchandise. Neither idea is unique, but combined it’s a novel concept.

So the trick is, now that you know the strategy other entrepreneurs are using to grow their businesses, how can you leverage a crossroads marketing strategy to grow your business? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so don’t forget to leave a comment!

It’s easy to create complex systems because you’ve removed yourself from the decision making. You’re now putting all the decisions on your customers. They have to know the best way to use your complex application now. They have to pick the right shipping option or understand whether to do A or B first.

The problem should be evident… they have to make the decisions. You’re supposed to be the expert. You’re supposed to know everything there is to know about your industry and your application, yet you’re letting them make all the decisions. Your customers don’t know anything about your industry or your application, that’s why they’re coming to you.

Simplicity is hard. It’s much harder to write a short sentence than a long one. Much harder to only have the right functionality than all the functionality. But if you’re able to do this. If you’re able to take on the responsibility of making the decisions, you’ll end up with something your customers would never have come up with on their own. And this is why they’ll love you.

Your value is your simplicity, not your features.

But that’s not the point of this post. I wanted to share how Peter Shankman, the founder of HARO, grew his company from zero to the largest PR email list in the world:

Did you know I grew HARO from a simple Facebook group to the mailing list of more than 200,000 people it is today? Want to know how I did it? Two words: Customer Service. I listened to every single reporter, member, and source, with every comment, question, and suggestion you had.

So guess what – I wrote a book about how I did it! It’s called Customer Service: New Rules in a Social Media World, and it talks all about how Customer Service is the new PR, Advertising, Marketing, and Social Media, all rolled into one. And guess what – You can grab a copy! If you do, let me know- I’d be happy sign it for you. Grab a copy on Amazon!

If you’ve had a chance to read his new book, let me know your thoughts! And never forget the power of customer service when it comes to building a great business.

Second, it helps everybody understand what the vision looks like in real life. Visions are great, but you can’t execute on a vision, at least not daily. The better framework you can create to help employees understand what success looks like in the flesh, the easier it will be for them to attain it.

And third, it allows you, and them, to enjoy the successes. In a growing company, there’s always a million things to do. It’s very easy to do one task or project, then immediately jump to the next one. This gets tiring and kills moral. The more you can take time and celebrate your successes, the more you want to keep getting them. Those high level revenue goals are essential but it’s so hard for an individual employee to feel ownership over those numbers.

A much better way for them to feel ownership and pride is through their individual successes along the way.Help your employees understand what success looks like, how to quantify it, and most importantly why they should even care about the small wins. The only way to hit your big revenue goals is through smaller successes. The more little wins you get the bigger the snowball becomes.

Take for example Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Larry Ellison, and Donald Trump. They’re all controversial in their own way, yet all extremely successful. I bet every one of them makes more in a day than you do in an entire year.

So what makes these anti-role models so smart? They understand controversy is good for business.

Unless you’re Google or Coca-Cola - huge brands with mainstream products everyone likes – you should be trying to create controversy.

The mega-brands are all about positioning themselves to offend nobody, because they want to sell to everybody. This positioning is only possible with a mega-advertising budget.

It’s kinda like saying “hi” to every passerby on the sidewalk. Hoping they’ll stop what they’re doing and engage in a conversation with you.

Sure, ”hi” won’t offend anyone. But it also won’t spark any interesting conversations. Why? Because everyone says hi to passerbys.

Instead of “hello”, try something like “wow, what an ugly sweater”. I guarantee you’ll stop people dead in their tracks. Sure, 80% might be offended, but 20% might think it’s funny or maybe you share a story about how you love ugly sweaters too. Instant connection!

How being controversial can build your company’s brand

The trick is finding the ugly sweater of your industry, or becoming the Britney Spears of your niche.

For 37signals, it’s “to hell with installed software” and “f#c$ venture capital” – both controversial statements in the high-tech software world.

For Britney, it was I’m a hot 18 year old sex symbol not afraid to show it. And then later she evolved her controversy, recording the song You want a piece of me, openly boasting “I’m the oh my god that Britney’s shameless. You want a piece of me? It’s Britney, bitch!”

Britney rode this kind of controversy her entire career, selling over 100 million records and becoming the best-selling female artist of the decade. Remember: tons of people hate her music. Yet she sold 100 million records, laughing all the way to the bank!

So many successful marketers understand these concepts like the back of their hand. If you can internalize this and apply it to your business, you will become the next Britney!  … bitch

PS – This is what I’m talking about. She’s the badass of her niche. The entire video a bold statement hard to ignore. She’s pushing the limits of acceptable behavior. If you like it, you talk about it. If you don’t like it, you still talk about it.

Guarantee is a very harsh word. It’s black and white. You either succeed or you don’t. There is a huge risk of failure. This also provides a chance of great success. It forces focus and helps limit scope creep.

Guaranteeing a solution is most important within your  company. However your market your service, you should always say you guarantee your solution internally. Every employee should focus on this guarantee. Strive to ensure this guarantee comes true in everything they do and in every interaction they have with their customers.

You’ll be surprised at the excitement, and fear, you hear in your employees when you tell them you’re going to guarantee your solution. You’ll also be surprised at how well they rise to the challenge.

Let me tell you a little story about why you should forget the temptation of launching a viral marketing campaign

One of our first big Printfection marketing campaigns – way before SwagLove – was a $2 t-shirt special for new customers. We coded up a landing page offering $2 custom-printed t-shirts, plus $5 shipping. A custom printed shirt with unlimited colors in your design for $7 out the door. This was unheard of at the time, and still is. So was this the perfect recipe for ‘getting known’ and rising from startup obscurity to stardom? Hardly.

I thought a few hundred people might try the promotion over the first few months. But before we knew it, we were a featured deal on SlickDeals and FatWallet. These were the ‘deal of the day’ sites before Groupon ever existed. And they sent us tons of traffic.

All of the sudden we were getting literally three orders per minute, for days!

Awesome, right? Just a few weeks after launching our site to the public, 5,000 orders poured in over less than 24 hours! But looking back, it was a disaster. Here’s why:

• Our company wasn’t ready for 5,000 orders per day. We had to hire temporary help to print the shirts & get the orders out the door. And my co-founder Kevin spent weeks debugging and scaling our servers to add capacity. Capacity that was unnecessary for years to come if we hadn’t ever done this deal in the first place.
• We barely broke even on the orders. Which would have been fine, if these were good customers who’d reorder down the line. (It’s all about customer lifetime value). But people shopping ‘deal of the day’ sites are not loyal customers ever willing to pay full price.
• Because the deal hounds weren’t willing to pay full-price, we started sending out regular coupons and specials offers to get them to buy again.
• We were getting dangerous customer feedback, skewing our product roadmap and marketing priorities. Since the cheapskates made up the vast majority of our customer base, our customer service department (me!) kept telling marketing (me!) ‘everyone wants us to keep mailing out coupons’. Looking back, of course cheapskate customers want coupons! Told you, I’m not very smart.
• We were trying to build a platform to help people sell t-shirts online. Buying your own shirt wasn’t the main thing, yet by structuring our promotion in the way we did, we attracted a ton of people who only wanted to buy a custom shirt for themselves & never had intentions to setup an online store. Basically, we attracted the wrong type of customer. And the reason I didn’t design the promotion strictly for ‘online t-shirt sellers’? Because I wanted it to go viral, of course! I didn’t think it would be possible to go viral with a hard constraint.

So for all the people in startup land trying to get a web app off the ground, think twice before designing a viral marketing campaign. What’s worked for us in the long run are the unsexy things: An easy-to-use web application. High quality printing. Great customer service. Basically, trying to provide the most value possible, not the lowest prices.

We got off track for a while, but now we’re focusing on the basics again. And it’s working. If you don’t believe me, take it from someone a lot smarter than me, David at 37signals:

Forget viral. Forget this notion of this automatic viral thing that will infect and spread. You know what’s viral? Shoes. Shoes are viral. When you buy them from Zappos at 10 o’clock in the evening and you get an email 15 minutes later saying ‘you’re such a swell customer we’re going to put you on overnight delivery and you’ll have them in the morning’. And getting that box tomorrow morning and opening the box, and saying ‘hey, there’s a pack of Puma’s I just ordered last night a few hours ago’. Another words, just great service. Just a great business. It doesn’t have to be an ingenious idea. Often the simplest ideas in the world like treating your customers nicely, while still asking for money for what you do, can work! And you can build great businesses like that.

David Hennemier Hanson, 37signals podcast #5

What do you think? Have you launched a successful viral campaign? Or have you failed like me? Let’s keep the conversation rolling in the comments!

And you’ll most likely disagree with their suggestions. But that’s the point, and that’s why you have to listen. They know more than you. Whichever area of the company they’re passionate about you have to learn from them. Ask them questions. If you don’t think they’re right, figure out where they’re coming from, don’t fight them. The more you listen the more you’ll understand how to grow your company.

You’ll also find they listen to you more. The more you force your way of thinking, the more defensive they’ll get and the less they’ll care about what you have to say or how you can help. Instead, just listen and ask questions. The more respect they feel from you, the more they’ll want your help want to learn from you too.

Keep track of how much you talk and how much you listen each day. Then double your listening time.

Looks like you are moving things along nicely. Resist the temptation to hire too fast. Better to have a growing savings account and work a little harder than a depleting one and be able to go home early every day. I’ve found it hard to “force” growth, reinvest only where you’ve tested sufficient ROI from a marketing standpoint.

In a world of $10,000 hiring bounties you don’t hear advice like this enough. Thankfully though, a lot of the smartest, most successful entrepreneurs I know advocate a hire less, hire later approach.

What do you think? Why is there such a fundamental difference between how some companies hire, hire, hire and others hold off as long as possible?

As soon as you cheat you start walking around with a weight on your back. Now you really have to do better tomorrow or you’ve screwed up twice. And every time you mess up it gets added to the list until soon enough, you’ve stopped all together because your sick of being stressed about messing up. No wonder diets never work.

Your team is exactly like you. They need to cheat. They need to do a fun project with no tangible results. They need to make a small improvement without consulting the right departments. And they need to do this outside of any structure. Hence the term cheating.

Allowing your team to cheat provides two benefits. It lets them relax and really have fun. And it gives you a chance to learn what they care about.

What do they do when they cheat? How often do they cheat? Are they able to complete their primary projects or duties regardless of how much they cheat? And if they are cheating too much, or unable to complete their tasks, then you’ve probably got them working in the wrong area.

Cheating is a great way to learn how to help your team be successful. If you never let them cheat, you’ll never know what they should really be doing.

You can preach all day, you can force them to work on project X or project Y, but you’ll never fully utilize your team until they believe what you’re selling. This includes company wide visions, marketing plans, the importance of simplicity, whatever it is your selling, they have to buy it, whole heartily.

It’s hard work to sell. Much easier to dictate. You’ll have to sit down for hours at a time with your team, with individuals, time and time again. You’ll have to refine it, simplify it, package it differently. But once you finally do sell it, the ROI is through the roof.

You’ll be amazed at the results. Communication will flow 100 times faster. Meetings will actually mean something. You’ll get help from areas of the company you had never thought of. You’ve got an amazing group of people helping you build your company. Take the shackles off and really let them work with you, not for you.

It really is great advice. And the advice applies to anything you’re passionate about, not just starting a company.

Take it easy. This whole startup thing, this whole rush thing. You’re thinking about it as ‘I’m going to put in all this work right now and then I can just coast away from there. It’s never going to be less work. In some ways, it’s just going to get to be more work. So if you setup your practices right now of working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, you’re just going to be stuck in that treadmill for the rest of your time working. The patterns you set, the practices you choose to adopt when you’re a startup will stick with you.

- David Heinemeier Hanson, 37signals podcast #5

Kevin and I used to keep track of how many hours we were working each day. And god forbid, if we took a day off we made a note in our spreadsheet to justify the time off. We were really hard on ourselves.

An example note in my spreadsheet: Family in town – 1/2 day.

How pathetic! When family comes to town once a year, take the day off and don’t worry about it! No need to justify spending time with family.

But if you’re in the early stages of your startup, you probably think I’m full of shit.

Maybe you’re keeping track of your hours like I was. And you probably think I’m just another idiot with a blog. So be it. But I’m going to give some advice anyways:

Looking back, I could have worked a lot smarter and spent more time thinking about what would really move our business forward. And what stuff I was doing that had little impact. I would have got 80% as much done. And probably been a lot happier overall.

There’s a period of a few years between 2005-2008 I barely remember. Thinking back, I can hardly remember fun stuff outside of work I did during those years. All I remember is we worked every day, all day. That’s no way to live your life!

While we’ve cut back our hours, we still work way more than 40 hours a week. Someday I hope to work just 40 hours a week and still double revenues every year. That would be an accomplishment!

But for now, we’ve learned to take most weekends off, a weekday here or there, long weekend trips now and then, and generally try to have a semi-balanced life.

And you know what? Our business is better than ever!

It really is a marathon. There will never be less work. Yes, you’ll eventually hire more people. But then you have to manage them and figure out more strategy and deal with more problems. And when you get more customers, there will be more requests and more things to do.

Work doesn’t pause for life. It’s up to you to take control, set a realistic schedule, and live your life in a way that makes you happy.

Still don’t believe me? Wait 5 years and re-read this post. You’ll have either burned out and killed your own startup, or changed your mind!

PS – if I’m slow to respond to comments that’s because I’m currently in Spain on my first two week vacation, ever!

Most people assign goals subconsciously. They have no idea why they want to see the number of registrations, it’ll just help, somehow. What’s really happening is they think, subconsciously, they’re doing something to increase the metric and they want to see if it’s working or not. They’re taking the easy route of asking for data without really thinking why.

Goals should come first, then data. Consciously say, I am going to increase registrations within 30 days, then track it. Switching around this thinking will have huge benefits. Every project will be quantifiable. Data will have meaning. Systems like Google Analytics will become useful, instead of overwhelming.

Data without goals will never show you what you should do next. You get 1000 registrations per day and 10,000 visitors per day, which one do you work on? Data is only useful if you’ve acted on it and can repeat your previous results. And the only way to see these results is to start with a goal. This also means, if you’ve never tracked your actions, you will have no idea what to do first. No matter how much you justify your actions, it’s still just a guess until you see the results of your actions.

It’s fun to look at data, everybody will do it. But don’t ever make decisions on it unless you’ve created your goal first.

Do you offer discounts or promotions?
No. We don’t like to play around with pricing for a program that is this important. In order to add promotional discounts we would have needed to raise the base price and would be encouraging people to wait to join during promotional windows. We don’t want you to have to wait another day to start.

Instead of focusing on the discounts and deals your company offers, why not instead work to justify the value of your product at full price?

The hardest part of this is the stopping. You should actually drop everything, stop executing, stop helping your team get better, if you don’t have the right vision. Completely exclude yourself from the company. Let everybody continue to work but don’t think about what they’re doing or help them in any way. Focus on the vision, figure out what it is first.

The same goes for your team. Don’t think about hiring, or what you should be doing if your current team doesn’t know how to execute. Just pick something, make a best guess then spend 100% of your time helping your team execute quickly and effectively.

Only after the first two items are done can you pull it all together by optimizing what you do or by bringing on additional resources. If you don’t do these items in this order, you’ll be treading water indefinitely.

The Internet is saturated with all these ‘best’ ways to grow a company. Forget them. Stop reading all these ‘great’ ideas. Start focusing on yourself and your company. Ask yourself simple questions. What can I do today to grow my company? What has worked in the past that I can repeat?

It’s so easy to get distracted and try a million different ways to do something. In the end it all falls back on the fundamentals. Do the simplest thing you can, then repeat. Writing a blog post every day is a million times better than the most optimized blog in the world. Upgrading a tiny part your application each week is leagues ahead of creating a new crazy piece of functionality.

Once you’ve found your vision, go back to the basics. You’ll be amazed by the results.

It’s common knowledge, meetings suck. No one wants to go to them, everybody believes they’re a waste of time. Yet the answer continually suggested is to stop them, or cut them in half, or set time limits. That’s like saying, you’re getting fat, so stop eating. That’s not the answer. It only makes the problem worse.

The real answer, is to attack the problem head on. If your meetings are inefficient, wasteful, or not enjoyed, you most likely have a communication problem. In order to solve that communication problem you should be communicating, a lot. Instead of cutting your meeting time, extend it. Do it all day, do it all week. Doesn’t matter.

The more you talk and the more time you ‘waste’, the better at communicating your team will become. Your meetings will become more efficient on their own. You’ll get way more out of them and most likely, end up doing way less of them. But you have to take that first step, you have to do more to do less.

This applies to anything in your company. If something’s not working don’t ignore it. Take the time to actually solve it.

That is, until I read the last paragraph of Expensify’s latest newsletter (emphasis mine):

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts — what we should do (or undo), how I can help, anything. I’ve almost finished responding to everyone from the last newsletter; hit reply and tell me what you think! Thanks for using Expensify, and I look forward to talking with you soon!

-david
Founder and CEO of Expensify

Brilliant! David’s doing everything right. Easy to read plaintext newsletter, hitting reply goes right to the CEO, and a novel prompt for customers to suggest some control Z’s.

With every order, they include these innovative custom neck tags. So when I put my wine in the wine rack, I can see the name of the wine, the price I paid, and how the wine was rated. And on the back, there’s room for tasting notes and a place to indicate if I’d order it again. This makes it super easy to remember to put notes in cellartracker.com, my favorite site for tracking wine.

More often than not, creating customer loyalty doesn’t take big bucks. It’s about the little things that set you apart from your competition.

The other night at a business networking event, someone brought up the idea of “earning the right to be an a-hole”. They were referring to someone who was well-known in our industry but wasn’t very helpful to up-and-coming talent.

I don’t understand how anyone could possibly think they have “earned” the right to be rude to others.

Yet many people – and companies – think like this. In all industries. I’m sure you can think of someone like this.

I want to know why some ‘successful’ people think they’re above other people. Maybe it’s something rooted deep in human evolution?

Or maybe it’s an opportunity to be more like Gary Vaynerchuk or Jason Fried. These guys are the anti-thesis. They’re successful, worked their asses off, and are ‘famous’ in their industry.

And they’re still genuinely nice, approachable, and willing to help others when they can.

Maybe that’s because these nice guys know happiness studies suggest giving back and helping others makes you happier. So you really can be selfish and make the world a better place!

I sure hope the Mean Girls of the business world don’t last much longer!

When I naïvely helped start our tech company in 2004, I thought I understood marketing. I was a marketing major and a good student. Surely I knew the basics. I graduated cum laude with a marketing degree from an overpriced private college. The world was my oyster bitch!

But looking back, I didn’t know shit!

It took me years before I understood the most fundamental aspects of “online marketing”. I’m still figuring out the basics seven years later. Marketing is hard. Maybe that’s why I made up so many excuses for not doing it.

Even though I knew half of corporate america is in sales & marketing, for some reason I thought 100% of our startup’s resources should go into building a kick ass product. Marketing was an afterthought.

As long as we build a kick-ass product, it will sell itself.

I kept telling myself that. I whole heartedly believed it. So we kept spending time on our product. Way too much time. I violated lean startup principles so bad, I’m sure Eric Ries will cry if he ever finds out we spent two years building Printfection inside a vacuum before launching it to the public!

Even with a balanced 50% tech-minded, 50% business-minded team, it’s easy to make these kind of mistakes. In hindsight, they look amateur and rediculous. But lots of startups F-up marketing.

Here are some of the excuses I kept telling myself to justify not doing marketing, and the resulting consequences. Please don’t repeat my mistakes!

Excuse #1: Our product is awesome.

Our product really did kick ass. Our quality, customer service, and overall user experience were better than the competition. The problem was, I thought this was all that mattered. Our competitors continued with their mediokre quality, customer service, and user experience - but still kicked our ass. Why? Nobody knew about us.

Just because you build something awesome doesn’t mean it sells itself! The company with better marketing almost always beats the company with a better product!

For example, 37signals isn’t known to have the world’s best project management software. It’s ‘good enough’ software, backed by brilliant marketing. You could say the same about HubSpot. Both of these companies prioritize marketing as much as – or more than – product development.

Why? Because most people use the product or service they hear about first, usually a word-of-mouth referral from a friend or colleague. And if you build a relationship with your prospective customers, and they trust you, you can get away with an even less-awesome product!

A good developer could probably build a Basecamp clone in a few months. But it doesn’t matter. Because you’re never going to replicate their 130,000 subscriber blog, speaking gigs, and best-selling books.

Excuse #2: We’ll worry about marketing closer to launch

I waited until a week before launch to worry about marketing Printfection. I thought I could just whip together some form emails targeting online communities and they’d think we were so great they’d sign up with us right away. After all, we were helping them engage their community and make a few extra bucks selling t-shirts! How could they resist?!

Not only did I think most of them would try us out, I was positive they’d tell their friends. The business would start scaling, and I was going to become rich! Part of this came true. The business did start to scale. But then we hit a plateau. At $1 million in sales, things started flattening out. We couldn’t figure out why, nor did we know what would push us to $2 million.

Excuse #3: We don’t need more customers, we need to build the new features prospective & current customers are demanding!

When we plateaued at $1 million, we started asking our customers what they wanted from us. Mainly because all the smart people with popular blogs tell you to do this.

How could listening to your customers possibly be bad? When you’re listening to your most vocal customers at the expense of acquiring new customers who would pay for what you already have.

Your most vocal customers are the ones participating in your community forums, e-mailing new feature suggestions, and chatting endlessly on the phone. Their suggestions are probably awesome. I’m sure they will use the new features you build.

But the real question is: does building new features drive as much revenue as if you spent this time acquiring new customers who already love what you already have?

This is where we went wrong. We built tons of new features. All of them came from listening to our customers. But this didn’t translate to significant increases in revenue.

We should have spent that time figuring out how to acquire new users who already liked what we had built. Or spent the time trying to up-sell our current users into buying more of what we already had figured out. Or made our service easier to use, thus converting more potential customers (trials) into happy, paying customers.

Bottom line: building new functionality might be fun for you and your customers. But it likely isn’t the most effective way to grow your company.

Excuses #4,5,6,7,8,9, and 10

There’s a whole lot more excuses I told myself. Off the top of my head,

• I can’t focus! Marketing is a distraction.
• My time is too valuable for basic outreach. We’ll hire an intern to do that.
• Who has time to blog on a regular basis? We’re trying to build a business here!
• Who has time to submit speaking proposals and travel to conferences to give a 30 minute talk?
• I can handle marketing myself. The rest of my team needs to focus on the ‘real’ business.
• I’ll attend some local meetups. That’ll do wonders to get the word out.
• Etc, etc, etc.

I’ll save these for another post. Right now I’m curious to hear from you: what excuses do you tell yourself to justify not marketing? Or if you are a great marketer, what do you tell yourself to justify time spent marketing?

When you unsubscribe from daily deals site AppSumo, founder Noah Kagan gives you the ultimate sad face. This is the most personal and intimate e-mail unsubscribe I’ve ever seen. Great job Noah!

The tech industry has a problem. We think our shit doesn’t stink.

Seriously, why do we have so many delusional, arrogant thoughts? For example:

• We have nothing to learn unless it’s on TechCrunch or delivered by RSS to Google Reader.
• We’re better than everyone in the ‘traditional’ world. Why on earth would anyone want to work for corporate america, a blue collar job, or live anywhere except SF or NYC?
• What could we possibly learn from the suits? Insurance agents are the devil!
• Rule of thumb: If they’re not on Twitter, they’re probably out of the loop & not worth your time.
• We’re changing the world. Every day we invent stuff regular people won’t understand for years. This proves we’re better than most other people.
• Because nobody understands us, we pat each other on the back and drink a lot of our own kool-aid.
• Tech conferences are the shit. I met Tim Ferris, Kevin Rose and Scoble!
• Exponential growth is more important than making money. Hire, hire, hire.
• I don’t need to understand financial statements. Cost-cutting isn’t important. Someday I’ll hire an MBA to worry about that ‘business’ stuff. For now, it’s all about top-line revenue growth.
• My parents are entrepreneurs too, but I can’t learn anything from them.
• Creating an internet business is different. It’s not like other businesses.

At one point in time, I was guilty of most of these thoughts. I drank the kool-aid too.

But no longer. There’s so much to learn from the ‘traditional’ world. Smart people are everywhere. The more I try to learn from people outside the tech-bubble, the more I realize: Internet-based businesses are no different.

Or are they? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments!

So how does David Cohen, the founder of TechStars, motivate his young entrepreneurs to be acquired? Simply and cheaply: Their “gold t-shirt club” is a great little way to create a sense of exclusivity (and jealousy) between the TechStars companies.

A few days ago, Sensobi announced that they had been acquired by GroupMe. Ajay and Andy have earned themselves a rare gold-colored TechStars T-Shirt, with the number “08″ on the back of it (they are the eighth TechStars company to be acquired). Congratulations to Ajay and Andy and to GroupMe (who adds to an already fantastic team).

David Cohen, on the TechStars blog

Look how Twitter uses the logout confirmation page to promote their mobile applications. It’s relevant, educational, and logical that a just-logged-out web user might want to go mobile. Brilliant use of a boring-but-necessary part of every web app.

If the founder of a successful fast-casual chain puts his personal e-mail address on every drink cup, what’s your excuse for hiding behind noreply@your-unfriendly-company.com? No wonder Tokyo Joe’s is kicking ass. Larry actually gives a shit! Mainstream fast-casual chains like Chipotle and Noodles would never do this! Their CEOs probably think they’d get way too much e-mail. But only the most passionate customers actually take the time to send an email. Larry gets this. Do you?

Savvy brick-and-mortar marketers know bathrooms are a profit center. The Internet is no different. Required-yet-boring functionality like order confirmations, logout screens, and password reminders are like bathrooms in real life. My local coffee shop knows when customers are pissing they’re a captive audience. Hence the happy-hour-upsell above the urinal.

It doesn’t matter where.
Whenever you have your customer’s attention, you should be talking to them.

For the longest time I thought the TVs were nothing more than gas stations trying to be cutting-edge and cool. But today I figured it out. Maybe the short “E hollywood gossip” segment is there to distract you. When you’re engrossed in the 15 second recap of the new Harry Potter movie, you’re not paying attention to the THIS SALE $ display below.

A brilliant example of how to increase average revenue per transaction.

“Every kid underestimates his competition, and overestimates his chances. Every kid is a sucker for the idea that there’s a way to make it without having to do the actual hard work.

The bars of West Hollywood, London, and New York are awash with people throwing their lives away in the desperate hope of finding a shortcut, any shortcut. Meanwhile the competition is at home, working their asses off.”

Hugh MacLeod‘s book Ignore Everybody via Derek Sivers

If most people are bored, with enough free time to read the Facebook news feed of their equally boring friends, it’s kindof patetic us marketers have such a hard time getting people’s attention. Why’s this? Because we (marketers) are no different than our customers: boring as hell.

Recently I subscribed to copywriter Ben Settle’s email list. I do this sometimes – subscribe to random e-mail lists – just to see how other marketers think. Ben sent me an intro-PDF with this amazing tip to combat marketing bordom:

Street-smart email secret #1: Make your emails fun

What’s the easiest way to stick out in the inbox? That’s easy… make your emails fun to read.

Fact is, if I could only use one email “technique” this would be it.

Reason why is because people crave fun. Most people are bored to tears, and want nothing more than to be a part of an adventure (even if vicariously through you). So if you want to make more sales… make your emails fun (not a chore, like everyone else’s emails) to read.

Say something whacky, or bizarre, or off the wall.

Be the person who always has something interesting and fascinating to share, that people can’t WAIT to hear from. Do that and they’ll eagerly tune into your “station” each day, while ignoring the people who only contact them when they are launching a new product or whatever.

If you’ve ever wondered why on earth people watch reality TV and buy tabloids, now you know. Adventure and gossip sell. Light the imagination and watch your business take off. If nobody is paying attention to your company it’s probably because your marketing is average and boring! Don’t think so? Ever heard of illusory superiority?

After following a social media brand on Twitter I recently received this DM:

Thanks for the follow SwagLove. Hope you find some interesting stuff on Social Media in Business with us. http://link-to-their-website.com

This is obviously an auto-DM. And I know that link is self-serving without even clicking on it! Go ahead and push your stuff on your website, but on social you have to earn that privilege. Sending a message like this right after someone follow you is not a long enough relationship!

It’s like trying for a home run on the first date

This never works! Instead, say hi. Ask something genuine about the person or their business. Tweet your thanks. Tell others that you followed me. Do something engaging!

What do you think? How do you start off your social relationships?

Do you really need t-shirts for your cause?

I have a t-shirt drawer, doesn’t everyone? Every year, I weed out a few old ones I finally admit I’ll never wear again. There are shirts from every school or church event we ever volunteered for – not to mention those from amusement parks and sports teams. The memories are wonderful, but some shirts are scratchy and never fit right. Do we really still need t-shirts for one more cause? Yes. Let me explain why…

The value of a visual identity

I have watched the birth of a new community. Unlike the diabetes community which has existed online for almost a decade, the rheumatology patient community did not exist at all. But over the last couple of years, patients have begun to connect. Several things played a part in this beginning: first blogs, then a Facebook group, then Twitter chats. But t-shirts played a surprising role, too. Here’s one example.

Launching an awareness campaign using t-shirts & social media

Last spring, Rheumatoid Arthritis Warrior held a t-shirt contest based on a Wonder Woman image I created as a t-shirt design called Warrior Woman. People used the design as a profile image on Facebook or Twitter to enter to win the contest. To earn more contest entries, they could also mention the contest on their own blog or social media profiles. Even guys played along.

In case you haven’t already guessed it, the contest was actually a clever awareness campaign for RA. But, it was even more than that: it was also a significant moment for our budding community. Every day, we could see one another using the same image – the Wonder Woman t-shirt design. It re-enforced that we were a team. Before long, members of the community were posting photos on Facebook of themselves in our t-shirts.

Creating a sense of belonging in virtual communities

A virtual community is a real community since real people are involved in real conversations that often become relationships. However, when there is something visual, it helps people to consider the community as real. T-shirts are a one way to help people feel like they belong to one another.

I hope this gives someone another way to think about t-shirts and other kinds of branded swag. They are more than just advertising for a company. And they are even more than just tools for awareness for a good cause. Sometimes, they can help create a family resemblance.

“When I think about the relationships I’ve developed … they evolve over a period of time. They don’t require boondoggles or fancy things; they require sincerity and substantive interaction over a long period of time. Then, when there are moments of opportunity, these are the people that I go to (and hopefully who come to me).”

Brad Feld, on How not to start a relationship.

It had been 13 years of ups and downs. Commitments and re-commitments. Happiness, ambivalence, anger, and satisfaction. All the emotions that come with long-term relationships. A phone call was the beginning of the end. All I wanted to do was anounce the end of the relationship. But I was practically screaming obscenities as I hung up.  No, I’m not talking about the end of a romantic relationship. This was the end of 13 year relationship with my cellular phone service provider- practically an eternity for this industry.

You Can’t Save the Relationship

The rep who took my call ignored my statement that the company simply didn’t offer what I wanted. He didn’t understand that I was upset about my treatment over the years and- by him in this phone call. I had been with this one company for the length of my entire cellular life thus far. I had begun this journey with them and now it was time to end. He didn’t understand that though I knew the relationship needed to end, it was hard. So, he treated it like a transaction and an opportunity to get me to re-commit to the company. Rather than what it was- the ending of a relationship.

Why Good Endings are Important

There’s a popular saying from The Godfather that often makes the rounds, “It’s not personal. It’s business.” But to customers it *is* personal. When you provide a product or service to a customer you become a part of their life- maybe even their daily life. When they choose to stop using your services, recognize it’s the end of a relationship. Don’t try to get them to change their mind, up-sell them to a different service, or bash your competition in hopes of keeping them as a customer. In doing this you miss the opportunity to end the relationship well.

How to End a Relationship Well

When someone no longer wants to use your service you’re presented with an opportunity in how you want to treat them. People remember how you treated them- during a relationship and especially at the end. And they talk about it! You can’t control the things happening but can help determine how you end things and what they talk to others about.

1. Recognize when you’ve lost them and let them go.

Don’t try to upsell them. Don’t bash their competition. Just let them go.

2. Treat this as a relationship ending rather than a transaction.

End it with grace.

3. Ask for feedback so you can learn. Thank them for their business.

In my situation this wouldn’t have changed my mind because the company didn’t offer what I was looking for in terms of product (I wanted an iPhone). But, it would have left a much better impression with me- especially after spending $15,000 and purchasing 8 phones over the length of our relationship. I would have tweeted about it to all my followers. I would have written a different blog post about what an incredible company they are- giving them free advertising and press at no cost.

Marketing Takeway

Business is more than a transaction- you’re building personal relationships with customers. You never know who they might talk to and you don’t know when they’ll need your services again. Treat them with care and kindness throughout the customer lifecycle all the way to the end. This builds goodwill for current and future customers.

“How did you manage to make custom t-shirts so cool and sexy?”

I explained how our company was pretty un-sexy in my eyes. I even admitted I’m not super passionate about t-shirts.

The product is not the purpose

So why am I building an unsexy company selling a product I’m not super passionate about? Because the real goal is to help other people grow great businesses. And that’s something I really care about. We happen to be doing this via a very unsexy business model that’s been around for 100 years: custom promotional merchandise. But that’s okay. And I think others in the startup ecosystem need to embrace a little unsexiness too. Here’s why.

The “coolness” factor of your product, or lack therof, has nothing to do with your startup’s success.

For most companies, there’s a direct correlation between how boring your startup is & how much money you make. This is why I don’t understand why everyone in the tech community is so obsessed with creating cool, sexy products. Why is the implied goal of tech startups to build the coolest new product that makes your techie friends, tech community, and the venture capitalists you’re lusting after go ooh and ahh? Having the hot startup du-jour or being the coolest geek in your community does not equal startup success.

Your role models are boring and ugly

What really baffles me is how the tech community admires so many unsexy companies, yet marches onward building cool things instead of solving real problems. For example:

• Amazon sells books over the internet. Not sexy. Not even in ’95. Nobody walks into a bookstore and goes ‘Ooh, ahh. Look how cool these books are! I want to start a business that sells books!’ But Amazon is a pretty cool company, aren’t they?
• LinkedIn puts resumes online. Resumes are boring. But with their recent IPO & $8 billion market cap, Reid Hoffman is laughing all the way to the bank.
• 37signals helps you mange projects using fairly basic software. Project management sucks. But their company has a cachet most startups only dream of. They also rake in cash and have Jeff Bezos as a mentor and investor. That’s sexy.
• Keurig brews coffee. But they do it differently. Different is sexy.
• Freshbooks creates invoices and helps you get paid. Accounts Receivable is as boring and tedious as it gets. But Mike McDerment bootstrapped his company to the market-leading position within the very boring niche of online invoicing.

These business models are all simple and boring. Amazon wasn’t the first company to sell books. LinkedIn didn’t invent the resume. People have been brewing coffee and writing invoices for who knows how long. Yet all of these companies are wildly successful.

Look for the opportunity

The takeaway? Instead of looking at existing human behavioral habits as a bad thing, look at it like an opportunity. If you can change how people do something they’ve always done, you’re probably solving a real problem. When you solve, or even just slightly improve upon, boring but important issues, you’ll have more customers and cash than you ever dreamed of.

Amazon forever changed how people buy books. Jeff Bezos has impacted far more people than most startups ever will. Changing the world doesn’t mean you have to create innovation out of thin air. It’s perfectly fine, and often highly profitable, to incrementally improve the status quo.

The Bottom Line

Unsexy startups don’t get the attention they deserve because people hate change more than they hate new ideas. It’s easier for people to accept new ideas (sexy startups) than it is to change existing behaviors (unsexy startups).

What’s wrong with No Reply?

Using a No Reply in your email marketing implies you’re too important to help your customers should they have a question. You might as well send your e-mails from screwyou@company.com. It says “You can email us but don’t count on hearing back from a real person.”

What about linking to a contact form within the email?

Even if you clearly link to a contact form, it still puts a burden on your customer. You’re making the customer jump through hoops. If you’re worried about replies not getting into your support ticketing system, try creating a friendly alias like human@company.com or realperson@company.com and route this to your support@company.com queue.

Try something human instead!

Your customer facing email address is a chance for you to build your relationship with customers while reinforcing your brand. So instead of an unfriendly handle like No Reply, use something that’s funny, interesting or unique. This lets customers know you care. It will build customer loyalty and make you stand out. Showing a little personality gives your customers a reason to talk about your company and spread your brand by word-of-mouth.

Here’s one we love from Sticker Giant.

Robots are not humans

Here’s another interesting way to handle the No Reply issue from Moo Cards. Although the company has a no-reply address, they handle it in a very clever way that actually creates a connection with their customer. They do this by acknowledging it’s a bot AND by directing users through their customer service process – a process that ends with a human.

Marketing takeaway

You don’t want to be “that” company being talked about poorly on the internet. Or the one that gets customers but somehow can’t seem to keep ‘em. Be the company that creates a human connection in a fun and interesting way. It’s a quick way to create customer loyalty and humanize your business.

Have you seen a great e-mail reply address or way to address the bot issue? Send yours in and we’ll thank you by sending you your choice of free swag.

Boulder Beta is a local event of connection–between people, local companies, the university, and the entrepreneurial community. We love this event because startup companies get to make some of their very first in-person, real life connections with early customers and prospects. Many tech startups spend months developing their product in a vacuum, so local events are extremely important to get these new ideas out in the wild collecting feedback as soon as possible.

Here are three of the big ways companies successfully connected at the event.

1. Meet the founders & give a demo

One of the best things about this event is spending quality time to meeting the founders, getting a demo of the product or service and asking  questions. So often, everyone in the local community “knows” about new startups in town yet hasn’t had a chance to connect with them in real-life. As a startup marketer or founder, developing real-life connections with startup enthusiasts in your commuinity can be a cheap, cost-effective marketing strategy. Let the community help you get the word out! All you have to do is build connections with members of the community. We were happy to see three of our clients doing this:

Fidatto – A free Facebook application which allows you to recommend local services to your friends.

Book Brewer – Enables authors and bloggers to easily create and publish eBooks to major devices and retailers.

SnapEngage – Is a chat tool which allows you to engage with your website visitors, turning them into customers and ultimately, friends.

We were also excited to see other high-impact Boulder startups in action: CardGnome, Clvr.tv, ID Weeds, RoundPegg, StatsMix, TeamSnap and Vacation Rental Partner.

2. Refine your pitch & marketing collateral

Most startups don’t have enough traffic at launch to properly A/B test their marketing message, sales pitch, or website. Demo’ing in-person at a local event gives you lots of fresh prospects to help you test your collateral.

First, explain your product in different ways to different prospects. Then, evaluate their facial expressions and the number of questions you get. If everyone’s asking the same questions, make sure the copy on your homepage answers them! You can also use the feedback you get to start a FAQ page. This simple exercise will result in double-digit improvements to your signup conversion rates before you even launch your product!

3. Creatively use swag to connect with prospects for a beta launch

One of the fun things about this event were these little dolls that Meeps set out around the event. The company wanted to do something special to celebrate their launch. Most importantly, they wanted to spark conversation since they’re about spontaneous conversation around a shared interest. It worked. People talked about the dolls at the event and afterwards on Twitter. Buzz from the dolls resulted in 160 signups and over 800 unique visits to their site!

Marketing Takeaway

Building strong relationships with your customers is the key for success. It happens in both daily interactions and during special events. Next time you notice a local event happening around your industry, make sure to attend. Better yet, apply to present or pitch your company.

So, we want to know… How do you connect with your customers outside of business as usual?

Boulder Beta is the brain child of Tim Falls of local Boulder company SendGrid.

Instead of sending boring promos, try engaging your customers with interesting content and a call-to-action to engage with your brand. Your customers will love it so much they’ll reply with praise and thank-you’s. Seriously! Our last newsletter got over 90 responses and someone even made a YouTube video thanking us! Instead of customers deleting your newsletter un-opened, they’ll read the whole thing and tell everyone they know how great your company is.

I’ve never met a nice company. Sure, I’ve come across plenty of amazing companies. Some companies have gone above and beyond to help me use their products. Some have customer service to die for. I’ve even dealt with companies that upgraded my shipping and gave me discounts without my asking for them. But I’ve never met a truly nice company.

Let’s define what I mean by “nice.” Nice, as in how you’re nice to your mom. Or how your best friend goes out of their way to cheer you up, expecting nothing in return. Or how your spouse brings you flowers or gifts for no reason. People are genuinely nice all the time to people they care about. Why not companies?

How many companies have done something for you, expecting nothing in return? How many companies do you have a meaningful relationship with? How many companies will send you a gift out of the blue, just to say thanks?

The more I think about how much nicer companies could be, the angrier I get. I’ve received gifts from only two companies—ever! And that was because Printfection spends a crazy amount of money with them. What did I get? A coffee mug, some chocolate and some mints, all at Christmas. What about all of those other companies with whom we spend tens of thousands of dollars a year, ones that I never hear from unless I proactively call about a problem? What about all of those companies I pay for in my personal life, even if not thousands of dollars? It would cost them almost nothing to send a gift or say thanks—anything to show they care. But they don’t, ever!

Are you nice to your customers? Do you treat them the way you treat a good friend? When was the last time your organization went out of its way to say thanks, just because, or did something for a customer without asking for anything in return—and certainly without performing the act of kindness as a gimmick to attract more customers?

I’m tired of dealing with companies that don’t care about me. Do your customers feel the same way?

Why do professional networking events always start with introductions? Same with conference calls! Introductions are harmful. Especially when you’re trying to harness the collective brainpower of a group. After an introduction, you’re immediately put into a bucket. Lawyers in one, programmers in another, the unemployed in a third. Instead of judging people based on the merit of their ideas, you’re subconsciously judging them based on their background and experiences.

Last night I helped put on House of Genius. Instead of introductions, we got down to business. When we started exploding ideas into actionable next-steps, nobody knew if the suggestion was coming from the CTO of a half-billion dollar company or an extremely intelligent high school dropout from a broken home. It was great. Only at the end did everyone reveal their background and their occupation (or lack thereof). Everyone was surprised at the caliber of ideas coming from unlikely candidates.

It’s human nature to put people into buckets and judge. So think about how you can change the underlying structure of your organization or event to create an environment where people are judged solely on the merit of their ideas.

Automating and reducing waste by adopting more efficient processes is good business, right? For the last 50 years this school of thought has been the driving force behind some of the world’s most successful companies. Outsource everything, continually refine your processes, cut costs and then squeeze out the juice to the bottom line. A recipe for success, right?

Wrong. In this new service economy we live in, being “efficient” is actually wasteful. By cutting costs, you’re also cutting the relationship with your customers. Instead of standing out with remarkable service, you’re now just another company with an unfriendly yet efficient approach that “keeps costs down.” You see this mantra everywhere: email instead of phone calls; self-service instead of full; ATMs instead of tellers. Rejoice! It’s working. The world is more efficient than ever before!

But efficiency does not translate to the bottom line.

Efficiency is expensive

Building this kind of efficiency into your business is usually not worth the money saved. Furthermore, most cost-saving schemes are being adopted by your competitors, too. So, far from being unique, you become just another me-too business:

• Everyone has automated phone menus with voice recognition. Saving a small percentage of your expenses on labor is not worth frustrating the hell out of your customers.
• Everyone prefers email to phone calls. But making a strong lasting connection over email is almost impossible.
• Every B2B company is getting rid of its field sales reps in favor of tele-sales teams. But bonding with senior decision-makers over the phone is hard.

You can’t cut your way to happiness

For the customer, day-to-day interaction with these so-called efficient companies is indistinguishable and anonymous. It doesn’t matter whether I call AT&T, Sprint, Verizon or T-Mobile: before I even pick up the phone I know I’ll be talking to a robot. It doesn’t matter whether AT&T’s phone system is friendlier than Verizon’s: they both still suck compared to a real person. No matter how much optimizing and cost-cutting these companies do with their customer service, I won’t like them for it.

But what if a cell phone company were to answer its 1-800 number on the first ring… and with real people? I bet the word-of-mouth buzz and brand awareness generated would easily cover the cost of the extra reps. Why? Because phone companies all have the same mediocre customer service. Answering the phone on the first ring would be a differentiator. It would get more attention than a Super Bowl ad.

The top three phone companies in the US alone spend $8.2 billion per year on advertising. So it must be an efficient method of customer acquisition, right? Wrong again. These companies are in a bidding war for consumer attention. Yet all of their ads look the same. And consumers aren’t even paying as much attention to mass media as they used to.

Instead of trying to one-up the competition with another me-too ad campaign, what if a company put 25% of its advertising budget into its call center and did something remarkable like answering all phone calls on the first ring. While everyone else would continue zigging with ads, it would be zagging with outstanding service. Instant differentiation, free PR, a million thank-yous from happy customers, a ton of word-of-mouth buzz—all resulting in many more customers than it could have acquired with traditional advertising.

The case for waste

Think of the times you’ve received extraordinary customer service. How many people did you tell about your experience? How loyal are you now to the company? How much more money have you spent on the company over time?

Next time you think of cutting costs, don’t. Fooling yourself into thinking that you’re improving the bottom line is easy. But when the by-products of efficiency are irate customers and damaged relationships, you’re not saving money at all. Being inefficient might just be the cheapest way to stand out and get the attention of millions.

Think outside the inbox

Nowadays, when you send something via snail mail, people take notice. When was the last time you got something in the mail from an online company you do business with? Nobody’s doing it! If you take the time to lick a stamp you’re almost guaranteed to make a lasting impression in your customer’s mind. And most importantly, last I checked, the USPS has no plans for a priority inbox!

From royal.pingdom.com

Like most people, we hate being on the receiving end of horrible customer service, too. This includes:

• Having to hunt for contact information
• Convoluted phone trees
• Being transferred to several people before getting any help
• Dealing with poorly trained reps with no authority to do anything
• Intricate policies and fine print.

We were guilty of everything on this list. Our way of handling customer service was time-consuming; by the time we actually started talking to most customers, they weren’t very happy with us, and we in turn started to dread picking up the phone.

Last year we asked ourselves, if we hate being on the receiving end of this, then why do we subject our customers to it? The solution became obvious. So, we ditched the old way of handling customer service and renamed ourselves the Customer Love Team. The name sounds silly, but the important thing is that we changed how we dealt with our partners and customers. All of our changes were simple, including the following:

• We made it easy for customers to contact us however they want: phone, email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, even snail mail.
• Goodbye long phone menu. Now there are just two options: sales or support.
• The Customer Love Team is able to handle both sales and support requests, no transfer required.
• The team has the authority to do whatever is required to solve a problem. There are no approvals. We trust our employees’ judgement.
• We threw out complicated policies in favor of common sense.

The most important change of all was in our attitude to customer care. It’s no longer a chore. And the more we strive to deliver customer love, the easier it becomes to reward our customers with great personalized service. Because of all these small changes, we’ve started to grow our base of loyal customers and our referrals.

Many of the improvements have been gradual. Our staff’s attitude didn’t change overnight. But over time, we’ve all started to show our customers the love. The benefits have been amazing. Customers are happier (we hear “Thank you” a lot more now), those of us on the Customer Love Team are happier, and we aren’t wasting time trying to dodge a major part of our business.

We aren’t the only ones moving away from conventional customer service. In fact, companies such as the famous Zappos have built their business squarely on customer care.

Which companies have blown you away with their dedication to customer service? How are you loving your customers?

Without customers, you don’t have a business. Without your first customers, you wouldn’t be where you are today. Think of your oldest customers, the ones who took a chance on you when you had only a shoddy minimum viable product.

Most everyone understands how important customers are… at least in theory. Yet a lot of what we think about day to day has nothing to do with keeping our customers happy. I’m as guilty of this as anyone.

• Our customers don’t care how much revenue we generated last month, but I do.
• Our customers don’t care about our new marketing website, which we built to acquire more customers, but I focused on it almost 100% for a month.
• And to be honest, most of them won’t notice our new social media strategy, but I’m hard at work on that, too.

How come our daily activities are so misaligned with what makes our customers happy?

Most customers are busy. They just want the company they’re buying from to do what it does best. If you ask, customers will almost always tell you what they want—except for one thing: no customer ever asks to be appreciated. And yet no customer is too busy to be shown appreciation for stuffing your wallet with their hard-earned money. Not one!

So, give your first and best customers a call. Right now. And then figure out what else you can do, consistently, to show them you care.

Spending a little more time keeping in touch with your customers could be the most important thing you do all day. People want to do business with people who remember and appreciate them.

We’re no different. Our first paying customer was Brett Purdom of The Foot Mechanic. He took a chance on us before anyone else. Thanks, Brett. Without you, we’d still be two college kids with $0.00 in the company bank account.

Who was your first paying customer? Are they still your customer today? When was the last time you told them how much you appreciate their business? Will you have forgotten about them this time next year?

Non-profits are experts in getting people to take action. A small thank-you gift is all it takes. Next time you're trying to get money, time, or attention from your customers or donors, take a clue from WWF's brilliant marketing strategy. Here's the email I received:

Bucking the status quo

Last month we said goodbye to our trendy downtown office. Now the entire staff is working from home full time. In the process of going virtual, I learned how deeply ingrained the idea of the office is in our culture. I was surprised at how hard it is for people to grasp the concept of a virtual company.

Some of my friends and associates don’t understand how you can run a real company without an office. They’re skeptical. They say we’re making a huge mistake, that it will never work over the long term:

What? You’re shutting down your office? Are you going out of business? How can you work without an office. Where will your employees go?

Working from home sounds cool, but it won’t work in the long run. People don’t have the discipline. They’ll watch TV and slack off all day. Managing them will be hard. Just wait and see.

Clearly, most people aren’t comfortable throwing out the office like the trash. But viewing the status quo with a bit of skepticism is healthy. And luckily, this mindset comes naturally to many startup entrepreneurs—including me.

When we started really thinking about our office, we quickly realized it was a major constraint on the company’s flexibility and growth potential—not to mention on our overall productivity and happiness.

The seven reasons we ditched our office

Working from home is addicting

For years I had been working from home at least one day a week, and usually for an hour or two each morning on top of that. After breakfast, I couldn’t help but check my email. Before long, I was consumed by the computer. By lunch time, I was feeling guilty for not being at the office yet.

Over the years, I worked from home more often. Collaboration tools kept improving, home Internet kept getting faster and highway traffic kept getting worse.

Going to the office was a chore

No, it had nothing to do with my coworkers or the physical environment. Going to the office felt like a chore because I couldn’t come up with a legitimate reason to commute back and forth to a place that offered no real benefit. In the world of Internet business, getting things done involves solitary computer work for extended periods of time, with no interruption. As most office workers know, focusing for three or four hours without interruption in any office is almost impossible.

After noticing how productive I was at home and how much easier it was to get in the zone, going to the office became less appealing. Hop in the car, sit in traffic and then get less work done? It didn’t make sense.

But I was the CEO. I had to go to the office to foster the company culture and be a team player, right? Truth is, I often went to the office just out of obligation, because everyone else was there, not because it provided any tangible benefit.

“But what about company culture?”

From the very beginning, we’ve taken steps to actively manage our culture. We go out to lunch every week as a team: no agenda, just to have a meal as friends. We also go to a happy hour every Friday around 4:00 to wind the week down over a few beers. Now and then, we do fun things like baseball and bowling. Between lunches, happy hours, monthly meetings, ad-hoc meetings and other events, I feel plenty connected to my team. Dare I say, sometimes over-connected? When it’s time to get work done, I don’t need or want to be in an office environment, ripe with distractions.

Time is the most valuable resource

When you’re in a startup, you never have enough time. Sitting in rush-hour traffic never made sense to me. Why spend double the time in rush hour when there’s no real reason to be at the office from 9:00 to 5:00? I’d much prefer to roll out of bed, eat some breakfast, hop on the computer and get right to work. I can blow through email and start working before most commuters arrive at the office.

Once I’m in the groove, I lose track of time. If I’ve decided to skip rush hour, I’ll make it to lunch time before I even think about heading to the office. But I’ve been working since 8:00 am and don’t want to stay in the office past 5:00 or 6:00. So, I get to experience the joy of rush hour on the way home—unless I stay late and miss out on an evening with friends or, worse, irritate my girlfriend, who’s on a regular schedule. And then my brain’s fried anyway from the more than full day’s work. So, the extra hours I gain by waiting for traffic to clear are mostly wasted anyway.

Those were not good options: either sit in traffic or turn my back on everyone at the office. Then I thought about their time as well. Everyone’s time is valuable. Why do they have to sit in traffic every day when they could work from home like me?

Networking and business development

This was the match that lit the fire. For years, I had been commuting from Denver to Boulder for most of my networking and business development meetings. Boulder is the center of the tech scene in Colorado. Almost all good meet-ups, networking and events happen in Boulder. Driving between Denver and Boulder with traffic takes over an hour, adding up to a two-hour round trip for every meeting in Boulder. Most meetings are only 30 minutes or an hour, which meant I was wasting two thirds of the trip just driving. I ended up cancelling meetings in Boulder because they would take up half the day.

After a few years, I got sick of it and thought about moving to Boulder. But our office was in Denver, which would double my half-hour commute each way. Once again, the office was the root of the problem! Yes, we could have moved the office to Boulder, but then everyone living in Denver would have had an hour added to their commute. And I wasn’t about to make everyone move to Boulder. It’s a cool city, but expensive and definitely not for everyone. No matter how you sliced it, moving the office didn’t seem fair to my employees.

Great people are everywhere

No matter where your office is located, the number of great people who would not be able to commute there will be more than the number of great people who can. For example, about 386,000 high-tech workers are in the entire Silicon Valley region, according to a 2008 study by AeA. That’s about 5% of the US high-tech workforce. Even if you moved your office there, to the center of the action, 95% of the talent would still not be able to commute to your office, and probably 99% wouldn’t be able to commute within a half hour. Why limit yourself to local talent?

The cold hard math

We were spending close to $1,000 per employee per month for office-related expenses. This might sound high, but when starting off, most companies lease a bit more space than they need to have room to grow. And don’t forget expensive T1s for Internet access, networking gear, office server(s), utilities, cubicles, food and snacks, parking, property taxes and every other hidden expense. Sadly, our $1,000 might be even less than the cost for startups in expensive cities such as San Francisco and New York.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather invest the $1,000 per employee per month into actually growing the company. Or raise everyone’s salary by $12,000 a year. Either way, we’d be better off.

We’re still scared to pull the plug

Even with these seven solid reasons, we’re still scared of having no office whatsoever. We have major concerns about working from home. Will work get done, or will everyone start slacking off? Will we still interact with each other socially or turn into hermits? How can we maintain our culture without a physical meeting space?

Stay tuned, more to come. Subscribe now so that you don’t miss our next post. And let me know your thoughts on working from home by leaving a comment below.

There’s a lot of talk about telecommuting from home. But not much about companies where everyone works from home all the time. Sure, some companies let their employees work remotely now and then. Some companies even have a small percentage of their staff working from home full-time. And there’s a few who fully embraced distributed teams. 37signals preaches great people are everywhere. But then again, they just moved into their fancy new Chicago office.

What about small companies with no office whatsoever. I’m talking about real companies generating real profits sans headquarters. Is it possible? Profitable? Or just plain crazy?

We’re about to find out if sending everyone home was a good idea or a grave mistake. Last month we kissed our swanky Downtown Denver office goodbye. After six years in business, this is the first time Printfection’s never had an office.

Stay tuned for our upcoming series of blog posts about ditching your office and working remote. Learn what provoked our sudden disdain for office life, how we went virtual in less than two weeks, what still scares the hell out of us, and most importantly—if we’re happy with our decision or living in home-office hell.

If there’s something you’d like us to cover about our relocation to our homes, please leave a comment. And make sure to subscribe. You don’t want to miss this series!

PS – for clarification, we’re still printing from commercial production facilities. Working from home refers to everything except production.

So what exactly is Tenporium?

Tenporium puts a social spin on product reviews. Through a fun and interactive community, we collectively determine the top 10 products in various categories. For example, the top 10 iPhone accessories.

What was your launch strategy?

For the last two years, we’ve had a homepage up with a place to enter your email if you’re interested in Tenporium and want an invite once the service launches. We used this invite list to seed our private beta. We also created a blog post about our 300 t-shirt giveaway. And used various forms of marketing to market that post. For example, Stumbleupon ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Google Adwords, paid tweets, social bookmarking sites, submitting to contest sites, posting on forums, contacting Amazon reviewers, etc. The first 300 people to create an account and write five reviews got a free Tenporium shirt.

Did the incentive work to increase signups and reviews?

Yes, it definitely helped us get people to sign up and write reviews! People like free stuff and the winners were pretty excited about the t-shirt. Before we launched into private beta, we weren’t really marketing our site or generating much buzz. We didn’t really have an existing user community before the t-shirt giveaway, so most of the users who completed the contest were new signups who came primarily to win a t-shirts. However, the majority of these users ended up liking the site itself and gave us very positive feedback on the concept.

Anything you’d do differently next time? Advice for other Startups?

Yeah, it was a learning experience. Next time we’d track our marketing efforts better. Set up tracking so we can differentiate our different campaigns and see which marketing channel was the most effective. We’d probably use Google Analytics in conjunction with their URL Builder to generate tagged links.

It would have helped to make the objective of the contest easier. For example, write three reviews instead of five reviews. We would have had even more t-shirt winners and three reviews is still quite a bit of content in exchange for a t-shirt.

And it was no small task to handle the logistics of the promotion. Identifying the winners was time consuming. Maybe we should have had had the user email us when they finished instead of querying the database to determine the winners. Even more time consuming than identifying the winners was contacting them and having them reply with their size/ shipping info and then collecting that info, storing it, and fulfilling the merchandise. Next time we’d improve the fulfillment process.

An Industry Ripe for Change

The promotional products industry is stuck in a rut. Sure, it’s moved from local screen-printing shops to online websites. But everything is still done the same, inefficient way. Here’s the typical 10-step process for ordering promotional products:

1. Shop around for a few reputable companies to compare
2. Select a product
3. Select a quantity greater than the minimum (12, 24, 72, 144, or more!)
4. Figure out how many colors to use in your design (it affects the price)
5. Submit your artwork
6. Get your artwork manually approved
7. Choose sizes and colors
8. Get a quote by calling or requesting a quote online
9. Pay upfront for all the products
10. And finally receive the bulk shipment weeks later.

If this isn’t enough of a headache, you still have to figure out how to give away the promotional products you worked so hard to acquire! And no promotional company is going to deal with complaints, returns, and exchanges from the recipients of the merchandise—your customers! Although this process is fairly clunky and time consuming, it can work okay if all your customers are in a single location, such as a trade show. But what happens if your customers are all across the country, or more likely, across the world? The old model falls apart. You’re stuck with two options: either go through this clunky process and do the distribution yourself (have fun at the post office!) or don’t do it at all.

Just like other industries revolutionized by the Internet, the promotional products industry needs an upgrade. Companies shouldn’t have to deal with minimum order sizes, how many colors are in their design, and the management of inventory. They should be given a simple web interface to design their products, choose recipients of the giveaway, and get back to their real business. Inventory management, distribution, customer questions, and exchanges should be handled by the promotional products company.

As the world moves towards specialization, companies should be very hesitant to take on projects outside their core area of focus. The traditional promotional products industry forces companies to take on a much bigger role than necessary. The industry needs to realize this and wake up. It’s time to start taking complete control of the promotional products process so businesses can focus on what they do best, not the logistics of a promotion.

How MoonPie Uses Merchandise:

1. On the back of MoonPie boxes, they’re selling shirts:

2. 20% of the real estate on moonpie.com is a call-to-action to buy MoonPie apparel, hats, and merch:

3. The header of their site (visible on every page within the site) has a giant button to “Buy MoonPies, t-shirts, and more!”

4. They give out free MoonPies, shirts, and hats at parades, carnivals, and events across the world.

Clearly, the company has given a lot of thought to their merchandise. It appears to be a key part of their marketing strategy. And in my opinion, it makes sense. Their product has gained cult status with MoonPie lovers around the world. Having a merchandise store for their die-hard evangelists is smart. It creates a stronger bond between the brand and their most important customers. What company wouldn’t want their most vocal proponents decked out in branded swag from head to toe? It’s like having a small army of walking advertisements!

If MoonPie wanted to take their merchandising to the next level, they’d start giving away stuff instead of selling it. While some die-hards will pay for the merch, there’s a lot of evangelists capable of generating word-of-mouth referrals and brand buzz who won’t pay for the swag. Give them free shirts and free MoonPies. It’s a trivial marketing expense with huge upside potential.

Step 1: Get Custom Printed T-Shirts

I contacted two local screen printers and went online to the popular screen printing website CustomInk. Below is a breakdown of how much it costs for a light blue, single sided, 2 color print. We got quotes for five, ten and 20 shirts for each company (as we’re not quite sure how many tees we want to giveaway):

The above pricing includes the shirts, printing and screen setup costs. This pricing only works if the artwork is formatted for screen printing. The local printers had an art department available for $40-$50/hr if the artwork was not already in screen-printing format.

Step 2: Get Addresses & Shirt Sizes from Customers/ Fans

In order to send the free shirts to your best customers, you’ll need their shipping address. Depending on your relationship with them, you might not have their most up-to-date mailing address. To collect and verify their shipping address, you should probably ask them for it. Email, tweet, or facebook message the winners asking for their t-shirt size and shipping address. There may be some complications if they didn’t provide a way to contact them back, forgot their shirt size, or misspelled something. If that’s is the case you can always pick someone else to give the shirt to.

Step 3: Fold, Package & Label

Mailers and envelops are available at Office Depot and Office Max . Or you can pick up mailers while you’re at the post office.

I recommend a mailer or envelope at least 8 1/2 × 11″. Otherwise you’re going to have to get creative with your folding for anything larger than a medium. The cheapest option for packaging I could find was a box of 25 9″ × 12″ brown envelopes from Office Depot for $5.99. Keep in mind the chances of a damaged t-shirt arriving are higher since the brown envelopes aren’t waterproof. Nor really meant for t-shirts.

Let’s assume we’re on a tight budget, and we are going to risk it with the brown envelopes. To prevent hand cramps and illegibility from poor handwriting skills we also got some address labels for $5. We can now package and label up to 25 shirts for $12.56 (including tax).

Step 4: Shipping

There are quite a few options for shipping out packages. The local post office is fairly inexpensive and they have an online service at USPS.com where you can print postage from your computer. It’s free to use and you can save 14% on postage (this might not be worth it if your printer is an ink hog). There’s also UPS and FedEx. The UPS store also ships USPS and offers packaging solutions, just like the post office.

Below are the shipping costs for a 1-pound package going from Colorado to New York:

USPS Priority Mail $5.35
UPS Ground $11.08
FedEx Home Delivery $10.20

USPS First-Class Mail from the US to the United Kingdom is $10.56 and from the US to Canada is $4.81. When shipping internationally, make sure to fill out customs form PS 2976 or PS2976-A (based on the class and weight of the package).

Shipping Tip: If shipping from the local post office, call before arriving if you have a lot of packages. Depending on the post office they can limit the number of packages you ship per transaction (basically make you go stand in line again until everything is shipped). Don’t believe me? This happened to MailChimp, and they wrote about it on their blog:

The real hero in all of this is our office manager April. She developed what you might call a rather special relationship with the employees at the post office down the block. Apparently they have a rarely enforced rule that you can only mail fifteen parcels at a time. And since April was a “chronic offender,” she had to endure dirty looks and lots of attitude while spending hours at a time standing in line, sending her fifteen parcels, and then standing in line again.

Step 5: Adding it All Up: The Total Estimated Cost

We decided to giveaway 10 shirts to our best customers. Eight of them were from the United States, one from the U.K. and one from Canada.

The total cost averaged $16.57 per recipient, not including any of my time. The breakdown is:

Some Final Thoughts & Advice

Some issues that may come up are incorrect addresses, extra inventory, lost or damaged packages, and shirts that don’t fit your recipients. What good is a free shirt to your best customers if they can’t even wear it? Shipping out a replacement will add to the overall cost. Especially if their size is out of stock! To make sure you have the right number of each size you could award the participants FIRST and then order the shirts. The downside is the turnaround time for traditional screen printing is 1-2 weeks, plus the repackaging and reshipping time to the individual customer. By the time the item arrives, the previously-excited recipient of a free shirt might be frustrated! Nobody wants their best customers frustrated by a friendly promotion-gone-wrong.

One of the biggest things not accounted for in the above calculations is your time. As we all know, time is money. Just finding a good price on screen printing can be very time consuming. Not to mention the time working with the printer, interacting with customers for sizes and address information, folding & packaging the shirts, filling out address labels and customs forms, and taking the packages to the post office.

An alternative to doing giveaways yourself is to look into a service provider. There are fulfillment companies (usually for larger quantities), promotional & campaign services, random winner selectors (for contests) and of course Printfection’s very own giveaway service.

What is Merchandise Marketing?

Merchandise marketing is the process of creating awareness and customer loyalty using merchandise. By merchandise, we mean any tangible item such as t-shirts, thank-you cards, gift cards, flowers, a new sports car, etc.

Merchandise marketing is similar to email marketing, tradeshow marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, or social media marketing. It’s another way to get your name out there in front of prospects and existing customers.

Why should I care?

Merchandise marketing is a proven strategy. For decades companies have purchased custom-printed items and given them away at tradeshows and events. But until now, merchandise marketing was a small component of tradeshow or other forms of marketing. An afterthought, not an entire strategy of its own. Similar to Email marketing 10 years ago, merchandise marketing is a newer, emerging concept.

It’s more than getting a box of shirts printed up for your next tradeshow. Merchandise marketing involves an ongoing strategy for creating awareness and customer loyalty using merchandise.

How is Merchandise Marketing different from Promotional Marketing?

Merchandise marketing and promotional marketing are similar. But promotional marketing (free t-shirts, giveaways, contests, etc) is just a subset of merchandise marketing. Merchandise marketing also includes thank-yous, referrals, incentives, and other proven uses of physical merchandise.

How does Merchandise Marketing fit into the overall marketing mix?

Merchandise marketing is just one part of the overall marketing mix. It fits in alongside other popular forms of marketing. It’s simply another form of marketing, another tool in the marketer’s toolbox.

Merchandise marketing can help support other methods of marketing, such as word-of-mouth and loyalty marketing. And other methods of marketing, such as email and social media marketing, can help support a merchandise marketing strategy.

Other popular forms of marketing include:

• Direct marketing
• Email marketing
• Word-of-mouth marketing
• Referral marketing
• Loyalty marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Social media marketing
• Relationship marketing
• Internet marketing
• Inbound marketing
• Telemarketing

DTG is a great, cost effective option for on-demand apparel. However, it’s not a print method most people are familiar with. People often want to know how the quality and durability compares to the more traditional silk screening method of decoration.

Pros & Cons of Screen Printing

Screen Printing Pros

• Cost effective for large orders
• Easier to print larger prints, sleeves, etc.
• Can silk screen on just about any fabric/ substrate
• Popular

Screen Printing Cons

• Limited number of colors per design
• Setup costs including artwork fees, screens, & proofing
• Singles/ small orders are very expensive
• Sometimes a tacky or thick finish
• Photos and extreme details don’t show up as well

Pros & Cons of Digital Direct-to-Garment

DTG Pros

• No limit to the number of colors in a design
• Can print photos and detailed images
• Very affordable for on-demand singles and smaller orders
• Soft to the touch

DTG Cons

• Not a significant savings for large quantity orders
• Color of the shirt can influence final print more so than screen printing
• Exact color matching can be difficult due to the CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black) ink used in printers
• Usually has a limited print area (i.e. no “all-over” printing)
• Can only print on fabric

Durability of DTG vs. Screen Printed

I could go on and on about how durable the prints are, but a picture is worth a thousand words. To show you I did a side-by-side wash comparison between DTG printed shirts and silk screened shirts. The plan? Wash the tees until the designs fall apart and take photographic evidence along the way.

I purchased a couple of silk screened tees at Target and then had some DTG prints ordered from us. I took all the shirts home and for the last few weeks I’ve been washing them over and over. I purchased duplicates so there would always be a brand-new control shirt for comparison.

Washing Conditions

• Shirt RIGHT side out
• Machine wash cold/cold with regular detergent
• Dry on Hot for 70 minutes

To simulate the harshest conditions, we did not follow manufacturer directions. To keep your shirts (DTG or silk screened) looking nicer longer wash them inside out, cold wash and dry on low heat.

Original vs. 15 Washes

 The blue ink on the DTG has faded slightly but otherwise the shirt is looking great.

 The screened version hasn’t noticeably faded, however, it’s no longer as shiny.

Screen Printed vs. DTG after 15 Washes

 
The white tees are both starting to fade (notice the black shades of the hat on the screened version and the VCR on the DTG). This comparison might not be apples-to-apples since the screen printed design has less detail than the DTG sample.

Both of the dark shirts are holding up really well with very little change.

Conclusions

After 15 washes, which for a lot of people would be at least 6 months of wear, things are looking pretty good for both DTG and Screen Printing. The screen printing appears slightly more durable so far, but not by much. Since there is hardly any difference between the two methods, the biggest factor when choosing a printing method seems to be the pros and cons of each. If you’re printing up 1,000 shirts in one big batch screen printing is probably the better overall choice. However, if you want to print in small batches or have lots of colors in your design, DTG wins out.

I’ll be updating the blog with more photos as I continue to wash the tees, so stay tuned…

Increasingly, companies are using sophisticated email marketing techniques like autoresponders and drip campaigns. When a trial expires, a specific email message can be triggered. But what's an effective call-to-action likely to get readers to reactivate their trial and become a paying customer?

Helpdesk software company Zendesk sent me a email a few months after my trial expired. Not one, but two compelling offers! (1) reactivate for free and try our new plan, and (2) the first 25 reactivations receive a free zendesk T-shirt.

The double call-to-action is smart. Both CTA's revolve around the free theme, but with different goals. Reactivate for free is their main goal. But the free t-shirt offer supports the main call to action in numerous ways:

• It creates a sense of urgency. Only the first 25 reactivations get the shirt.
• It helps shows the fun and playful side of Zendesk, a key ingredient in their Love Your Helpdesk message. Even if you're not one of the first 25, or you don't reactivate, you can't help but think Zendesk is cool and fun based on their shirts!
• If you're on the fence about reactivating, a free shirt might push you over the edge.
• When your free shirt arrives during your trial, you're going to subliminally think good things about ZenDesk. When you wear the shirt, your coworkers/ friends will probably ask what's Zendesk, at which you'll have to explain their service and how they just sent you a cool new t-shirt. Perfect word-of-mouth marketing!

Next time you're optimizing a conversion funnel, think outside the box like Zendesk. There's a lot of creative calls to action underutilized by most marketers.

Here's the full email screenshot:

Follow us & RT this tweet by 5pm GMT for your chance to win a BBM T-shirt! Every 10th tweet wins! (UK ONLY) #BBMT4MeUK

In a few hours, their original tweets and hashtag received over 450 retweets! Since twitter shows 100+ instead of the exact number of retweets, its likely they actually received thousands of RT's.

Furthermore, this promotion spread deep into friends of friends of followers through 3+ levels of retweeting.

To build additional excitement, follow up tweets were posted every few minutes during the contest announcing the latest winners. There were 56 winners announced before the promotion ended a few hours after it started:

I'm curious how they collected 50+ mailing addresses and shirt sizes through direct messages. Generally DM's dont work too well because BlackBerry needs to be following the winner before the winner can send a DM to BlackBerry. With a limit of 140 characters per DM, any back-and-forth questions, incomplete addresses, or missing shirt sizes can be a nightmare. Handling the data collection through a structured form (with validation) or at a minimum via email would be much easier. Having traditional contact info on file in case of a delivery issue or problem is always a good idea too.

All in all, a great social media promotion. Congrats BlackBerry!

Giving a t-shirt away and having it relegated to the bottom of the dresser drawer defeats the whole idea behind giving away free swag. Receiving a bland t-shirt for free is nice, but receiving an awesome free t-shirt is way better.

Instead of giving away our existing, boring t-shirt I managed to create three new, exiciting designs. And I have absolutely no artistic ability! So how’d I do it? A t-shirt design contest!

A contest is a great way to get some fresh design ideas flowing. There are several services you can use to manage your contest. Or you can run your own – your existing fans, followers, and customers are great resources since they know you best and will design something they themselves would want.

Try reaching out to them using Twitter, Facebook, your blog, or email. You’d be suprised at the artistic talent lurking in your social networks/ rolodex. If you run your own contest, you can probably compensate the designer with some free swag featuring their winning design.

Since we had a bit of a time crunch and didn’t want to worry about the logistics of hosting our own contest we decided to use 99designs.com. They have a community of over 74,000 designers so we were pretty sure one of them would be able to design a t-shirt our customers wouldn’t be ashamed to wear in public.

Creating the contest was super easy. Once you’ve decided on an award amount, you write a brief overview about your project, describe your target audience, and outline some requirements for the designers. 99designs handles everything else: marketing your contest to talented designers, managing feedback & comments, awarding the prize money and transferring the winning design files to you.

We ran the contest for one week and had over 126 entries. The hardest part was picking just one winning t-shirt design (we picked three in the end). This was a quick and easy solution to our lack of design skills. We now have 3 great designs to give to our best customers and wear ourselves. The first official Printfection Giveaway is underway!

As you can see, there’s no reason to let a lack of design or creative skills hold you back from offering great merchandise to your fans and followers.

Our Winning Design

Runner-Up Design #1

Runner-Up Design #2