Last four months journey has been exciting, full of impatience, worry, happiness and all kinds of feeling one ever experiences…
As I am working on building one of the best Internet Media company, I am learning as I am failing, experiencing and observing.. Here are some of my learnings so far.
1. Don’t ever under-estimate the impatience of internet audience: You can keep on mulling over on what is the product feature you are lacking and how you should make it more useful for the end consumer, but the problem might lie somewhere else. Don’t assume that Internet audience has the patience to see what lies beneath. They are an impatient lot and want results quick, real quick!!
2. Hire Hungry, Not Experienced Sales People: When you are battling with so many things – product, marketing, operations, sales – you would think that hiring the experienced sales guys is the best thing to do as they would have least learning curve. My experience tells me that it might go wrong in a harsh startup environment where power of brand is not behind the sales guy. Experienced sales guys, working in large companies are like courier boys collecting cheques on the power of brand. They struggle, or rather are not willing to work extra hard when power of brand is not behind them.
Therefore, look of hungry sales guys who have never say die attitude and can withstand the pressure and harsh environment.
3. Invest Early in Brand Building: In the internet business, Search engine marketing is like a necessary evil. Sooner you reduce your dependence on it, better it is. Bids only increase over the years and starts pinching you. SEM is like putting an ad in classified where every ad is competing for attention from the user.. Display is like a insert in main line newspaper.
Invest in Display ads with powerful communication. Be patient in terms of results as brand recall takes time to build. Be happy seeing more and more people searching you on google via brand keyword. Have your TG well defined and have targeted publishers for Display ad.
4.Don’t invest early on on Design – fix the UX first: While undoubtedly design is super important in Web 2.0 world, but not more than UX. And UX is not an elixir which somebody can tell you in 1 day. You need to rigorously experiment, measure and evaluate to fine tune your UX. While this is a never ending process, spending heavily on Design makes sense when you have a good handle on UX, or atleast you have a good sense of what does not work, otherwise you might up end up in a beautiful UI but a crappy UX.
5. Every employee is an integral part of the success story: As you build the business, you will hire lot of people in operations and seemingly mundane jobs. I can’t stress on it more that it is important to keep every employee engaged and involved. If mundane tasks are not executed properly, a well thought strategic move will not result into anything.. As is rightly said, every brick in the house is important!!
Chief Marketing Officer,
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O'Santorini 