This is where I share my ideas, inspiration & thoughts. Generally though I'm just the Creator of Rockstar Awesomeness and this tumblog is further proof of that.
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In the extremely agile online world, there seems to be a premium placed on getting to market first with a new feature or product. But I’d like to contest the viability and probably the suitability of that premium, since I don’t believe that it’s crucial to be the first to the market**.
Getting to the market first, gives you the bragging rights and all of the hype / publicity that goes along with that. This is obviously great and I’m sure this is every marketer’s dream, since the marketing angles are pretty easy; it is undoubtedly much harder to hype & market something when it already exists, but when you’re game-changing this is a massive advantage. It is also considerably easier to create & build your own share of the market, when no competitors exist.
So all-in-all it would seem like a great idea to get to the market first. This does however not mean that you need to make this the be-all & end-all of your strategy. (more…)
“If you’re customers (existing or prospective) do not understand what you are telling them; everything you say will purely be marketing speak.”
I wrote that bit down recently as I was contemplating additions & tweaks to WooThemes and realized that as marketers we have an integral part to play in the education process for our products & services. See, I don’t think it’s that easy to sell your products & services to someone that is uneducated about what they are really purchasing and spending money on.
Prime example of this (in our context), would be the addition of ExpressionEngine themes to WooThemes’ collection. Instead of just being able to market them (side-by-side) with our WordPress themes, we’re busy building its own, unique channels, with its own angles. It’d be a lie if I said that it has been easy to introduce our WordPress users to the idea of using EE as an alternative CMS. But why?
Simply put, the only way I ever see a WordPress user switching to ExpressionEngine** is if they are properly educated about the pros & cons of such a decision. So part of our marketing strategy should be to include that educational information and in such a way, interact with our users about those pros & cons. Without that understanding of why they’d potentially make such a decision, all of our EE marketing talk would be limited to sounding like us just pushing something new & shiny at them.
So just something to consider in your marketing efforts: people can’t spend money on something that they don’t understand.
Most entrepreneurs seem to be keen to develop & establish their brands as umbrella’s for a whole business empire, in that they grow the company both horizontally & vertically. Whilst this may not be on every startup’s radar, the more established a business becomes, the bigger the need seems to be for diversification & increased sustainability (whilst you wouldn’t be too surprised if you found that every second entrepreneur was a ruthless, greedy business person).
A great example of what I consider to be an “empire” within the online spaces that I move is Envato. Not being content with only having one content-generating website or one marketplace, I think Collis & co should be lauded for really building a massive business with different, yet related, arms & vehicles.
So whilst this is all great, here’s a bit of a proviso of sorts…
Making it seem like you’re building an empire is relatively easy, when you’re creating projects that definitely seem much cooler than they are actually profitable or viable. So the trick is in ensuring that you continue to fuel the mothership (the main / umbrella brand) [with all these cool projects], whilst obviously blowing the “look at us building an empire over here”-horn.
See, when it comes to publicity, the profitability of individual projects / departments aren’t that important, as they were never destined to be considered as an independent vehicle. Instead they should be geared towards fueling that mothership, as that is the cash cow; not necessarily the shiny new idea that you are implementing.
The main brand also has a longevity that far surpasses the lifespan of an individual project. Whilst some of your newly introduced projects may be great enough to be the next cash cow, their first aim should be to contribute to the building of the brand.
That way they’re also indirectly contributing to the profitability of the business as a whole. It may seem irresponsible to allow one side of your business to operate at a loss, but this is where you need some balls and you need to view the situation from a holistic point-of-view. Don’t let isolated situations impair your judgement. Focus on the mothership, as that is where you will find the greatest value, sustainability and hopefully profits in the longer term.
Great post by Collis about how they’ve managed & sustained the growth that Envato has experienced. Always awesome to read such inspiring stories and even cooler to know that we could all learn from these experiences when building our own startups.
You can do well in a crowded field as long as you’re doing something that sets you apart from the pack. It can be price, style, substance, personality, positioning, or storytelling. There are tons of ways to establish your company as unique.
As a note… WooThemes wasn’t first to the market either; at least initially when premium WordPress themes started taking off. And look what we’ve built until now. Fact is that I’d probably attribute a great deal of our success to us taking an unique approach to marketing our business and adding customer value.
I’ve really been enjoying Spencer Fry’s blog posts of late and this one is no different. In this post, Spencer talks about how competition does & doesn’t influence their thinking at Carbonmade. You may also want to read my post on ignoring the competition here.
If you build a simpler, more affordable alternative to what’s out there already, you can bring new people into the fold. You don’t have to grab a piece of someone else’s pie — just bake a new one.
As I’ve been building WooThemes with Magnus & Mark, we’ve often considered the type of market & customers we’re selling our themes to and tried to figure out exactly how to define that and how that then influences the products we’re pitching to them. Not such an easy task of course…
I would however like to think – and in my opinion that’s what Matt Linderman is getting to – that we’ve dictated a bit in terms of marketing awesomeness within our products. That way the marketing machine is at least finding the customers that are not sure what they want or how they want to use it. It also still remains that it’s slightly harder to market to the experts at the top-end of the market, but in my mind those are in the minority anyway.
“While everyone else was doing social media, music, video or the startup de jour, we tried to ground ourselves in what any business should be doing: solve a real problem for people.”
Makes you think huh?
Along with blogs, Twitter & everything else social media, came the ability for any Average Joe to simply speak their mind and publish their opinion. Whilst this is all very democratic, I’d like to think that opinions don’t really matter in the business world.
So in this episode I talk about how companies / brands need to listen to opinions (as they need to interact with customers / stakeholders), but that there’s a fine balance between listening and allowing useless opinion to influence the way we run our businesses / brands.
Okay, so this is a little weird and maybe overly impulsive (even from me), but I’ve decided to close down RockstarTV (previously at http://therockstar.tv, but with a 301 redirect bring you here now) completely as of today, after only having it online for the last couple of weeks. All six RockstarTV episodes that I’ve published already have been moved over to this blog and adii.co.za will now once again become my sole publishing outlet.
Why did I do it? Well, I’d be lying if I said that this was a massive decision that took me a massive amount of time… 
Instead I just sat down after dinner tonight and just felt that this was the right thing to do. But to indulge you lot, here’s a few reasons for taking this more, integrated approach with regards to my publishing: (more…)