Software Business in the Middle East

Eric Sink has published his presentation from Business of Software conference. The original post is here and the presentation is available on this link.

I think that presentation is a very good and brief summary of what Eric has written so far on his blog about marketing for geeks, and I strongly recommend to read his blog through if you are running your own company or you want to start it. Few highlights from the presentation:

• The process of development and marketing is presented in a pseudo-code, something very clear for developers.
• Development is sandwiched between two marketing steps: (1) Decide What to Build as Strategy and (2) Tell Everybody About It as Communication. Developers tend to forget about step 1 thinking about step 2.
• Geeks are really bad at marketing, but almost everybody else is bad at marketing too.
• Excerpt: “We think of marketing and sales as something that can subtract value if it is done poorly, not as something that can add value if it is done well.”
• Example: Moving more expensive products on a web site on the top of the list of products increased the revenue by about 30%. This is the one of the shocking discoveries that cool features of your product is not the only source of you increased revenue.
• Excerpts: “Don’t compromise on product or craftsmanship, but respect the value of marketing. And sales.”
• Tendency to think that bad ideas are good, and good ideas are bad. The example is given for the product SourceOffSite – the kind of remote access for the SourceSafe. In the beginning Eric thought this product was a bad idea – but finally the revenue for this product for the past 9 years is $14,837,958.17. Not bad at all.
• Products would have more chances to get more sales if we stop thinking about technologies and programming languages and start thinking about how to solve real problems the normal people have.
• Great excerpts:
  • “Customers do not care what language my product is written in.“
  • “They don’t care about what library I used or how much fun I had learning a new technology or platform or tool.“
  • “They just want their problem solved, and many of them are seriously annoyed that they have to use a computer to do it.“
  • “The only way to overcome that annoyance and get their money is to create a product that is simply beautiful, and completely focused on what they want to do.”
• Marketing is not black and white as we used to in the binary world. Marketing and sales have a lot of gray. It affects that we think about competition as “get it all or nothing”. But truth is that normally there is no single company that takes all the market. Player number 5 or 10 might also have solid revenue too.
• As result, for sales and marketing you would ask question “How many people will buy my product?” rather than “Will people buy my product?”.
• Don’t be afraid of the competition – if you want to make a product that nobody else has made before, it might probably mean that nobody needs this product. Escaping the competition you escape your customers. (РК: Sure, there are some example of the niches where you can earn tones of money just because nobody have ever thought there would be any money).
• Finally – make your marketing and sales efforts to be fun for you. Marketing is not a miracle, and everybody can learn how to do it.
  

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