Andrew Chen: Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing →

Great piece by Andrew Chen.  Some quotable bits below, but the piece itself also includes an awesome discussion/analysis of how Airbnb created / hacked a Craigslist integration with no API.

“Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After product/market fit, they can help run up the score on what’s already working.”

“The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs.  Business development is now API-centric, not people-centric.”

“The role of the VP of Marketing, long thought to be a non-technical role, is rapidly fading and in its place, a new breed of marketer/coder hybrids have emerged.”

Biz Dev Is A Clever Name For Dirty Work (via Christopher Steiner) →

This is true.

“Hello there, son: this is biz dev.  This is the beating, pumping heart of biz dev.”

“I get the impression, from a lot of these biz dev’ers, that they think of biz dev as fun and sexy.  One minute you’re grabbing lunch with Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher and the next minute you’re closing a deal on the phone while you wait in the lobby at Microsoft to give Steve Ballmer the bad news: “No, we will not accept your acquisition offer of 3 trillion dollars.”  From there, you head out for cocktails and swirl single-malt Scotch while discussing why Apple is so badass.”

“That might be biz dev at Facebook, but biz dev in the true startup world is 90% dirty work.  The “fun” stuff, I’m afraid, is the hacking and the product development.  That’s usually not in the job description for biz dev’ers.”

The Four Golden Rules Of Partnerships

alexstechthoughts:

Here is my most recent Forbes piece: http://onforb.es/xQp553

Enjoy!

Shaival Shah: Cannibalize Your Business Development By Popularizing Your API →

Great post by Shaival Shah (Hunch BD) from a couple years back.  Some key takeaways below:

“The trick is to think of your API, RSS, Embed, etc as a product and a business itself.  And like any product or business, understand how to market it and how to build awareness to drive market adoption. […] the great challenge is how to market your API so that people know a) that it is available, b) how/why to use it and 3) what value they can generate from it.”

“When I joined Hunch, Chris Dixon asked me what my goal would be and more importantly, how I would know if I achieved success.  My response was to cannibalize my own function by popularizing the Hunch API into the wild.”

Goal of Marketing your API:

1. Develop Market Awareness for your service and availability of your API.

2.  Absolutely nail 3 partner use cases that has strong re-use across the market.

3.  Determine Success Metrics, Analytics (Proof that your API yields Value Impact to 3^rd Party) to preserve future monetization options.

The Process of Marketing Your API:

1. Don’t be shy to do hand to hand deals.

2. Bowling Pin Strategy – cluster your outreach to a neighborhood of companies within an ecosystem that overtime can share overlapping interests.

3.  Have a crystal clear view of what metric you are trying to solve. 

4.  Once you understand precisely what you are solving, don’t be afraid to trade Revenue for Transparency to Analytics and PR. 

5. Work with your partner, hand in hand, on the initial set of use cases and keep iterating until you are pleased with the outcome.

6. Track and Analyze the analytics like a Ninja.

7.  Secure PR rights upfront, have your partner write up Testimonials and apply the Double-Barrel PR approach (announce partner signings followed by the launch of your API).

Five Tips for Startups When Negotiating Contracts With Big Customers (via Matt Bartus) →

From a startup lawyer — some great points to keep in mind when thinking about negotiations with big customers (seem equally applicable to partners as well):

1. Term Sheet, Term Sheet, Term Sheet.  “Your startup company will never have more leverage in terms of making changes to an initial agreement than you do at the beginning of a relationship. So make sure your important deal points are in your term sheet. Unfortunately you’re not going to be able to add anything into the contract that wasn’t in the term sheet. Large companies know that startups are hungry to get deals closed and use this to great effect; they will make last minute changes to the deal, but you won’t be able to.”

2. The Essential “Termination for Convenience” Clause (i.e., Your No-Fault Divorce).  “Right now it might not seem like you would ever want to terminate this relationship, but believe me when I tell you that there are plenty of reasons you might want to. […] Part of being a successful startup is being nimble and opportunistic, and if you have no way to leave this customer if you want to, you could be in trouble (ie: think ball-and-chain). Do include a clause that gives your company an out if you want it. Of course the customer may want it to go both ways and that’s fine. Because, in practicality, they can just walk away from you whenever they want […]” 

3. Educate Your Attorney on the Background of the Deal - An Email with “Please Review” Falls Short.  “Make sure your attorney understands what you’re trying to achieve with this customer, so you can receive useful feedback on the contract, rather than just a red-lined version created in a vacuum.”

4. Understand the Pace of a Larger Organization.  “As a startup, you are all about agility and speed. Larger companies are all about process. Remember that there are a lot of people who need to vet your product, understand your deal terms, and buy off on the relationship.”

5.  Keep Your Perspective: One Customer Is Not Your Entire Market.  “While deals with large marquee customers can be helpful, they rarely make or break a startup. […] Your company’s success is really dependent on your ability to apply repeatable business processes to a lot of customers, as opposed to your ability to service a single (and sometimes very demanding) customer — think of the difference as “outsourced labor” versus “stand-alone business.” Creating the right product for a large market is how your business is going to take off and enable you to scale it.”

Biz Dev 101

Great insights on biz dev from this slide deck by Scott Pollack, particularly around the “Build vs. Buy vs. Partner” decision, types of partnerships (e.g., channel/distribution, product, brand), key terms to negotiate, and approach strategies.

Biz Dev: Marketer. Connector. Deal maker. →

A piece on BetaBeat entitled “Biz Dev is Having a Moment.”  The last sentence is where the title of this post comes from.  Biz dev is different at a startup vs. at a big company, but that’s still a great, succinct summary of the biz dev function.

A more fleshed-out definition comes from Scott Pollack: “Business development is the creation of long-term value for an organization from customers, markets, and relationships.”  ”At its heart, business development is all about figuring out how the interactions of those forces combine together to create opportunities for growth.”

Scott Britton: How I Got Into BD (Part 3) →

Part 3 of a 3-part blog post by a new friend and contact, Scott Britton, about what it takes to get into a biz dev role at a startup.  Parts 1 and 2 here and here.  Awesomeness all around.  Good to see that I think I’ve been applying these and other similar principles in my own interactions with folks in the startup world that I meet.

Alex's Tech Thoughts: Leaving Your BD Up To A Third-Party →

alexstechthoughts:

All you hear about these days is startups looking for technical talent. But what about when you are the tech talent and are starting your own business? Then you need business talent.

This post is inspired by a friend of mine who has started a company that is moving in the right direction….

View high resolution

ataussig:

APIs continue to accelerate. The WWW is quickly becoming a place where machines talk to other machines, not people. 

Startup Business Development Strategies: 7 Tips For Putting Together Stellar Deals →

Via Nathan Bedford:

1.   Focus on the right targets. 

2.   Come to the table from a position of strength.

3.   Get creative. 

4.   ”Ask not what your partner can do for you—ask what you can do for your partner.”

5.   Introduce competition into every deal.

6.   Be operationally ready to do a deal.

7.   Know when to cut bait and run.

Just Fucking Sell →

“For a company to be successful there are literally only two functions the company has to perfect. Building and Selling. Thats it. Metrics and analytics are only the score card, the reporting mechanism to determine if what you are building will sell, and what you are selling is worth building.”

“Find a metric that is truly indicative of what makes your business go [….] Find it and love it. [….] Any other metric just makes it easier for your investors and employees to tell their friends why the company they are a part of is cool in a dumbed down fashion so others can understand. But DONT CARE about those numbers.  Care ONLY about the metric that proves that you are building something worth selling, and selling something worth building.“ 

“Both Brad and Mark have written about Grinfucking. Its an epidemic. No one wants to be the bad guy. The working stiff dreams of being involved in that super cool startup with the sick lounge. When he gets pitched by that startup founder in the flannel shirt and Warby Parker glasses, Toms shoes andCharity:Water rubber bracelet on a cool new technology and he doesn’t understand it, then he is full of FEAR THAT HE IS AN IDIOT.  Which makes the awful, awful truth that the prospect will never say no.”

“Your goal as an untested, unknown founder, who has a product to sell that NO ONE CARES about is to find what about your product makes your users lives better. Read that again. Thats not a feature. Thats not a price. Thats a feeling. Better is a feeling. Sell the feeling.”