The challenge about marketing output is that it’s not always numbers based and the ROI isn’t immediate. With that being said I think it can be and here’s how I would solve how to find and how to know if someone is good.

How to find?

• Look for advertising, marketing tactics or things you like and look backwards to see which marketer did them.
• Look back into your own community / customers / users to see if there is anyone who gets it. I find this most helpful.
• Look at specific companies you admire and check LinkedIn for their marketing folks.

Those have been my best ways of finding marketing people. Word of caution: most marketers suck.

How to know if they are good?

• They Love your product. I did at Mint so marketing was easy.
• Objective based. Easiest way to test someone on marketing is give them a challenge and see if they ask whats the objective. Most will just start rambling bullshit or ideas. Others will start with what do we want this to accomplish. I like them.
• Metrics. I personally like people that can quantify and prove what they are doing is backing out to numbers.
• Personality. This is general but just want to say it.
• Relevance. If they are already in your industry it’s a bonus cause they’ll have the connections, it’s ideal, not required.

Here’s a test I gave someone to help run AppSumo, has a few marketing related questions and ideas to see how people think through things.

One of my fav questions for marketing is just giving them limited budget questions and a # of people to reach. See what they come up with, hear their thought process and if they provide #s related to their decisions.

Hope this helps.

I initially saw Mint with Aaron Patzer and Dave McClure in November/December of 2006. Instantly, I was in love. It was a unique approach to a massive problem and Aaron already had a working prototype. Note: Aaron spent the previous 6 months building it alone in his apartment. Most people never realize there were way more competitors than just Wesabe: Geezeo, Buxfer, Yodlee (data-aggregation company used by Mint), Quicken Online, MS Money online and a few others I can’t remember.

Here is Mint’s initial version:

So what did it take for Mint to win?

1. Instant Value. This is easily the most important thing. All the other solutions required work. Facebook was our secret weapon that trained people to share their personal information online. Thanks Zuck. Within 3 minutes of using Mint you get your full financial picture and ways to increase your own money. All for free. Basically, too good to be true. No other service came close to doing this.

2. Name. Next to family and health, personal finance it is one of the top 3 most sensitive things in life. The site was originally called mymint.com. I was initially against buying Mint.com but Aaron / Anton spent months acquiring the domain. This may seem inconsequential, but would you feel more comfortable entering your bank details on Wesabe.com or Mint.com?

The idea that we could buy / use that domain showed people we had money and aren’t as likely to just steal their information. The shortness of the domain in and of itself [chase.com, mint.com] signals legitimacy. Think about companies adding ‘as seen on tv’ stickers to their boxes. Shows they had the money to buy the tv spots.

3. Trust / Design. This goes along with the name. This seems to be discounted but sometimes I talk about Mint as a design / marketing company whose product is personal finance. Think of Zappos as a Customer Support company that happens to sell shoes. Jason’s clean design style helped make users feel comfortable with giving Mint their financial information. I’ll cover this in more detail another time, but for now here’s a few key things we did to increase trust:

• SEO. People trust Google, so we knew they’d trust us more if they came to Mint from there, so we used search engine optimization to get Mint to the front page of Google searches.
• Authority. We got thought leaders in personal finance to back us.
• Security. We actually promoted security front and center.

To drive this point on design & trust home, compare these 2 sites (names removed) and tell me which one makes you warm and fuzzy about sharing your financial data.

If you want a contemporary reference, it would be something like this “Hello, ladies, look at your man, now back to Mint, now back at your man, now back to Mint. Sadly, he isn’t Mint, but if he stopped using ladies scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s Mint.”

4. Investors. Aaron is one of the most strategic people I know and was able to bring on the who’s who of investors. Those people had deep connections anywhere we needed it. For example: one of the leaders of Quicken, the guy who invented Gmail, and many more…

How did he do it? Good question. He wasn’t a Silicon Valley insider (he’s from the midwest) and he didn’t pitch these guys right away. Aaron built a functional prototype for 6 months and then hit the streets. He picked investors based on their industry experiences relevant to Mint.

5. Research. Aaron’s father has research experience and we spent countless weeks figuring out what people really wanted before we ever launched our beta. Guess who we found out Mint’s biggest competitor was? No one. Apathy. This shocked me! Most people would rather not track anything and just see how they are doing when they go to the ATM. Guess who was #2? Ms Money, Intuit, Wesabe? NOPE. Microsoft Excel. Who would have believed that!

Learning about all this provided us with the messaging / approach and branding to appeal to the right audience. This affected our messaging, internally and externally we were similar to Firefox in saying “take back your money.”

6. “Lean”-Startup. Mint was well-funded and definitely took its time to launch. 1.5 years. Think of how it was to be the marketer of that (:

I am a fan of validation through research – approaching people at cafes, user testing in person, surveys, segmentation and interviews – which Mint did way beyond any quick-to-launch first movers.

There are times when getting your product out there before it’s ready can hurt you; first mover advantage may not apply to a market where the product needs to convey trust. Would you give your credit card to someone who was caught cheating?

Could Mint have won if they hadn’t raised $15+ million dollars? I don’t think so. Where did the money go? Yodlee is not cheap. Hiring the best people. Endless supply of ping-pong balls add up.

Why did it need so much money? Dealing with Yodlee seems trivial but we had dedicated engineers, and securing data is not cheap! We also spent a lot on design, and we made sure we got the product right. How did we know the product was right? That’s for another blog post. 1.5 years to launch.

Did Aaron need to take 1.5 years to launch the product? It’s hard to say about right vs. wrong but when looking at the outcome it doesn’t seem horrible.

7. Education. Dave had a the killer idea of the content network (blog) which was a HUGE traffic generator and still is to this day. It provides infographics, ideas, interviews and a wealth of useful information to users (and Google for SEO juice). The development took way longer than anyone expected so we had the time to focus. Most startups won’t have this luxury. This got us loyal followers, connections to other relevant bloggers and learnings of what keywords people are using when talking about personal finance. More recently, Stew Langille has done an amazing job creating tons of rich content & infographics in the blog and well executed landing pages.

8. PR / word-of-mouth. I get ultra-annoyed when people refer to things as viral. Mint got its inital public buzz and discussion because it won TC40. Beyond that Mint built a useful product, that tons of people wanted and was completely free, makes it easy for people to want to tell their friends about. Then Atomic PR (and their $15k+ month retainer) helped take Mint out to the mainstream press (Walt Mossberg, Good Morning America, The NY Times, etc…). We cared less about the web 2.0 crowd and more about Aaron’s family & friends form the mid-west. Guess what? They still read newspapers in physical form.

Managing your finances effortlessly (and free) was a very appealing story compared to chatter and manual input. Also, most users don’t want to install a plugin to then connect to their personal finance sites (required on Wesabe).

9. Right place, wrong community. Wesabe provided a phone # to call their CEO (great idea), was involved in all things web 2.0 but I believe missed looking to middle Americans who are the struggling the most with finances. Personal finance is an extremely private thing. Personally, I couldn’t care less about your money. I just want to know how I can protect and grow my own. Wesabe was all about forum / chats / comments about money while MInt is a entirely private experience.

10. Community. We spent a ton of time holding online chats, went to events (like twiistup la, finnovate) and connected with the entire personal finance community. Oh yea, this was 9 months before we even launched the product.

Think about this. By the time Mint launched we had more traffic than all the other personal finance sites (buxfer, geezeo, wesabe) combined. Huh? Yea, thanks to its design, 4th-mover (or later) advantage and actively seeking promotion, Mint won.

Bonus: Look how Mint responds to Wesabe shutting down. Ha!

You should follow me on Twitter.

Thanks to Jason Baptiste and Matt Wensing, Brad and Allen for reviewing.

Please leave comments on Hacker News.

Here’s an excel chart where you can calculate how much your email unsubscriptions are costing you. Guess how much I am losing after a year? Way higher than I expected…

Email Unsubscription Costs

(This is from a Facebook ad spend for AppSumo)

Download the email unsubscription calculator for Excel and try yourself or use Google Doc

Without further ado:

1- Suggest them to follow you on Twitter when a user tries to unsubscribe from your email.

A few people said emails clog their inbox and wanted less communication. They’d be okay with Twitter. Also, you can try to suggest them a lower frequency email when they try to unsubscribe.

2- True 1 click unsubscribes.

I personally hate email. I unsubscribe and filter almost every email that annoys me. To me long-term loyalty and good experiences make me much more likely to use your service. I HATE clicking unsubscribe then having to login, find account page, etc. I just filter those emails and forget about you forever.

Consider even putting the unsubscribe link at the top, Ramit really reminded me about quality > quantity. Having people who really want your emails is infinitely more valuable than just having a big list. Size doesn’t matter.

3- Save them at the unsubscribe.

This was something I built at Facebook. Ask the user why they are unsubscribing and offer a solution at that point. You may be able to save them.

3- A/B test your email provider for deliverability.

We found using aweber.com that many of our emails would go to spam on Gmail so we are split-testing the list with MailChimp.com and finding better results.

4- Offer pausing of email instead of unsubscribing.

Not sure where I saw this but as I am on vacation now there are a few San Francisco activity emails that I had to unsubscribe / forward since I’m not around for awhile. I’ve seen this on some site but can’t remember, they offered me the chance to pause emails and gave me a few choices (1 month, 3 months, 6 months).

5- Consider the name of your email list

Sometimes when you unsubscribe or signup for an email list you get to see the name, “Suckers who signed up for my service.” Is not a good one. For AppSumo I call one list of people who I really like “Gold,” you can name it VIP or whatever. Just something to be considerate of.

And my all-time favorite: I personally email every single person who unsubscribes. Please don’t try me:)

I apologize for the email and ask how we can improve for the future. The responses you get from this are a gold mine. It is a nightmare to get people and most just let them go without a fight. It takes time to get people to 1) be aware of your service 2) go there 3) sign up and the actual cost may be around $3+ per email sign up. It is WAY easier to keep them to then to go and find someone new, duh.

Any other good ones?

How did that happen?

First off, the product was awesome. That makes marketing less about “marketing” (whatever that is) and more about educating and sharing with people. Still, there is always that annoying quote about if a tree falls, blah blah you know what I mean.

Instead of doing “social media marketing” and flailing around with random posts throughout the web we needed a framework and a new approach to pre-launch marketing.

Quant Based Marketing.

Work backwards to the solution of what you need and map it in Excel. Dave McClure is an Excel / PowerPoint guru if you ever need some inspiration.

Here’s an example for Mint:

Target: 100,000 users in 6 months.

Link to spreadsheet for your usage. Amazing update from @davestone to SpreadSheet v2.0

This is they KEY to any pre-launch marketing you are doing.

Most people have the tendency to wait for their thing to launch, email a few friend, tweet about it and get on their knees to pray it works.

There are two columns, total users and confirmed users. When you setup your metrics on the pre-launch like above and then confirm the marketing channels you cannot fail. Only confirmed matters!!

You must confirm the marketing ahead of time: blogs, twitterers, ad buys, etc… Don’t leave it up to chance.

The Meat:
- Make your target list prior to launch.
- Figure out your target list through: wefollow.com, google searches, pick specific niches (at Mint it was Personal Finance, geeks (Paul Stamatiou) and GTD people) and other wild ways
- Track with the Google Spreadsheet to know what’s working and what’s not.
- Consider testing 2-3 different messages to people to see which get highest responses.
- Use new methods to get a hold of people. Don’t be like everyone else
- Oh yea, build a great product.

Follow me on Twitter if you like this and want more.

Thanks Jason Baptiste for reviewing.

The purpose of these pages was to collect users pre-launch and also test different marketing messages to see which were the most effective in converting users.

You can see the rest here: http://okdork.com/mint/?i=1 (check out others: 2,3,4,5,6)

Which do you think was the most effective?

ps. Notice we were called mymint.com before (:

link

1. Add a secure lock near your confirmation button
2. Change the text of your confirmation button to some more positive action
3. Have your confirmation button above the fold
4. Include images of the Visa / Mastercard logos
5. Test out pricing specials for first month. This has shown to work better than 14 day free trials, etc…
6. Automatically put the user on a recurring plan vs. opting into it
7. Include user testimonials and # of subscribers on your subscribe page
8. Give them a surprise bonus to subscribe at the point of confirm
9. Use a javascript timer countdown to encourage impulsive subscriptions
10. Test varying lengths of time if you want to do a free-trial program: 7, 14, 30
11. A/B test 50% off vs $50 off (or some equivalent amount)
12. Allow them to subscribe for 1,2,3 years and default to 2 years. While building Facebook advertising users would more than average use the amounts and timeline that we defaulted too
13. Add security badges to your confirmation page. BBB, hacker safe, etc…
14. Provide a phone # on that page in case they are having doubts
15. Use intellichat.com. Will talk more about this in a future article. Definitely one of the best startups on the market today.

One of the most important things is to get the users to pay you something. Credit card, paypal or the new mobile payment services (mobillcash or zong). Once you have it you can make it one click ability to pay for other things and upsell them. If I missed anything please let me know.

pic of me at corcovado (christ) in brazil

Do you want to go to heaven?

Besides the fact Jews get an express pass to heaven, HECK Yes I want to go to heaven! That’s like asking someone do you like fun? No one says no to that. (excuse the double negatives).

How can you learn from this and make your site better? On our new site we had some text stating for people to join and some benefits below. We changed it to list the best benefit on the top and others below. Our conversions jumped 100%, from 10% to now 20% users sign up when they get to that page. Worth it?

Bottom line: Display the ultimate benefits they will receive from your service and test it. Something they can’t say no to.

Bonus Idea: Get 1-2 of your users to rewrite the copy on your site. (Thanks Rachel!) They will have some interesting ways for you to think about the language they prefer to understand.

Can I get an amen?

WTF happened to Alexa? Remember them, we use to clamor over those #s for our sites and others to prove that we are worth some valuation .

And before that a few of us checked out technorati.com to see how we stacked up in the internet world. There’s also quantcast but I’m not sure who actually uses that.

So how did this slowly happen under our eyes? Honestly, I don’t know but it was really interesting to realize this last night. I can take a stab at how they did it:

- Their traffic was more accurate and reliable than Alexa. Their data comes partially from ISPs which is actual traffic of sites and not as skewed where Alexa’s came from browser and toolbar installs. Which tend to favor IE users.
- They had great blog posts comparing many interesting sites that got picked up many blogs.

What’s the future? Google Trends for websites (maybe)

Why do I compare traffic? It helps me determine which sites are relatively succeeding and then analyze them to see how they got to that point.

What do you think?

Cool? This guy blog is about a guy who wants to chat on IM / email for 30 days to raise money for causes. Relatively, cool idea.

But…it turns out if you read the disclaimer this is coordinated by McCann group and sponsored by Microsoft who is running the im initiative thingy. Some stupid idea to give money for using their service.

Problems with this “blog”?
1) It is so unauthentic it’s not even funny.
2) If people don’t want to create stuff for your initiatives faking users is not the best way to go.
3) Fake comments also aren’t smart. (18 on the post, ha!)
4) Why are you using some semi-hipster actor as the person?
5) They have a disclaimer saying this is fake.
6) Signing up for twitter, flickr & linkedin does not make you a hipster 2.0.

Can you imagine these high paid ad agencies meetings about this? ” Oh, I’ve got it. We’ll fake that people care about Microsoft and make a blog faking it. ” Makes total sense! Most likely the same people that fake it during sex with me:P

link to comments

Suggestions:
1) Embrace your crappiness. Seriously. Not a bad thing but play on the fact you are old, slow, copy others and haven’t come out with any impressive things in a few years. I am totally serious. People appreciate honesty. Make it fun.

2) Do the opposite. People aren’t creating fan sites or blogs like they do for Google, Flickr, Facebook, etc… Why not create a anti-fan page. Similar to #1, make this blog by Microsoft stating things not good about Microsoft. Rally people around it and make those changes. Scoble was a face of Microsoft that at least brought together, absorbed comments, defended, agreed with people and made the company “seem” real.

3) Create a better product. That would be too easy. If you made messenger good vs. giving money out then maybe you can increase your market share. I don’t think giving money back for using a service but the old use our service so we can a) help children b) donate to charity thing is played out. Why not just give us free gasoline for a year.

Best joke about this wins Ori’s book: Sway or a book of your choice. I’m feeling good:)

So how did Lefora get to 10,000 communities in just 3.5 months? I think it can be broken down into just 3 steps:

1. Solve a Problem
2. Develop alongside a real audience
3. Support the early community

.

1. Solve a Problem
Research – Not just web stats, but go out and talk to potential customers. We talked to tons of communities and forums to learn their biggest pain points and how we could solve them.

2. Develop alongside a real audience
Sounds easy… and it is. We hit on multiple fronts, from directly inviting existing communities onto our software (it only takes a personal email), to SEOing the site for relevant keywords, to advertising our services for people looking to create a forum (we’re talking just $2-3 a day, no big ad budget), to acquiring a site that was going out of business – leveraging the branding they had left on their service (again this was on an extremely ‘low budget’). We did all this before ‘launching’ in the web2.0 blogosphere.

3. Support the early community
When you’re getting your first ‘real’ users but are still in ‘active’ development, it’s vital that you let them know there might be some kinks, but you are there to support them and need their feedback. We did this through a support forum, a ‘live chat’ widget, and personal emails. A live chat widget may be running on your desktop 8-10 hours a day, but early on, you’re only going to get interrupted for 15-30 min a day – and get some of the richest feedback and sales opportunities a website can offer.

—

Our service didn’t require massive amounts of people to be on the network in order for it to be a sustainable service. It just had to provide tools for an existing or newly forming community, they didn’t care how many other ‘users’ or ‘friends’ were already on the site. Look how facebook started with such a small community (harvard), before jumping to other ivy league schools, before opening it up to all colleges.

Moving forward, the next wave of ‘social software’ is going to be services directed towards ‘communities’. From craft work communities to parenting to hiking to… Services that address the needs of communities will have many opportunities ahead.

Suggested Reading for any new startup: Steve Blank’s “The Four Steps to the Epiphany“.