It is tempting to fully embrace data-driven decision making and demand all marketing efforts are backed with data and ROI. While this sounds reasonable initially, marketing is both an art and science, and great marketers should also spend time honing their customer intuition to be successful in their craft.
Read More »Marketers: Hone Your Customer Intuition
Inspired by a recent conversation that reminded me of Ben Horowitz’s Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager post, I wanted to share a cleaned up version of a similar talk I prepped for a subset of my team at SurveyMonkey on what a world class marketer looks like.Read More »Good Marketer / Bad Marketer
Inquiring minds want to know… What is the average free to paid conversion rate from a free trial or freemium? What is a “good” conversion rate from free trial to paid?Read More »Freemium and Free Trial Conversion Benchmarks
Just about every startup has to cross this bridge at some point: making their first marketing hire. I often get asked about this topic and after several conversations, I was inspired to put together a guide on how to scope, evaluate and hire a strong first marketer for your team.Read More »How to Make Your First Marketing Hire
One of the areas I often advise startups on are questions around how to structure a marketing organization or make their initial marketing hires. I noticed there isn’t a lot of information out there about the different types of marketers, so I wanted to share some of the key functions that make up a marketing organization and thoughts on how to build and structure your team.Read More »Anatomy of a Marketing Organization
Brand is a hot topic for tech companies lately. It’s unsurprising, because tech companies are currently dominating the top brand charts. In the 2016 Interbrand survey, technology companies occupy fully half of the top 24 global brands with Apple and Google 1st and 2nd, and Facebook and Amazon the top growing brands in their report.Read More »Three keys to building a strong technology brand
Product and marketing are key players in ensuring the success of a product. However, often these two functions struggle to work effectively together.Read More »Building Effective Marketing + Product Partnership
The role of product marketing in technology companies is a fascinating topic in part because it is so poorly defined and inconsistent. I’ve managed product marketing now at LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey and various early-stage startups and in each case the expectations for the role were different from team to team and company to company. It’s a chameleon role that is often defined by circumstance, such as the first hire of a marketer to support the product development teams. Often, this first hire creates a precedent on product marketing’s role and contribution within the organization which results in wildly different roles from company to company. What then do product marketers do?
A quick repost of my guest post for Andrew Chen’s blog yesterday.
After recently moving on from adventures building a consumer gaming portal at Mochi Media (acquired last year for $80 MM), I’m now working on a new startup called Connected, which is a SaaS contact management solution for professionals. I decided to blog some of my thoughts based on my experience thus far with deciding on the right user acquisition channels to focus on.
Read More »When Does Paid Acquisition Work for SaaS Startups?
One of the key early decisions to game design or creating a virtual currency platform is designing the price and exchange rate of virtual currency. Unfortunately after it’s been released, it’s also one of the most difficult to change, because the change impacts the userbase and economy of the system as a whole. So if you’re starting out, how do you decide how to price your virtual currency? Three Types of Virtual Currency To answer this question, I started by looking across a broad swath of popular social games, social networks, and some MMOs and virtual worlds. Currency is typically used… Read More »How to Price Your Virtual Currency (Dataset Across 57 Social Games, SNS and MMO/Virtual Worlds)