6 ms·

You're a little company, now act like one

240 points by lrm242 17y ago

arohner 17y ago
Excellent advice. In a related note, why do all those Enterprise Software Startups appear to have the same website? The one that has different links about how FooSoft can help for each different industry, and you have to go to wikipedia to find out what the product really does? The only thing I can come up with is someone must like those websites that contain zero information, but who is it, and why?
- edw519 17y ago
  "...someone must like those websites that contain zero information..." My guess is that the less you say about yourself, the less corporate drones have to eliminate you in their RFP process.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Going cold through an RFP process is playing to lose anyways, edw519.
    - edw519 17y ago
      Right. Just like posting a website with zero information. I don't know why anyone would do either.
michaelcampbell 17y ago
Very enjoyable read. I twitterfollow a number of local startup cultists, errr, "enthusiasts" that I think would be wise to consider some of this.
tsestrich 17y ago
I love the advice given in this article. In working on putting together a little company of my own, I often find myself looking at what seems to be "accepted" and trying to steer in that direction. This creates a lot of fluff in my language and, honestly, I end up with something that I don't think I'd even be interested in trying. Keeping it simple and honest always sounded like a good idea, but the fact that people have shown that it can work is a big confidence booster.
- patio11 17y ago
  You want a simple recipe for eliminating fluff and connecting with your customers? Talk less about we/us/I and talk more about you/your. When you're talking about "we", you're almost certainly talking to hear yourself talk -- "We have an industry-leading solution with years of YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT THIS." When you're talking about "you", you're probably addressing the customers needs and ways to get those needs satisfied. ("You can use Widget to flangle a foobar in less than 30 seconds, saving you time and getting you home to your kids faster.")
  - donw 17y ago
    Good advice when Dale Carnegie put it in his book, still good advice today.
  - mattcrest 17y ago
    The "we" line is used all over the place for web design shops. My question is does it become valid if you regularly use sub-contractors and/or interns? I recently did a video interview with an Icelandic freelance web designer and just posted a small excerpt, of which the main topic was honesty and authenticity in business (he spoke specifically of the "we" talk). Worth a look: http://www.designlitm.us/articles/honesty_and_authenticity/ http://www.designlitm.us/articles/honesty_and_authenticity/
- fuelfive 17y ago
  Not sure I agree with this. My startup (Frogmetrics, YC S07) hasn't tried to sound big or small. Our site focuses on the service we provide, in concrete language with a clean design. We don't try to sound bigger than we are, but we also don't play up our smallness with a bunch of cute catchphrases either. We've been pretty successful so far at getting big customers, and I think we'd have done less well with a more "startup authentic" aesthetic. I think the better lesson is to tailor your messaging to your target buyer. If you're selling to a level III coder at a big company, put the message in a form (s)he will like.
  - snprbob86 17y ago
edw519 17y ago
...is the leading provider of... Unless you're McDonalds, Microsoft, or Walmart, this is guaranteed bullshit that just makes you look stupid. For many cases, OP provides great advice. While some customers feel more comfortable with the stableness of a large institution, just as many feel more comfortable with the attention they'll get from someone small and hungry. For many of us here, we should use that to our advantage.
- sfphotoarts 17y ago
  not necessarily, there are a lot of niche products where there is a small company that is the leading provider. Leica, for example, the leading provider of rangefinder cameras since the 20's. A perfectly true statement, but you won't find them in the fortune 50. There are many many more examples.
stevoski 17y ago
My favourite "pretending to be big" line I see little guys using is: "With more than 20 years experience" based on 4 guys in the firm, each 5 years out of university.
- josefresco 17y ago
  20 years of 'collective' experience is the key word that needs to be there to make it (slightly) less of a complete bullshit line. But that's the least of the problem with false claims ...I recently met the owner of another local web firm who was telling people they've been 'in the business' for 30 years. I don't think I need to point out the error in math there.
  - pxlpshr 17y ago
    Right, distinction is important. We use "combined experience" to call out the width of our expertise, not depth, on our publishing services page for mobile development. I think it helps reassure some prospectives that while young, we have a broad range of experience in multiple industries. Getting sign off on a ~5-6+ digit services project takes a fair amount of work, and more so without a thick portfolio. Vertical software sales benefit from tech diligence and product demo as part of the buying decision.
    - brk 17y ago
      helps reassure some prospectives In reality I don't think it works as you expect. Most people have come to see these "collective experience" lines as excuses for not having anyone on the team with more than a few years of experience. Would YOU want to get a heart transplant from 5 medical students with "10 years of collective experience"? The reality is that this collective experience is not really additive. If you have 1 person with 20 years of experience in some area, they've seen a couple of cycles and progressions of technology. No amount of people with 3 years of recent experience can ever really match this.
      - jodrellblank 17y ago
sh1mmer 17y ago
A bit of meta-commenting but the "Welcome HN" banner which encourages us to upvote the story put me right off. I'll vote it up if I like it, not because you customized your site to "Welcome" me because I read HN.
- Alex3917 17y ago
  For every 100 people who read HN, my guess is that 10 upvote stories and 1 comments. I bet that more than half of regular HN readers don't even know that the site is powered by voting despite the little arrows next to each story. If people knew to upvote stories they liked on their own then the average story would have something like 800 upvotes. I agree with what you're saying because if everyone did this it would be really annoying, but certainly most people don't upvote the stories they like.
  - Retric 17y ago
    I up vote 1 in 20 stories because I only like 5% of what's posted to HN. Looking at new submissions is mostly a waste of time, but when I am board I will occasionally take a look. And I expect most regular HN readers act the same way.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    I might vote on 1 out of every 100 things I read, and usually it's not because I like the story, but because I want it to get more comments.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    I comment a lot more frequently than I upvote stories; I have a pretty high bar for upvoting.
  - whatusername 17y ago
    PG - I / We would love to see the engagement stats on here? Is that 1/10/100 rule valid? I'd like to hope that it's greater than 50% of people who understand the voting concept, but it would be interesting to see the metrics.
  - 17y ago
donw 17y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. Writing corpspeak on your website may be 'safe', but it's not only boring -- it's totally unmemorable. Even if people hate your corporate image, if they remember you, you've already made a significant step in the right direction.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
donaq 17y ago
That is, of course, until the present batch of small companies grow big (or die) and all the big companies are putting words like "suck" and "cool" on their corporate blurbs. Then the next batch of small companies will ape them because people never change, and then early adopters will start looking out for companies with "people who care enough to sound professional" (excerpted from the future version of OP). And when that happens, I'll be ready...
- donw 17y ago
  It is possible to sound professional without sounding boring, and I'd also argue that being honest about the scale and capabilities of your company is a big part of professionalism. "UberSoft is a leading provider in synergistic data-driven technologies focused on improving ROI through market-driven analytics. The UberSoft Team has over twenty years of experience in delivering proven solutions to our corporate partners." is fluff. "Spend less time marketing, and more time watching hockey. UberSoft makes marketing easy, because we've got a really great way to link statistics from news feeds into your existing analytics." is honest, and a lot more memorable.
  - mitjak 17y ago
    Dead on. As tired as I am of all the friendless as well, there are shades of gray in the between. Take even the balsamiq example the article uses -- the website doesn't jump in your face; it simply tries to be more honest and not present itself as a Fortune 501 company.
- dan_sim 17y ago
  I thought I was the only one bored of those "friendly" company that use cool expressions to talk about themselves (ex : "we kick ass at what we're doing, woot!", "no more boring meeting! yay!"). I don't want to be friend with a company or a product, I just want it to look pro in what they are doing. Does your dentist says "I clean the crap out of your teeth! giddyup!"? Maybe when that "we are friendly" trend will be over, the smaller companies will have access to "big" companies not because they try to sound bigger than they are but because they are pro.
- 17y ago
there 17y ago
i think it's certainly possible to make your company's image look professional without all the corporate speak, buzzwords, and stock images. my company is mostly just me (unless i sub out parts of a project) and i usually use "we" when talking to customers. many of them know the company is just me but they are already my customers. a potential customer might not even consider calling me in the first place if my website said i'm one guy. if they have a big project planned and they think it needs a whole team, would they even consider asking a one-person shop for an estimate? maybe not.
- patio11 17y ago
  I think the choice of "we" versus "I" is bicycle shedding for copywriting. I've seen software developers paralyzed by this decision. (No, really. It used to come up with some regularity at the Business of Software boards.) They've both got merits -- pick whichever sounds good to you and get back to stuff which matters.
  - LogicHoleFlaw 17y ago
    Perhaps We shall settle upon the Imperial We in the future.
jcromartie 17y ago
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I've worked with 3-person operations that claimed to have "teams" and double-digit employee counts to clients. Why not just be honest? It's like black-hat SEO for your HR.
spencerfry 17y ago
It's always odd to me when a company spends more time trying to market the people behind the product rather than the product itself. The marketing of the product should be in the forefront across all pages and any mention of yourselves should be short and to the point. You don't even need to mention the people behind it (although, we do, but only our names and links to our websites/blogs).
rubinelli 17y ago
Putting aside the corpspeak fluff, I wonder if this advice is valid for SaaS as well. I understand managers won't feel nervous after buying a mockup or code review tool from a small supplier, but would they be as willing to put business-critical data into a small company's servers? Would you let a one-man shop run your CRM?
- sh1mmer 17y ago
  I think that depends how transparent you are on your business practices. Running anything on a single server is dumb, but if you are one man shop running on EC2 and you are clear about that I don't think it's a big deal. Explain what you do, and why it's good. Explain how you've thought about BCP and making sure everything will stay up (essential for a service). Companies routinely hire individual consultants at $2k/day and follow their advice. I don't think that trusting a well respected individual in the industry is so much the problem, as trusting someone who's capability is unknown. If you show the capabilities of you and your systems up front, without BS, then people will take you on for projects that are appropriate to that level of risk. Which may be quite as much as you can handle.
oink 17y ago
Why does hitting <ESC> take me to a login page? That was odd.
- smartbear 17y ago
  I guess the Squarespace blogging platform just does that automatically. Agreed it's odd.
tptacek 17y ago
Love this post. This has been our standard marketing tack for years, and was a real conflict early in the company. How are we doing? Check out: http://runplaybook.com http://runplaybook.com Do we sound like VC-funded 6-person-marcom team boring jerks, or just the real jerks we actually are?
- Andys 17y ago
  FWIW, Your site didnt seem very professional until I got to the pricing page. Both the content of this page and the pricing level of the product sent a clear signal that this was a "serious", enterprise-aimed product. The rest of the site made me confident in your technical abilities but not the longevity of the company. The pricing made me feel more comfortable that you would be around for a while yet.
jpbutler 17y ago
I entirely agree with this. I wrote Serendeputy's about page in my own voice. I did it partly to separate myself from the my more corporatey competitors, but mostly because I despise the way I sound when I try to speak corporate droid. It makes me want to cry. That might be my number one reason for doing a startup: the ability to avoid doing things that make me want to cry.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
polos 17y ago
It has always been known that: Lying may(!) bring you some advantage, short-term only; but you always have an alternative way: you can tell something great, without lying, but you need your phantasy for doing that. So, my dear friend, do you simply lack phantasy? ;)
johnnybgoode 17y ago
Yeah, but a lot of companies seem like they're overcompensating to me. I mean, even if I met these people in person, I know they wouldn't sound as "forced-casual" as they do on their website.
dpcan 17y ago
As a developer, I have no problem buying development tools from one-man-shop / small company. When it comes to software for my other business needs however, I wouldn't use a hosted SaaS service if I didn't think it was backed by a lot of people, has a lot of customers, and isn't going anywhere. As a provider of hosted business tools, similar to the ones I wouldn't buy myself, I find that showing the small size of my company is a huge problem. I'm actually finding that the customers that won't host their data with a small company would be more than happy to buy a version they could install on-site.
steveblgh 17y ago
On a slightly related linguistic note, I find the following sentence annoying: "Put yourself in the shoes of that Early Adopter. Does she want to see useless garbage phrases or does she want to hear about how you totally understand her pain?" It's safe to bet that among the early adopters of a version control data mining tool there are overwhelmingly more males than females. Probably the poster feels that using she will somehow compensate this inbalance. I see the he/she problem as a bug of English, but using she in all technical text where a he would be more probable is just fake.

240 points by lrm242 17y ago

Excellent advice. In a related note, why do all those Enterprise Software Startups appear to have the same website? The one that has different links about how FooSoft can help for each different industry, and you have to go to wikipedia to find out what the product really does? The only thing I can come up with is someone must like those websites that contain zero information, but who is it, and why?

edw519 17y ago
"...someone must like those websites that contain zero information..." My guess is that the less you say about yourself, the less corporate drones have to eliminate you in their RFP process.
- tptacek 17y ago
  Going cold through an RFP process is playing to lose anyways, edw519.
  - edw519 17y ago
    Right. Just like posting a website with zero information. I don't know why anyone would do either.

michaelcampbell 17y ago

Very enjoyable read. I twitterfollow a number of local startup cultists, errr, "enthusiasts" that I think would be wise to consider some of this.

tsestrich 17y ago

I love the advice given in this article. In working on putting together a little company of my own, I often find myself looking at what seems to be "accepted" and trying to steer in that direction. This creates a lot of fluff in my language and, honestly, I end up with something that I don't think I'd even be interested in trying. Keeping it simple and honest always sounded like a good idea, but the fact that people have shown that it can work is a big confidence booster.

patio11 17y ago
You want a simple recipe for eliminating fluff and connecting with your customers? Talk less about we/us/I and talk more about you/your. When you're talking about "we", you're almost certainly talking to hear yourself talk -- "We have an industry-leading solution with years of YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT THIS." When you're talking about "you", you're probably addressing the customers needs and ways to get those needs satisfied. ("You can use Widget to flangle a foobar in less than 30 seconds, saving you time and getting you home to your kids faster.")
- donw 17y ago
  Good advice when Dale Carnegie put it in his book, still good advice today.
- mattcrest 17y ago
  The "we" line is used all over the place for web design shops. My question is does it become valid if you regularly use sub-contractors and/or interns? I recently did a video interview with an Icelandic freelance web designer and just posted a small excerpt, of which the main topic was honesty and authenticity in business (he spoke specifically of the "we" talk). Worth a look: http://www.designlitm.us/articles/honesty_and_authenticity/ http://www.designlitm.us/articles/honesty_and_authenticity/
fuelfive 17y ago
Not sure I agree with this. My startup (Frogmetrics, YC S07) hasn't tried to sound big or small. Our site focuses on the service we provide, in concrete language with a clean design. We don't try to sound bigger than we are, but we also don't play up our smallness with a bunch of cute catchphrases either. We've been pretty successful so far at getting big customers, and I think we'd have done less well with a more "startup authentic" aesthetic. I think the better lesson is to tailor your messaging to your target buyer. If you're selling to a level III coder at a big company, put the message in a form (s)he will like.
- snprbob86 17y ago

edw519 17y ago

...is the leading provider of... Unless you're McDonalds, Microsoft, or Walmart, this is guaranteed bullshit that just makes you look stupid. For many cases, OP provides great advice. While some customers feel more comfortable with the stableness of a large institution, just as many feel more comfortable with the attention they'll get from someone small and hungry. For many of us here, we should use that to our advantage.

sfphotoarts 17y ago
not necessarily, there are a lot of niche products where there is a small company that is the leading provider. Leica, for example, the leading provider of rangefinder cameras since the 20's. A perfectly true statement, but you won't find them in the fortune 50. There are many many more examples.

stevoski 17y ago

My favourite "pretending to be big" line I see little guys using is: "With more than 20 years experience" based on 4 guys in the firm, each 5 years out of university.

josefresco 17y ago
20 years of 'collective' experience is the key word that needs to be there to make it (slightly) less of a complete bullshit line. But that's the least of the problem with false claims ...I recently met the owner of another local web firm who was telling people they've been 'in the business' for 30 years. I don't think I need to point out the error in math there.
- pxlpshr 17y ago
  Right, distinction is important. We use "combined experience" to call out the width of our expertise, not depth, on our publishing services page for mobile development. I think it helps reassure some prospectives that while young, we have a broad range of experience in multiple industries. Getting sign off on a ~5-6+ digit services project takes a fair amount of work, and more so without a thick portfolio. Vertical software sales benefit from tech diligence and product demo as part of the buying decision.
  - brk 17y ago
    helps reassure some prospectives In reality I don't think it works as you expect. Most people have come to see these "collective experience" lines as excuses for not having anyone on the team with more than a few years of experience. Would YOU want to get a heart transplant from 5 medical students with "10 years of collective experience"? The reality is that this collective experience is not really additive. If you have 1 person with 20 years of experience in some area, they've seen a couple of cycles and progressions of technology. No amount of people with 3 years of recent experience can ever really match this.
    - jodrellblank 17y ago

sh1mmer 17y ago

A bit of meta-commenting but the "Welcome HN" banner which encourages us to upvote the story put me right off. I'll vote it up if I like it, not because you customized your site to "Welcome" me because I read HN.

Alex3917 17y ago
For every 100 people who read HN, my guess is that 10 upvote stories and 1 comments. I bet that more than half of regular HN readers don't even know that the site is powered by voting despite the little arrows next to each story. If people knew to upvote stories they liked on their own then the average story would have something like 800 upvotes. I agree with what you're saying because if everyone did this it would be really annoying, but certainly most people don't upvote the stories they like.
- Retric 17y ago
  I up vote 1 in 20 stories because I only like 5% of what's posted to HN. Looking at new submissions is mostly a waste of time, but when I am board I will occasionally take a look. And I expect most regular HN readers act the same way.
- tptacek 17y ago
  I might vote on 1 out of every 100 things I read, and usually it's not because I like the story, but because I want it to get more comments.
- barrkel 17y ago
  I comment a lot more frequently than I upvote stories; I have a pretty high bar for upvoting.
- whatusername 17y ago
  PG - I / We would love to see the engagement stats on here? Is that 1/10/100 rule valid? I'd like to hope that it's greater than 50% of people who understand the voting concept, but it would be interesting to see the metrics.
- 17y ago

donw 17y ago

I agree wholeheartedly. Writing corpspeak on your website may be 'safe', but it's not only boring -- it's totally unmemorable. Even if people hate your corporate image, if they remember you, you've already made a significant step in the right direction.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

donaq 17y ago

That is, of course, until the present batch of small companies grow big (or die) and all the big companies are putting words like "suck" and "cool" on their corporate blurbs. Then the next batch of small companies will ape them because people never change, and then early adopters will start looking out for companies with "people who care enough to sound professional" (excerpted from the future version of OP). And when that happens, I'll be ready...

donw 17y ago
It is possible to sound professional without sounding boring, and I'd also argue that being honest about the scale and capabilities of your company is a big part of professionalism. "UberSoft is a leading provider in synergistic data-driven technologies focused on improving ROI through market-driven analytics. The UberSoft Team has over twenty years of experience in delivering proven solutions to our corporate partners." is fluff. "Spend less time marketing, and more time watching hockey. UberSoft makes marketing easy, because we've got a really great way to link statistics from news feeds into your existing analytics." is honest, and a lot more memorable.
- mitjak 17y ago
  Dead on. As tired as I am of all the friendless as well, there are shades of gray in the between. Take even the balsamiq example the article uses -- the website doesn't jump in your face; it simply tries to be more honest and not present itself as a Fortune 501 company.
dan_sim 17y ago
I thought I was the only one bored of those "friendly" company that use cool expressions to talk about themselves (ex : "we kick ass at what we're doing, woot!", "no more boring meeting! yay!"). I don't want to be friend with a company or a product, I just want it to look pro in what they are doing. Does your dentist says "I clean the crap out of your teeth! giddyup!"? Maybe when that "we are friendly" trend will be over, the smaller companies will have access to "big" companies not because they try to sound bigger than they are but because they are pro.
17y ago

there 17y ago

i think it's certainly possible to make your company's image look professional without all the corporate speak, buzzwords, and stock images. my company is mostly just me (unless i sub out parts of a project) and i usually use "we" when talking to customers. many of them know the company is just me but they are already my customers. a potential customer might not even consider calling me in the first place if my website said i'm one guy. if they have a big project planned and they think it needs a whole team, would they even consider asking a one-person shop for an estimate? maybe not.

patio11 17y ago
I think the choice of "we" versus "I" is bicycle shedding for copywriting. I've seen software developers paralyzed by this decision. (No, really. It used to come up with some regularity at the Business of Software boards.) They've both got merits -- pick whichever sounds good to you and get back to stuff which matters.
- LogicHoleFlaw 17y ago
  Perhaps We shall settle upon the Imperial We in the future.

jcromartie 17y ago

This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I've worked with 3-person operations that claimed to have "teams" and double-digit employee counts to clients. Why not just be honest? It's like black-hat SEO for your HR.

spencerfry 17y ago

It's always odd to me when a company spends more time trying to market the people behind the product rather than the product itself. The marketing of the product should be in the forefront across all pages and any mention of yourselves should be short and to the point. You don't even need to mention the people behind it (although, we do, but only our names and links to our websites/blogs).

rubinelli 17y ago

Putting aside the corpspeak fluff, I wonder if this advice is valid for SaaS as well. I understand managers won't feel nervous after buying a mockup or code review tool from a small supplier, but would they be as willing to put business-critical data into a small company's servers? Would you let a one-man shop run your CRM?

sh1mmer 17y ago
I think that depends how transparent you are on your business practices. Running anything on a single server is dumb, but if you are one man shop running on EC2 and you are clear about that I don't think it's a big deal. Explain what you do, and why it's good. Explain how you've thought about BCP and making sure everything will stay up (essential for a service). Companies routinely hire individual consultants at $2k/day and follow their advice. I don't think that trusting a well respected individual in the industry is so much the problem, as trusting someone who's capability is unknown. If you show the capabilities of you and your systems up front, without BS, then people will take you on for projects that are appropriate to that level of risk. Which may be quite as much as you can handle.

oink 17y ago

Why does hitting <ESC> take me to a login page? That was odd.

smartbear 17y ago
I guess the Squarespace blogging platform just does that automatically. Agreed it's odd.

tptacek 17y ago

Love this post. This has been our standard marketing tack for years, and was a real conflict early in the company. How are we doing? Check out: http://runplaybook.com http://runplaybook.com Do we sound like VC-funded 6-person-marcom team boring jerks, or just the real jerks we actually are?

Andys 17y ago
FWIW, Your site didnt seem very professional until I got to the pricing page. Both the content of this page and the pricing level of the product sent a clear signal that this was a "serious", enterprise-aimed product. The rest of the site made me confident in your technical abilities but not the longevity of the company. The pricing made me feel more comfortable that you would be around for a while yet.

jpbutler 17y ago

I entirely agree with this. I wrote Serendeputy's about page in my own voice. I did it partly to separate myself from the my more corporatey competitors, but mostly because I despise the way I sound when I try to speak corporate droid. It makes me want to cry. That might be my number one reason for doing a startup: the ability to avoid doing things that make me want to cry.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

polos 17y ago

It has always been known that: Lying may(!) bring you some advantage, short-term only; but you always have an alternative way: you can tell something great, without lying, but you need your phantasy for doing that. So, my dear friend, do you simply lack phantasy? ;)

johnnybgoode 17y ago

Yeah, but a lot of companies seem like they're overcompensating to me. I mean, even if I met these people in person, I know they wouldn't sound as "forced-casual" as they do on their website.

dpcan 17y ago

As a developer, I have no problem buying development tools from one-man-shop / small company. When it comes to software for my other business needs however, I wouldn't use a hosted SaaS service if I didn't think it was backed by a lot of people, has a lot of customers, and isn't going anywhere. As a provider of hosted business tools, similar to the ones I wouldn't buy myself, I find that showing the small size of my company is a huge problem. I'm actually finding that the customers that won't host their data with a small company would be more than happy to buy a version they could install on-site.

steveblgh 17y ago

On a slightly related linguistic note, I find the following sentence annoying: "Put yourself in the shoes of that Early Adopter. Does she want to see useless garbage phrases or does she want to hear about how you totally understand her pain?" It's safe to bet that among the early adopters of a version control data mining tool there are overwhelmingly more males than females. Probably the poster feels that using she will somehow compensate this inbalance. I see the he/she problem as a bug of English, but using she in all technical text where a he would be more probable is just fake.