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I don't agree. Lots of startups don't have sales and marketing in the early stages. The grow through word of mouth or iterate/pivot to find something that becom

by pkaye 11y ago

I don't agree. Lots of startups don't have sales and marketing in the early stages. The grow through word of mouth or iterate/pivot to find something that becomes a hit. Somebody like Yahoo would need to buy and maintain a lot of servers to scale up but now with cloud computing, you can grow quite a bit with Amazon AWS until you implement your own infrastructure.

spotman 11y ago
would love to hear examples of successful startups that did not do any marketing. especially ones that are tech/Internet startups. also - while AWS can make infrastructure convenient to scale up, rarely is it cheaper. It certainly can feel cheaper in the beginning as its pay-as-you-go, but averaged out over N years it's not. AWS also has reserved pricing to aid with this, but most startups are not in a position to commit to either real hardware or 3 year contracts up front.
- oimaz 11y ago
  zenefits, zenpayroll, slack were basically word of mouth
  - spotman 11y ago
    Zenefits and zenpayroll have easy to spot ads running on google right now. Most startup's spend an enormous amount on marketing to get any traction. I'm sure there is more examples like Slack that did not use much marketing, but they are very rare. If you build a startup and hope to iterate your way into being viral, this is bad planning in my opinion, no matter how awesome what your building is. Unfortunately, one that I had to learn the hard way.
    - michaelchisari 11y ago
      If you build a startup and hope to iterate your way into being viral It's a great way to alert a much bigger competitor of an emerging market so they can eat your lunch, though.
  - foobarqux 11y ago
    Zenefits has a massive sales team now, I don't know if it always did.
thorfish 11y ago
Obviously it varies quite a bit. Some consumer companies can spend very little on sales and marketing. But many consumer companies and nearly all B2B companies spend an enormous amount. Look at a company like New Relic. They took four rounds of venture, plus two rounds of private equity. They were spending 70% of their operating budget on sales and marketing. It was expensive the whole way. It costs a lot of money to develop a product to the point where it is better than the status quo, and then a lot more money to market it.

by pkaye 11y ago

spotman 11y ago

would love to hear examples of successful startups that did not do any marketing. especially ones that are tech/Internet startups. also - while AWS can make infrastructure convenient to scale up, rarely is it cheaper. It certainly can feel cheaper in the beginning as its pay-as-you-go, but averaged out over N years it's not. AWS also has reserved pricing to aid with this, but most startups are not in a position to commit to either real hardware or 3 year contracts up front.

oimaz 11y ago
zenefits, zenpayroll, slack were basically word of mouth
- spotman 11y ago
  Zenefits and zenpayroll have easy to spot ads running on google right now. Most startup's spend an enormous amount on marketing to get any traction. I'm sure there is more examples like Slack that did not use much marketing, but they are very rare. If you build a startup and hope to iterate your way into being viral, this is bad planning in my opinion, no matter how awesome what your building is. Unfortunately, one that I had to learn the hard way.
  - michaelchisari 11y ago
    If you build a startup and hope to iterate your way into being viral It's a great way to alert a much bigger competitor of an emerging market so they can eat your lunch, though.
- foobarqux 11y ago
  Zenefits has a massive sales team now, I don't know if it always did.

thorfish 11y ago

Obviously it varies quite a bit. Some consumer companies can spend very little on sales and marketing. But many consumer companies and nearly all B2B companies spend an enormous amount. Look at a company like New Relic. They took four rounds of venture, plus two rounds of private equity. They were spending 70% of their operating budget on sales and marketing. It was expensive the whole way. It costs a lot of money to develop a product to the point where it is better than the status quo, and then a lot more money to market it.