Mixergy interview with Jason about Sortfolio and more
Andrew Warner talks to Jason about Sortfolio, advertising, data, lifetime customer value, email etiquette, and more. Other Mixergy/37signals interviews: Bootstrapping Lessons From 37signals (Jason in 2008), The Biography of 37signals (Jason in 2010), and Blasphemy & Revelation (David in 2011).
condor
on 11 May 11“tweet to watch this video” with pre-filled twitter message; incentivized clicks were cheesy when they were on lotto sites, and they’re still cheesy now.
Sherwood
on 12 May 11Great comments from Jason about exploring advertising and trying to find the right formula to “throw money at.”
Oddly, I caught Jason finding his own answer to this riddle, though I don’t think he realized it when he said it: people are very busy, and have a lot of things on their minds. They do not spend their days and nights thinking about 37signals products.
In fact, there are large cross sections of the business world – industry verticals, whole professions – that could use a 37signals product to organize their work, but are utterly unaware of the existence of the product, or – more crucially – unaware of the application of that product to their profession.
The Product Blog takes a stab at this, by showing how different companies have gotten value from using their accounts. And that’s a start: in fact, I’d aim some targeted ads at these posts and see what happens.
But taking it a step further, I’d try to project into these markets, and see if there was a compelling way to (for example) show college coaches how they could use Highrise to recruit high school players. Maybe it could be something like a live workshop at an industry conference. A more guerrilla approach would be to give away a few seed accounts, to build initial awareness within that profession.
The point is to identify and target big-enough, lucrative-enough verticals, and educate that group on how 37signals fit in their world.
Plenty of ways to extend this – happy to talk more about it.
Jake Walker
on 13 May 11Not only does “tweet-to-view” make me not want to watch the video, but the pre-populated tweet suggests that I’ve already watched the video I’m not able to see until I send the tweet. So they demand I send spam and then suggest I lie as well. What a horrible concept.
@Jake Walker
on 16 May 11While I agree that the “tweet-to-view” concept is garbage, you could just click the “No thanks, just show me the video” link at the bottom to display the video and skip the “tweet-to-view” crap.
This discussion is closed.