You have no idea how many times I've seen variations on that sales graph -- a few years in the coding salt mines with gradually increasing but sporadically up and down sales, followed by new version and a step function increase.<p>Incidentally, contra the article, if you get advertising on the Internet right its a fairly low-stress way to make a lot more money than you would otherwise for a small software company. Sure, Google gets 50 cents on the dollar from my last $1000 of sales every month... still, 95% gross margin exclusive of advertising, you do the math. (This is a complementary strategy to wowing customers and having an unpaid sales force of fans. You now have more customers to wow and more unpaid fans. What is not to like?)<p>Another note against the article: if you're doing software over the Internet, I beg you, please get over your hangups about SEO. You may think its about being an evil spammer. It isn't. (Well, OK, it doesn't have to be.) You can do great SEO for your business and still touch holy water without suffering 3rd degree burns. (In a nutshell: publish useful stuff, get linked, win. You'll note how this <i>dovetails very nicely</i> with constantly positively surprising people and extracting value out of folks who are unwilling to pay you money.)<p>I'm still in the salt mines but 3.0 is coming out any week now. I'm cautiously optimistic. ;)
The "Make your mistakes visible" advice seems to have merit based on the offered axion:
"Telling the truth even when you don’t have to is good evidence that you’re trustworthy."<p>But I can't think of any marketeers that have taken this advice. I wonder how effective it would be if Microsoft ran a campaign saying: "although we enabled user account control by default to increase security, we admit that it came across as 'chatty and annoying' for most users."<p>Such a strategy may be especially useful to reduce impact of a competitor using a mistake in negative marketing.
in a previous post about marketing, i placed a quote from bill hicks that if your in advertising, kill yourself.<p>i like this guy, though. he's not marketing scum.<p>this leads to my question: are there terms that distinguish between what this article is promoting, this idea of marketing and the more common ideas: 'public relations'/edward bernays/manipulation? Something other than 'being cool' vs 'being a jerk'?<p>if not, if both are just 'marketing' - then a terms should be made to distinguish the paradigm difference.
All the lessons sound great, but in lieu of advertising or conferences, how do you make the first 10 sales? The first 100?<p>Surely it's not sufficient to simply "build it and they will [magically] come" unless your product is incredibly niche and solving a <i>very</i> painful demand.<p>Is the author a superb personal marketer, or did he literally sell 2 copies of his software to friends and then everything snowballed from there?<p>The sales graph suggests there's something else going on, and I really want to know what it is!