Startup School, DHH, and the Missing Marketing Piece 7
If you weren't at Startup School this weekend or haven't watched DHH's speech yet, you should go check it out. It was entertaining and a good counter-point to much of the ridiculous talk that you hear out here in the Valley.
As I was watching it though, I had the same thought that I always seem to have when I hear someone from 37 Signals talk, and it came to me right when I saw the slide that said:
- Great Application
- Price
- Profit!
If only it were that easy. The thing that these guys always leave out seems to be step 1.5:
Market the hell out of your product, and get a bunch of people to use it.
That step is really, really hard.
I bet that if you asked DHH if he thought that 37 Signals would be just as successful if he hadn't invented Rails, and without the flood of free publicity that that got them, and he answered truthfully, the answer would be "no".
There are probably all sorts of great applications out there that would help me out on a daily basis, but I have little to no time to try out most of them. I've tried out Basecamp though, simply because while learning Rails you hear again and again about how Rails was extracted from it.
Would I (or you) know anything about 37 Signals if it wasn't for Rails? Probably not.
Those guys do a great job of marketing themselves and getting things out in front of people, but just because you're having fun marketing your stuff, doesn't mean that marketing isn't work that you have to do.
If you think that you don't have to market your app, no matter how great it is, you're living in a world similar to the one that DHH had on one his final slides where he said:
500 * $40 = $125,000
That's right, an imaginary world.
This is a fair point, but doesn't refute the main gist of his presentation. His presentation was squarely aimed at building a sustainable business versus the build-to-flip mentality that pervades the current startup world.
Marketing is important, sure, but I doubt he could contain that topic and give it fair treatment in a 30min spiel. You can always poke holes in missing steps.
That last equation is probably a typo that's been really overplayed in the blogosphere.
I think you'd be surprised how many people know about 37s without knowing a single thing about Rails.
Marketing was missing from that talk, although if you have read Getting Real, it would have been the same info and he only had 30 min.
I knew about 37signals way before RoR. I don't really care about it, I program in python.
37signals had a very well known design consultancy before Rails. Pretty much everyone in interaction design and usability I know has known about them for quite some time.
I can also recommend "Getting Real".
Making a successful company is never easy. I reiterated over that point over and over again. It's just much easier to build a nice, sustainable business than it is to become the next Facebook.
Also, as a few other people have mentioned, Basecamp was out before Rails and we were a profitable business long before Rails took off in any way. But sure, being involved with Rails has been one of many ways we've been fortunate enough to create awareness.
That last slide was some seriously magic math :). I changed the suggested price and the number of customers/server without updating the result. That didn't compute.
Yeah - it seems to me 37 signals was pretty well known before they released rails - which is neither her nor there, but for you to say that the reason basecamp was a success was because of rails ... I think is a bit of revisionist version of history.
I also knew about 37s before they did Rails. I saw their site when it was that old white thing about the 37 signals themselves.
Their blog is what made them take off imo.