I had to try a little bit of advertising for the Founder Conference on August 17, to see if I could spread the word beyond our usual partners such as Startup Weekend, VentureBeat, Startup Digest and so on. I had used both Google AdWords and Facebook Ads in the past but it was a good opportunity to revisit both.

I’ll give you the conclusion first: FaceBook rocks. Google was completely useless, managing to generate a grand total of one click in two weeks.

How can this be? For my purpose, FaceBook ads had two killer features:

• The allowed text is long enough to put the key benefits of the conference. With Google AdWords, I just couldn’t find a way to make a compelling case with its meager two lines.
• Targeting is laser-focused, when Google is keyword-based (as in, 20th century technology). On Facebook, you can put an ad that will only be displayed if someone is a current Grad student at Stanford, less than 30 years old and likes Techcrunch. On Google AdWords, you can specify that your ad runs for the US. After looking around a lot, I finally discovered that you can target a city or region by using one of the advanced and unintuitive features.

So here I am: with Google AdWords, no matter how much budget I specify, I can’t get any clicks. FaceBook brings me a steady stream of people who are nicely targeted and often register for the conference. Exactly what I wanted.

Privacy concerns? Sure. But very impressive.

I was on the Paris subway, returning from one of the first sessions of the Founder Institute there. Sitting next to me was one of the founders. Something was bothering him.

He finally asked: “why do you put so much emphasis on market size? The team, and surely other aspects must be equally important to a startup success.”

He was right: we are putting a lot of emphasis on the market size. It dawned on me that we hadn’t clearly explained why. Maybe because we took it for granted. So I said it: “VCs can fix your team by injecting more money, but they can’t fix your market”.

“Oh, of course!”. That was all the explanation he needed. When you are a bootstrapped entrepreneur, you think of money as something real hard to get, a very expensive commodity. And you lose sight of the fact that on the other side of the table, VCs see money as the cheap commodity, and good startups as the rare one.

If your technology is not quite as good as you thought, your VCs will put more money on the table and hire a bunch of Ph.Ds to make it work. But if your market turns out to be non-existent, there is nothing the VCs can do to fix it. That’s why despite all the claims about backing teams first, it’s so important to target a huge market.

Ideally, VCs want to back great teams targeting great markets. But given the choice, they’ll settle for a somewhat weaker team.

Not a smaller market.

Advice on how to build a startup is plentiful online with countless blogs by seasoned entrepreneurs or consultants, successful or not. So it begs the question: why write a book in 2009 about starting your own web startup? “The Web Startup Success Guide” by Bob Walsh answers with a resounding yes!

Despite all the information at your fingertips with Google, a book presents a more coherent story, from start to finish. Paper is still the better approach when you decide it’s time to go past random nuggets of wisdom and get serious about entrepreneurship.

Software developers are the natural target audience for the Success Guide. The author makes the right choice in assuming that you already know technology, so it focuses instead on the business and marketing aspects of creating a startup. Its strength is in being up to speed with the current online social media trends, without succumbing to fads. In comparison, most other startup books now read more like dated advice from the times past.

The book does a very good job of walking you through the steps of building a modern startup. The first chapter reviews your possible motivations for starting your own company and where to get ideas. The second chapter forces you to refine and challenge your original idea. At a minimum, you owe it to yourself to check the sidebar titled “what startups not to pursue” because we are all guilty of making those mistakes at least once.

Together, those two first chapters do a great job of getting you excited and pumped up so you want to start right away, but also making sure that you don’t wander off in the wrong direction.

The Success Guide then covers various platforms such as Google App Engine, Amazon, or the iPhone in a way that will surprise you. This is not a technical review of whose cloud is better. Rather, it forces you to think as a business and make the right decision based on which customers you are targeting and what kind of business model and revenue you expect. As an example, the author favors B2B2C, meaning that selling to businesses that sell to consumers is the easiest path to a profitable company, rather than selling to consumers directly. Such choices can impact your target platform.

Next comes a comprehensive section about the current best online tools to build your startup. For instance, the book reviews GetSatisfaction, UserVoice, 99designs, and more. It’s a great chapter but it’s probably the part of the book that will become obsolete the fastest. Another criticism is that it reads more like a collection of descriptions rather than reviews and advice. The reader can’t quite tell which product to use. For instance, is CrazyEgg better than Google Analytics? It doesn’t clearly say.

A major strength of the book is the chapter on social media. In my experience, new software or web startups have strong technical background. They don’t need much help with technology and can build great products. However, many don’t have a clue how to spread the word and reach their customers. The Success Guide does a great job of guiding the reader and use the latest tools – facebook and twitter included. Without succumbing to twitter-mania. The book will show you why and how to become your own community manager.

Publicity is another important topic that software developers struggle with. How do you convince the press to cover your product? The age of the press release and an article in the New York Times is long gone. This chapter is the key to finding success in today’s world and is focused on the right approach for a company with a handful of developers, not a large corporation. You could call this “guerilla marketing 2009, the lost manual.”

As a side note, I also looked at StartupToDo.com, a web site from the same author. Bob Walsh formatted the same startup advice two ways. First, in the form of this book. But also as a website that will force you to apply the recipes of the book to your actual situation. Once you think about it, it makes total sense.

The book concludes with in-depth interviews of six role models for entrepreneurs.

The book could use some better formatting. Sometimes, a sidebar will spread multiple pages, which looks strange. Some interviews are presented as sidebars. Others flow like regular text, which is inconsistent.

Those minor editing weaknesses do not change the fact that “The Web Startup Success Guide” is an excellent book for all web entrepreneurs, with advice that is not only excellent and timely, but also actionable. If you don’t spring into action after reading this book, you should keep your cushy corporate job because entrepreneurship is not in you.

You can download a free chapter or visit Bob Walsh’s blog which contains extra information about the book.

Good programmers don’t need marketing. Great applications sell themselves.

I used to think that way too.

When I was an R&D engineer, I wrote the code. I made the product. I thought that sales and marketing were basically overhead.

Then I switched sides, worked with sales people for a while, and witnessed how hard it is to sell a product.

Those sales people had the same attitude: without them, there would be no customers and no money. Therefore, they were the ones really making the product come to life.

Reality is somewhere in between: Without sales, you don’t have a product, you have a prototype. Steve Blank makes an excellent case.

The Microsoft vs. Linux war didn’t help with the disdain toward marketing among software geeks, hackers and slashdotters. It feels good to believe that Windows succeeded mostly because of marketing and money spent by the mega-corporation.

If Linux had the marketing muscle of Windows, it would rule the world.

That’s beside the point.

Marketing Matters

You may have the most robust operating system, the best wiki or a twitter-killer, it doesn’t matter if no one knows about it and no one likes it.

You must design something that people want (market research), in a way that they can understand (usability) and make sure they can find it (market communication and public relations).

These are not overhead. If you get any of them wrong, you’ll have frustrated users at best, or no users at all. Not a fun situation.

Four Step Recovery Program

Here are four steps to help recovering programmers. They won’t turn a hard core hacker into Steve Jobs, but it’s a start:

1. Users are good: Whether you are trying to pay your bills or you code for the fun of it, recognize that you have an audience. It’s no fun writing code that no one uses. It’s so much more exciting to receive praise for your work from real people.
   So you will eventually have to open up and start listening and care about your users. They won’t be perfect. They may be clueless about programming. They’ll ask for features that sound basic to you, but they are your users. You will learn to love them.
2. Meet people face to face: There is so much you can do online. Sometimes, face to face interaction is more powerful than the best crafted tweet. Set yourself a target to attend at least one developer or entrepreneur meeting each month.
   Once you get into that habit, increase to two meetings per month. Be open, discuss your vision as well as your immediate problems and you’ll be surprised by the results.
3. Set aside one hour daily for active marketing: Software developers love to spend days and nights coding great stuff. Focusing on marketing, sales and customer activities is not quite as exciting. Put some discipline in place. A good starting point is to devote one hour per day of your time to work exclusively on marketing. And I don’t mean read the Web to learn about SEO.
   Spend one full, active hour contributing to forums, pitching to people, e-mailing journalists and other key influencers that may be interested in what you do.
   Does your web site have a success story from a real customer? Did you follow-up with the people you met at those meetings?
   The first week, send at least two e-mails a day to people you have never met. By the third week, your goal is to receive one e-mail a day from people you don’t know. Once you figured it out, just scale.
4. Chat with 3 Users: Geeks are particularly good at imagining what their ideal customer wants. Stop!
   Go and actually chat with a handful of your potential users. Listen to their interests, their concerns, why they would use your product, etc. You’ll be amazed every time. Just make sure that you talk to more than one or two. Does the target or three customers sound low? That’s because you haven’t done it yet.

There are many resources out there about SEO, A/B testing, how to write a press release (or not), create buzz, etc. Start paying attention. Because if you don’t, someone else will.