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Launching a New Blog: ConstraintMarketing.com
While I love my DanielleMorrill.com blog, it is pretty much a smattering of random things I am thinking about and pieces of my personal life. And don’t worry, I won’t stop writing here, but I am looking forward to creating a more structured home for all my ideas about how marketing can be done effectively at startups.
Lately, I’ve been following along more closely with Eric Ries, Steve Blank and others who are talking about Lean Startup. I think it is really cool that “lean” has finally made it down from the ivory tower of Six Sigma to the nerf gun wielding floppy haired startup kids. And with the state of the economy, it couldn’t come at a better time.
How I Came To Love Lean
When I was 15, I started working for my Dad’s newly formed financial consulting company (he’s blogging now, woo!). After two failed startups that had attempted to marry technology and the finance/healthcare benefits industry he was ready to strike out on his own, and I served as his tech-support/office-manager/generalist. It was my sophomore year of high school, and the first year I really got to know my road-warrior of a father. As consult, the business was basically a one-man-show so I began to set up processes that would help things like reporting to scale as we took on more customers. The first business book I ever took down from his shelf was The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, and it was the seminal work that brought the concept of lean manufacturing to the average businessman when it was published in 1984.I was fascinated by the “Theory of Constraints” – the idea that you have to run your business in a way that is appropriate to your constraints. You have a broken machine, materials shortage, broken supply chain, damaged orders? Figure out how to restructure your processes to serve your end goals and take the reality of your situation into consideration.
Why “Constraint Marketing” for Startups?
Marketing in the technology world is more than just brand awareness, it’s a core distribution channel for consumer and enterprise products that are sold on the internet. The new product supply chain isn’t interested in planes, trains, trucks, and boats. Instead it is interested in channels like display advertising, social media, webinars, and ultimately a call-to-action that leads to conversion.
So what if we applied the rules of lean manufacturing and supply chain to startup marketing? What would happen, what can we learn, and would be more effective marketers? I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard marketers derided for not being cost conscious enough, or efficient enough – and in that way I think I have a lot in common with a plant manager at a factory.
I think my experiences working in logistics (Expeditors International) as well as on-site for highly productive lean manufacturing factory concerns such as a Genie Industries and distributors like Zumiez were some of the most fascinating and formative experiences of my life. In the same way I am marrying the old and the new in telecommunications with Twilio, let me marry the old and new wisdom of product distribution for online products. We’ll see where this goes… I’m looking forward to feedback.
Stay tuned, http://www.constraintmarketing.com will be live soon
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Ignite WordCamp Boston Videos
Want to watch one of the super-fast presentations, or weren’t able to make it last night? Never fear, Flipcam HD to the rescue! These are also on YouTube for your embedding pleasure.
Getting the Moneyshot: Making Screencasts without Going Insane – by Danielle Morrill (me!)
You Beta’ Test Your Plugins – by Michael Erlewine
Turning WordPress Into a Social Media Monitoring Dashboard – by Kevin Palmer
Yo Dawg I Heard You Like Publishing Platforms – by Eric Buth
more coming soon, they are still uploading on the airport wifi…
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Wordcamp Boston is Tomorrow!
Wow, this morning I woke up and I’d slept with the balcony door open in 80-degree weather in Miami Beach and now I’m in Boston, and there’s snow on the ground! The joys of air travel, it’s just amazing. ITEXPO was a good show, and I’m very happy with the launch of the 1st StartupCamp Telephony, where my company was the premier sponsor and two of our customers presented their startups – I’ll recap on all that soon.
Outside my hotel room I haven’t been to Boston in almost 6 years, and it’s so cool to be right here next to all the geeky goodness of the MIT campus, Akamai, etc. In fact, I’m checking on Gary’s Guide and Plancast right now to see if there are any tech/entrepreneur type events scheduled for tonight. It would be fun to meet new people – I don’t know very many folks in this town at all.
WordPress Boston Tomororw
Tomorrow it’s all about WordPress. We’ve got a Twilio WordPress plugin that I’ll be showing off, and then I’m speaking about screencasting at Ignite in the evening (right after the closing keynote). I’m 2nd up, so I need to go watch some YouTube videos of previous presentations and do quite a bit of practicing to get the timing right.
I’m not in love with my slides (quite a rush job) but I think I can compensate for them with great spoken content. I’ve also been considering making a screencast on how to make screencasts – that way people can see how the entire process works if they like the talk. If you like this idea, or think it would be useful, please drop a note in the comments.
I’m sure there will be some video footage of the event coming from your’s truly soon. See many of you tomorrow! You can follow along with what’s going on using the #wcbos hashtag on Twitter search.
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Time to Say Goodbye Seattle, Hello San Francisco
Cross posted from Seattle 2.0 >>
A series of events yesterday convinced me that it’s time to write the blog post that I haven’t being willing to touch for over six months. This is the blog post that says goodbye to Seattle and hello to San Francisco.Seattle is a great place to start a company and, after traveling a ton this past year, I strongly feel it is also one of the best places on Earth to live. I anticipate that you, Seattle 2.0 readers, might point out that it seems a little ridiculous to be editor of Seattle 2.0 and then to move away. As numerous people can attest, I’m a huge fan of Seattle startups, entrepreneurs, and as someone who was born and raised in the Seattle area I’m homesick as hell. But I don’t live for the scene, much as I enjoy being a part of it. For awhile, I did feel like the startup community was an end in itself and I think that is one danger to be aware of as you’re starting your own companies. Your fellow upstarts are not, for the most part, your customers. Impressing them is optional – impressing (and making money from) your customers is required.How Long Has This Being Going On
I’ve been avoiding talking about my move kind of like someone who’s in a new relationship but doesn’t want to call the guy her boyfriend. But the truth is that Seattle and I had to break up, because I’m seeing someone else… and it’s very serious. I wasn’t planning to fall in love with a startup in the Bay Area but it happened, and as one of our investors (who is partial to the New York tech community) said, “you have to go to the place where the startup you want to work on is”. I think he’s right, and beyond that I think you have to take your business where it is most likely to be successful. For Twilio, that’s San Francisco.I saw Mikhail Seregine of Seattle-based startup Jambool (their San Francisco team shares an office with us at Pier 38) today, and we laughed at how much one chance meeting at a WTIA event could do. One year ago Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, Mikhail, and I were eating dinner together at an event where our respective startups were presenting and look how much has changed since then (Twilio took funding, ClayValet closed, and I left Pelago).It’s a Choice, Not a Sacrifice
Right about now I’m missing everything from our weather to our (often crappy) sports teams, and for the record Seattle really does have the best Thai food no matter what these foodies tell you. Most of all, I’m missing A LOT of people including my parents, my sister, my friends, and the majority of business contacts I’ve built up in the past five years since dropping out of college. Case in point, I saw Dave Schappell today at our office here in SF and probably hugged him hello a little too tight (sorry Dave).Why give all that up for a startup? Why give it up for a company that, despite an impressive trajectory, still has statistically high odds of going nowhere like every startup? Why risk messing up my marriage, going bankrupt trying to sell my real estate, etc. just to be constantly exhausted, have panic attacks, get sick, travel too much, sleep too little? Why live like this? My reason might surprise you. It’s not that I love startups (although I do, for many reasons).My reason for choosing this crazy life is simple, I want to give people back hours of their lives. I want to take things that are hard, and make them easy. I want to free people up to do higher value things with their time. It is the common thread of everything I’ve ever worked on, and it is the motivation behind each company I’ve chosen to work for and each product I’ve worked to create or bring to market.Tactics: On Becoming a Maker
One of the top reasons I took on the role of 1st non-founding multiple-hat-wearing something-or-other (we call is “Director of Marketing”) is because I need to become more technical to achieve my long term goals of founding successful startups of my own. Startup Weekend taught me something important about startups in the earliest stages: he who writes the codes makes the rules. As it turns out, I really like the freedom and immediate gratification of creating working prototypes. One of my proudest moments was when an app I wrote made it to the #3 spot on Hacker News, and no one said anything nasty about my code. Phew!Tactics: On Becoming a Marketer
Although I hold the title “Director of Marketing” I am not a traditional marketer, meaning I didn’t study it in school and I didn’t even really intend to get into marketing. In most startups, engineers are the rockstars and marketing plays second fiddle but its becoming increasingly obvious that startups with engineering gurus who never bring anything to market are not viable businesses, and ultimately a waste of time and money for investors. What I’m doing now allows me to stretch my wings as a marketer, and become intimately familiar with marketing channels and how to bring a product to the public.Thank You, Thank You, Thank You
It’s not like I’m disappearing or anything, I’m still going to post my ramblings on here until Marcelo or the commenters kick me out. I wasn’t going to do this because it is a little cheesy but what the hell. I really want to thank some people who have been helpful to me in the Seattle startup community, and who I think are part of what makes Seattle a great place to be in tech. I apologize in advance for anyone I’ve forgotten, and I’m sure I’ll be updating this post.my husband, Kevin – for putting up with my single-minded obsession with entrepreneurship, supporting me endlessly, and also kicking my ass when everyone is telling me what I want to hear- Marcelo Calbucci (Seattle 2.0)- for encouraging me to write for Seattle 2.0, live broadcast, and generally inspiring me to go after things I want in life, cooking yummy food and talking for hours
- Michelle Goldberg (Ignition Partners) – for being a supportive mentor who believes in me, listens, and gets excited about the same things I do
- Brian Westbrook – for being my better half when we cohost Seattle 2.0 TV, up for anything every time I call with something I want to film, teaching me to fake smile on camera for hours, and letting me play with his gear and toys
- Rob Eickemann – for being the first person to say hi to me at the first tech event I ever went to, Six Hour Startup, as well as a friendly face at Saturday House and organizer of Startup Weekend
- Cassie Wallender – for interviewing me at my first attempt to join a startup (I didn’t get it, maybe because I wore a suit to the interview hehe) at iLike
- John Cook – for cofounding TechFlash, because it is helping keep Seattle startups on the map where they belong and helping them be taken seriously
- Ksenia Oustiougova – for showing me how hard you have to dig in to get what you want, sharing your office space, and inspiring me to be less nice and more badass
- Josh Maher & Nathan Kaiser – for hosting Lunch 2.0 and nPost events (respectively) that helped me meet tons of people, learn to pitch, and feel like I was a part of something special
- STS mailing list – for letting me lurk, the entertainment, the wisdom, did I mention the entertainment?
- numerous geeks like Brian Dorsey, Calvin Freitas, Colin Henry, Damon Cortesi and Aviel Ginzburg – for explaining things to me without making me feel stupid, encouraging me to keep getting better at coding, and answering my (often dumb) questions
- Poker 2.0 – for your money 😉
