start with a product, then build your promise.

This post is all about the only thing that matters for a new startup.

But first, some theory:

If you look at a broad cross-section of startups — say, 30 or 40 or more; enough to screen out the pure flukes and look for patterns — two obvious facts will jump out at you.

First obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of success — some of those startups are insanely successful, some highly successful, many somewhat successful, and quite a few of course outright fail.

Second obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of caliber and quality for the three core elements of each startup — team, product, and market.

At any given startup, the team will range from outstanding to remarkably flawed; the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose.

And so you start to wonder — what correlates the most to success — team, product, or market? Or, more bluntly, what causes success? And, for those of us who are students of startup failure — what’s most dangerous: a bad team, a weak product, or a poor market?

Let’s start by defining terms.

The caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the CEO, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them.

You look at a startup and ask, will this team be able to optimally execute against their opportunity? I focus on effectiveness as opposed to experience, since the history of the tech industry is full of highly successful startups that were staffed primarily by people who had never “done it before”.

The quality of a startup’s product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it: How easy is the product to use? How feature rich is it? How fast is it? How extensible is it? How polished is it? How many (or rather, how few) bugs does it have?

The size of a startup’s market is the the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product.

(Let’s assume for this discussion that you can make money at scale — that the cost of acquiring a customer isn’t higher than the revenue that customer will generate.)

Some people have been objecting to my classification as follows: “How great can a product be if nobody wants it?” In other words, isn’t the quality of a product defined by how appealing it is to lots of customers?

No. Product quality and market size are completely different.

Here’s the classic scenario: the world’s best software application for an operating system nobody runs. Just ask any software developer targeting the market for BeOS, Amiga, OS/2, or NeXT applications what the difference is between great product and big market.

So:

If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team. This is the obvious answer, in part because in the beginning of a startup, you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn’t been built yet, or the market, which hasn’t been explored yet.

Plus, we’ve all been raised on slogans like “people are our most important asset” — at least in the US, pro-people sentiments permeate our culture, ranging from high school self-esteem programs to the Declaration of Independence’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — so the answer that team is the most important feels right.

And who wants to take the position that people don’t matter?

On the other hand, if you ask engineers, many will say product. This is a product business, startups invent products, customers buy and use the products. Apple and Google are the best companies in the industry today because they build the best products. Without the product there is no company. Just try having a great team and no product, or a great market and no product. What’s wrong with you? Now let me get back to work on the product.

Personally, I’ll take the third position — I’ll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure.

Why?

In a great market — a market with lots of real potential customers — the market pulls product out of the startup.

The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along.

The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.

In short, customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy.

And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly.

This is the story of search keyword advertising, and Internet auctions, and TCP/IP routers.

Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn’t matter — you’re going to fail.

You’ll break your pick for years trying to find customers who don’t exist for your marvelous product, and your wonderful team will eventually get demoralized and quit, and your startup will die.

This is the story of videoconferencing, and workflow software, and micropayments.

In honor of Andy Rachleff, formerly of Benchmark Capital, who crystallized this formulation for me, let me present Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success:

The #1 company-killer is lack of market.

Andy puts it this way:

When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

You can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently — but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most.

And neither a stellar team nor a fantastic product will redeem a bad market.

OK, so what?

Well, first question: Since team is the thing you have the most control over at the start, and everyone wants to have a great team, what does a great team actually get you?

Hopefully a great team gets you at least an OK product, and ideally a great product.

However, I can name you a bunch of examples of great teams that totally screwed up their products. Great products are really, really hard to build.

Hopefully a great team also gets you a great market — but I can also name you lots of examples of great teams that executed brilliantly against terrible markets and failed. Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.

In my experience, the most frequent case of great team paired with bad product and/or terrible market is the second- or third-time entrepreneur whose first company was a huge success. People get cocky, and slip up. There is one high-profile, highly successful software entrepreneur right now who is burning through something like $80 million in venture funding in his latest startup and has practically nothing to show for it except for some great press clippings and a couple of beta customers — because there is virtually no market for what he is building.

Conversely, I can name you any number of weak teams whose startups were highly successful due to explosively large markets for what they were doing.

Finally, to quote Tim Shephard: “A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product.”

Second question: Can’t great products sometimes create huge new markets?

Absolutely.

This is a best case scenario, though.

VMWare is the most recent company to have done it — VMWare’s product was so profoundly transformative out of the gate that it catalyzed a whole new movement toward operating system virtualization, which turns out to be a monster market.

And of course, in this scenario, it also doesn’t really matter how good your team is, as long as the team is good enough to develop the product to the baseline level of quality the market requires and get it fundamentally to market.

Understand I’m not saying that you should shoot low in terms of quality of team, or that VMWare’s team was not incredibly strong — it was, and is. I’m saying, bring a product as transformative as VMWare’s to market and you’re going to succeed, full stop.

Short of that, I wouldn’t count on your product creating a new market from scratch.

Third question: as a startup founder, what should I do about all this?

Let’s introduce Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success:

The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.

And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s.

Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens.

My contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit.

Carried a step further, I believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this “BPMF”) and after product/market fit (“APMF”).

When you are BPMF, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit.

Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.

When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else.

I’m not suggesting that you do ignore everything else — just that judging from what I’ve seen in successful startups, you can.

Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit — and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful.

Conversely, you see a surprising number of really well-run startups that have all aspects of operations completely buttoned down, HR policies in place, great sales model, thoroughly thought-through marketing plan, great interview processes, outstanding catered food, 30″ monitors for all the programmers, top tier VCs on the board — heading straight off a cliff due to not ever finding product/market fit.

Ironically, once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit.

Because, really, what else could it possibly be?

[Editorial note: this post obviously raises way more questions than it answers. How exactly do you go about getting to product/market fit if you don't hit it right out of the gate? How do you evaluate markets for size and quality, especially before they're fully formed? What actually makes a product "fit" a market? What role does timing play? How do you know when to change strategy and go after a different market or build a different product? When do you need to change out some or all of your team? And why can't you count on on a great team to build the right product and find the right market? All these topics will be discussed in future posts in this series.]

I opened the code, decided to make a few comments. If you want to read my findings (might be a bit technical), go ahead. But I’m just going to make this clear: DO NOT INSTALL THIS. This addon acts like malware and the service is a security vulnerability waiting to happen.

If you did install this accidentally, read the child replies to this post, there are instructions on how to remove this provided by several people.

The following notes were from the Firefox version of this addon (which I was able to get by looking at the script on the install page), but I’m sure the Chrome version pulls off similar ploys.

I’ve grouped my notes into four categories (I hope this makes everything easier to read and understand):

PRIVACY (for issues regarding the addon and what it does with your data)

SEC (for security risks)

MAL (for unwanted changes the addon makes behind your back or malware like functions that are performed)

MISC (for various other notes that don’t fit the previous categories).

• SEC: The extension is dependent on remote external javascript (meaning, it needs to go download a JS file before it can even work. This happens on every startup). Mozilla does NOT approve of this practice for reasons such as MITM attacks and server security (someone gains control of that server = all clients are now at high risk). It’s why Conduit Toolbars are not allowed on Mozilla’s Offical Addon Repository.

This is the file the addon requests the current javascript file from. Link to current JS file.

• MAL: The API makes multiple references to a premium service. What this means is that if the author of the plugin fails to pay the service money, CrossRider can force all users of the plugin to install additional crap. This is a forced change that you cannot opt-out of.
• PRIVACY/SEC/MAL: You have no idea when this file will change. It’s downloaded at start up and ran with window chrome permissions (this is considered dangerous). At any point in time, the author could basically say fuck you and change it to start data mining. But that’s okay, because the change will happen in the background without you ever knowing. Ever.
• MISC: Here’s the page it injects to gain access to your FB data (you must accept this before it can do anything with Facebook).
• PRIVACY/MAL: It also tries to install an OpenSearch plugin and redirect the search page that Firefox will go to when you type in a search in the URL bar (like just typing in “What is Reddit?”, Firefox would redirect you to a Google result screen, instead this addon makes it redirect to a page CrossRider controls). This seems to be making revenue for the developers. Additionally, these changes do not get reset on uninstall. Also, their search plugin is extremely deceptive and is trying to sound like it is the default Google search plugin that is bundled with Firefox (while the icon gives it away, the plugin itself uses strings like “Google powered web search” in order to make you fall into their ploy). There’s code in the addon that forces their OpenSearch plugin to override whatever your default search engine is (Normally Google) in your search bar (provided you have a searchbar on your toolbar, you can press Ctrl + K to bring it into focus). However, this change only happens if the plugin is registered as non-premium, however, that can change without warning.
• PRIVACY/SEC/MAL: It actively (and at random) looks for known webmail domains and starts reading your emails until it hits a quote block which it then uses to append a signature to your emails in order to get your friends to start using this software. Social engineering high-o!

Currently, the signature “feature” runs on the following domains:

• mail.google.com
• mail.yahoo.com
• webmail.aol.com
• mail.live.com

• PRIVACY: This addon sends browser stats while it is on the manage screen. Data sent is the browser type, addon version, script version and this value called bic (which I assume is supposed to be unique [considering it only gets set after receiving data from the server]). It might do this in other places as well.
• PRIVACY/SEC: Google Analytics can be injected into any page the plugin author chooses from window chrome (this is rather bad, privacy wise). At the moment, I don’t see anything currently calling this function, but it is there and ready to be put into any and every page ever. To stay safe, I recommend NoScript (I believe it might be able to block this addon from injecting).
• MISC: The API code is obfuscated everywhere, which is normally done in an addon when you have something to hide. It also makes this incredibly difficult to read.
• SEC: There are a ton of content permission hacks in order to mount remote JS and run it at a higher permission level. It’s rather lame considering Mozilla gives you safe interfaces that allow you to do this safely.
• MAL: Several mentions in the code to overriding your browser homepage. There is one place where I see this happen, but I don’t know if any function actually calls it. This code is an absolute mess.
• MISC: You can change SOME of the settings while it is installed, MAYBE. Judging by the code, the settings application doesn’t seem to work very well. Your mileage may vary with the options window, but it looks like you can’t do anything if the plugin is registered as non-premium.
• MAL: Uninstalling will not revert any of these changes. The code does not watch for an uninstall event at all, so it can apply any of this shit whenever it pleases and never have to clean it up. The “Easy to Uninstall” part on their page is bullshit. Premium or not, this stuff does not get cleaned up.
• PRIVACY: Your FB data does go through their service. They don’t have a privacy policy or a terms of service (which is surprising considering they’ve been around for a couple of months). This should be a red flag.

So should you trust these guys? In my opinion, fuck no. Do NOT install this, it does more harm than anything. Stay the hell away.

EDIT: Added updates, removed the other edit notes.

EDIT: I might have misunderstood the premium feature. On further inspection, if the author is listed as premium, the addon will not override all the search features by default. However, even if the plugin is registered as premium, it still sniffs your emails and does all the other bad things.

EDIT: Made update portions fit into each point better.

EDIT: Added note categories, hopefully this makes it easier to read.

Components.classes["@mozilla.org/preferences-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIPrefBranch).deleteBranch("extensions.crossriderapp519");

Whenever something like this happens, it really is too good to be true. I’ll say that again, This is too good to be true.

I showed my brother my stats and he said he’d never seen bounce rate this low. immediately i knew i broke something. when installing cloudflare, they promote using their widgets and I used the google analytics widget. Unfortunately, I hadn’t un-installed GA from my wordpress template!

So google analytics(GA) was being ping’d twice for each visitor. GA sees 2 page views from 1 IP address and says “2 page views = no bounce”

so if you have a symptom of increased page views and decreased bounce, most likely you have GA installed twice.

once i fixed, you can see above in the picture my bounce rate is going back to normal. (the mountain in the middle of the chart was when i turned off cloudflare for a day)

My description: Selection and Convenience support a better Customer Experience. Good Customer Experience brings in more customers(increases traffic). Traffic brings more sellers. More Sellers bring more Selection and Convenience. All of that GROWTH supports a lower cost structure with economies of scale, and lowers prices, exponentially adding to the customer experience.

I think its fairly straight forward, and I don’t understand why more people aren’t competing with the exact same model…

so far, useless. every single result is from my website. this isn’t in my social circle, this is my own work that i know very well. searching my social circle should only include friends websites.

Where do my friends list their websites?

Google should offer a “facebook backup sync” so that it can take all the friends/info that facebook has taken and gathered it again on their servers. Then to create their own social map from that data is powerful.
more from the google people about google social:

Social search results

If you’re signed in to Google, your search results may highlight relevant content that’s created by or shared by your social connections. Your Social Search experience is personal and the highlighted content that you see is unique to you and your social connections.

Here are some of the types of content you might see:

* Websites, blogs, and other content that’s shared by or created by your friends
* Images that are shared by your social connections
* Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions
* Profiles of people you know beneath results for social sites like Twitter and Flickr

If you want to see more results from your social connections, click More Search Tools or Show Search Tools on the left panel of the search results page and select Social to filter your results.

This marketing guide assumes you’re making something and interested in connecting better with followers. I’ve had a music blog for a while and i’ve very familiar with the services available to artists, and obviously the best SEO strategy to make sure you’re being found.

Step 1. Get a Domain Name!

Step 2. Start a tumblr and setup your domain name to tumblr.

Step 3. Delete your myspace account, don’t look back.

Step 4. Make a Facebook/Twitter/youtube. Set them up with your Tumblr so that when you post an article, it goes to those accounts.

Step 5. Create a Bandcamp and upload your music, if you’re a comedian, upload to youtube.

Step 6. Delete all your other Sites

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg43s9yPsaI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZLNyrFow5Q

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQy_HFHOZug

Hello. My name is Ian Rogers. Thanks to New Music Seminar for the opportunity to speak to you for the next 18 minutes. I’ll start by telling you a small bit about Topspin then quickly jump into a discussion of how we think about building online marketing campaigns. At the end I’ll announce a program to help you turn this knowledge into action, a contest with real money and assistance executing a campaign like the ones discussed below.

Topspin is a direct-to-fan marketing and retail software platform. What ProTools is for production we aim to be for online marketing and retail: a software platform which makes your job easier and takes the art of online marketing and retail to a new and inspired generation of marketers. Topspin is the only platform which combines the bundling and sale of digital audio and video, physical products fulfilled in a variety of ways, tickets (including self-check-in via an iPhone ticket scanning app), VIP access/fan clubs, fan management, direct marketing, and social marketing, all backed by analytics to help you make smart decisions about your business.

We’ve been helping artists market and sell for three years and we’ve worked with more than four thousand artists in our private beta. We work with many marquee artists, from Eminem and Linkin Park to Arcade Fire and Yeasayer to Paul McCartney and George Harrison. The notion that Topspin only works with marquee artists, though, isn’t accurate. Of our four thousand artists the vast majority are artists with small fan-bases who are not household names. We’ve been tooling our platform to be useful to artists of all sizes from the beginning. Our goal is to be the professional toolset any artist can use. We endeavor to be Final Cut Pro not iMovie, ProTools not Garage Band, a professional tool for any artist, marketer, label, or distributor who take their craft seriously.

As such we’re excited to announce a new set of features is on its way, to be unveiled next month at SXSW, and all features will be open to everyone. We’ll have a web site which does a much better job explaining what the software does plus a new look and feel for the Topspin application. This offering will be self-serve and start at $9.99/month plus a 10% service fee on tickets and a 15% commission on other products. At SXSW we’ll have a space upstairs at The Belmont (same as last year) and we invite you to stop by, visit us, get a tour of the features, meet the team, and hear success stories and case studies from many current Topspin users. More news on that over the next couple of weeks.

I have what I hope is good news: you are NOT in the $0.99 download business. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you should never sell a $0.99 download from your web site. A fan connection is worth far more than $0.99, and I’d much rather convert a large number of people into lasting and meaningful relationships than make a few dollars on a digital download. The reason is, the average revenue per transaction across everything Topspin has sold to-date is $26. When you look at optimized campaigns, what you might call the typical Topspin campaign, you find yourself in the $50-60 range. Add tickets to the campaign and you start to approach $90. When it comes to direct-to-fan sales from my web site, I would much rather build fan connections and push higher value transactions than drive people to a $0.99 download.

But that isn’t as simple as plopping some buy buttons on your page. I wouldn’t recommend you start by selling expensive packages on your web site, Facebook page, or Mobile Roadie app. In fact, I would recommend you start by selling NOTHING. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself…

The above diagram came to me via Tim Read and Kris Wehner as a way to describe how we think about the products we’re building. Not coincidentally, it describes the way we think about a marketing campaign, too. The people at the top of the image represent the vast number of people who have never heard your music and never heard of you. Artists of every size have exactly the same issue and feeling: “If more people would just hear this music, they would fall in love with it.” As Tim O’Reilly famously said, “An artist’s enemy is obscurity, not piracy.” Your initial goal is to build awareness, get people to know you exist and to feel an affinity toward your art. If you are successful at building awareness you turn that awareness into fan connections and build a strong relationship with those fans by communicating with them. Once you’ve established a relationship and trust (and not until then) you can turn some number of those fans into customers.

Step one is to take those people who have never heard of you and make them interested. Turn them from non-knowers into carers. That starts with your art, none of what’s written in this post matters if you don’t make music people love. Assuming you do, though, the first step to is to take it to them, everywhere. The good news is we aren’t reliant on FM radio and MTV to bless us to get our music distributed. The bad news is posting your music on iTunes, YouTube, Soundcloud, Facebook, Official.fm, Rapidshare, Angelfire, and MySpace doesn’t mean anyone is going to see it. You need to get your music to places people trust for their daily or weekly dose of music. It’s not easy to get on heavily trafficked sites like Pitchfork, but thankfully there are hundreds of thousands of places you can lobby for inclusion. Sending incessant emails begging blog authors to post your music tends not to work, though. What works is making great music and playing live locally until people start taking notice and naturally wanting to share their enthusiasm for what you do. You can’t make people share something they don’t like, but you can make it easy for them to share your music with their friends should they be motivated to do so. This is why we make all our widgets shareable and embed-able with simple hooks to Like on Facebook, Tweet on Twitter, etc. So the best thing you can do to build awareness is to a) Make incredible art, b) Share it with anyone who will listen, c) Make sure it’s simple and fluid for people to share their love of what you do with others.

People ask us all the time, “How should I be releasing my album? Should I be releasing 12 singles instead of 1 album? How can I get the fan base to build organically?” There isn’t a single answer to this line of questioning. First and foremost, your marketing plan needs to be an extension of your art, it needs to fit the image and brand of your band. What’s good for Miley Cyrus isn’t going to work the same for Danzig (I hope). But I do believe the above bit of advice, “Do Something Small Weekly and Something Big Monthly”, is universal: to put a simple plan together to make sure you have more fans tomorrow than you have yesterday, get out a calendar and start mapping out the next few months or even the year. Look at the next 4-8 weeks on the calendar and start writing down small things you could do each week to share art with your fan base. Share a work in progress. Make a short video. Write a blog post. Do a QA with fans via Twitter. Look at the next 12 months and start mapping out larger things you can do. Release a single. Release an album. Announce a tour. Premiere a music video. Drop a new line of merch. Release a holiday promotion. Do a collaboration with Lionel Ritchie or an EP tribute to Abe Vigoda. Do not email your fan base every time you do a small thing. Do Tweet, post to Facebook, and blog when you do a small thing. Do all of the above and email your fan base every time you do a large thing.

Yeasayer is a great example of a band who gets this and applies it naturally to great effect. They keep in contact via their Facebook page, Twitter stream, and (less frequently) their blog. Even better, they’ve done many fan-centric “big things” over the course of their last album/tour cycle. In addition to the normal album/tour duties they started the campaign with an exclusive and very cool 12″ + t-shirt offer. When it was time to release the album they pushed an exclusive pre-sale package on their web site featuring digital, physical, and limited edition merchandise. When they booked a New Year’s Eve show with the band Health they collaborated with Health on a very special package of limited edition merchandise only available to folks who purchased their tickets direct from the artists. On Christmas day they released an incredible live album in a pay-what-you-want sort of way. And for Valentine’s Day on Monday they released their new video along with a way to gift a free EP to a friend. Not every campaign is a huge money-maker, but every time they show their fans they care and remain relevant and a part of the conversation. Just take a look at the news search for “Yeasayer” on Pitchfork for evidence and more examples.

If people like your talent and you’re scoring awareness, congrats! It’s time to turn that awareness into connections and build trust with those connections through conversation.

Any way you encourage fans to make a direct connection with you, any way fans say “please, talk to me” is accretive. Email remains an incredibly valuable and cost-effective channel. Mobile connections often have higher conversion rates but sends are costly. Direct connections via Twitter and Facebook are great and important but more passive and don’t have conversion as high as email and mobile connections. Make these connections by offering your fans something of value in return for permission to talk to them. Topspin’s email for media widget is a very simple, effective, and anti-spam, TrustE, COPPA, and EU Safe Harbor-compliant way to accomplish this (and look for a significant step forward with this widget in our SXSW announcement). Check out Seth Godin’s classic book Permission Marketing for permission marketing basics.

If you’re just starting out, you need fans, not dollars. Our advice to artists is to not attempt to sell ANYTHING until you have at least a couple thousand people on your email list. We’ve heard this story too many times: “I don’t know about this direct-to-fan thing, man, I put my music up on my site and I didn’t sell anything!” Mike Masnick had it right, the equation is: “Connect With Fans + Reason To Buy = $$$$”. The aforementioned story too often lacks both fan connections and compelling, valuable product. More on the valuable product in a moment, but for the time being please take this to heart: If you have less than 2,500 people connected to you via email, Facebook, Twitter, and mobile, put “selling things” on the back burner and focus 100% on growing your fan connections.

Just having the connection isn’t good enough, though. Too many artists make the connection then either abuse or neglect it! Remember there are human beings with lives and feelings and desires on the other side of those connections. Treat them with respect. Earn their trust. As a stellar example sign up for Chuck Prophet’s email list, Twitter feed, and Facebook page and watch the way he communicates. He doesn’t sell, he shares. He’s a real person who makes you smile, shares things of interest, and becomes someone you trust. So when he plays a gig or releases an album (or recommends a friend’s record) you listen. You want to be a patron of his art.

Similarly, but in a much different genre/scene, I heard Chamillionaire talking about how he engages with his fans via Twitter. He said if he needs them to do something he doesn’t just jump on Twitter and make a call to action. Instead he starts a conversation. He might talk about basketball. “Who’s better? Kobe or Jordan?” He entertains the debate. Grabs people’s attention. Shows them there’s a real human being on the other side. Then when he asks them to call a radio station or buy his new mix tape they graciously oblige. He’s treated them with respect, they reciprocate.

Be a catalyst for the building of a scene. Strength in numbers can definitely apply. Identify similar bands and work together to grow your fan bases (Headliner.fm is a tool which is building technology around this particular notion). The rising tide really does lift all boats.

You’ve got buzz, you’re no longer obscure, you have a couple thousand fan connections (at least), and you’re building trust by conversing with those fans? Great! Now let’s talk about selling something!

As mentioned above, Mike Masnick had it right when he coined the equation “Connect With Fans + Reason To Buy = $$$” (unfamiliar with this meme? watch Mike’s presentation from 2009’s NARM or read more about it on TechDirt). You are talking to your fans so you probably know what they want but if you’re not sure, ask them! Create something of value for them. It could be as simple as a t-shirt or vinyl or as elaborate as a box set or an in-person experience. But remember not everyone has the same level of fandom or depth of pocketbook. Every day there are people coming to your web site who are just entering the “Awareness” phase and there’s nothing you’re going to do to get them to open their wallet for you. Offer something free, something in the $10 price range, something in the $25 price range, something in the $50 price range, and something in the superfan price range. It turns out the Internet isn’t about “going digital” after all, it’s about consumer choice. Give your fans a valuable product that fits their budget and level of fandom and they will be happy to support you.

Put these incredible offers in front of your fans anywhere they might turn up: on your web site, Facebook page, and in your mobile app (Topspin is partnered with Mobile Roadie for simple and cost-effective mobile app development).

Front-run your release with your compelling direct-to-fan offer. Before your album goes on sale, sell a special package with an early single or EP. Start a pre-sale 6-9 weeks ahead of your album on-sale date and give people a reason to buy from you direct. Metric had one of the best pre-sales I’ve seen yet, selling two tracks only available via the pre-sale plus very special limited edition art. They made it so if you were a real fan you were crazy to buy it any other way. And they still did a “retail exclusive” with iTunes. iTunes is smart and recognizes these are very different products directed at very different audiences.

Of course you still want your music at iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, Spotify, Rd.io, and everywhere music is sold around the globe. Use a great online distributor and make sure your music is everywhere. Your direct-to-fan campaign exists to get the maximum value out of people you have direct connections with, it’s not in place of other retail. You want to be everywhere music consumers are, of course!

When your fans do buy from you, take excellent care of them. Ship their products quickly. Ship in packaging that protects the products from damage. If their poster gets bent, replace it. Quickly. We’ve dealt with a lot of fans over the past three years. We’ve seen great fan experiences and unfortunately seen a few terrible ones. The terrible ones deeply impact your fan relationship. You need to either be prepared to take great care of fans or partner with someone who can.

To wrap up: the first ingredient is music people love. From there you plan a marketing campaign which is an extension of your art and appropriate representation of your brand. The outline is: fight obscurity and create awareness, turn awareness into fan connections, communicate authentically with your connections and build trust, create valuable products and sell for profit. Lather, rinse, repeat. Experiment. Optimize. Share what you learn with others. We’re just at the beginning of this and we’re all learning together.

To help catalyze some creativity and action in the direction of new and innovative direct-to-fan business plans, we’re happy to announce a grant of $5,000 plus help executing the campaign to whomever submits the best plan. The plans will be judged by Rick Rubin, Marc Geiger (William Morris), Richard Jones (Manager, The Pixies), Glenn Peoples (Billboard), Mike King (Berklee Online), and Jennie Smythe (Girlilla Marketing). We’re taking submissions right now on TopspinMedia.com and the deadline for submissions is March 7th. We’ll be announcing the winner at SXSW.

ps – A reader requested the presentation in PDF form. You can download here.

1. Start a blog on Blogger or posterous or HERE
2. If you want to Give away music use Dropbox.com and      http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/.

1. upload MP3s to the “public folder” in your dropbox account
2. paste the code for the yahoo media player in your sidebar or on your blogroll
3. Create a “page” and create links to your “public mp3″ files. Yahoo media player should make them playable.
4. visit feedburner and create a feed. click the publicise tab and turn on email subscriptions. add the link to your page.
5. start blogging
6. start keeping track of press articles about your band. put them on a separate page called press.
7. make the title of your blog, the exact name of your band. Do not abbreviate.

Paid:
1. Hire someone like me to do all that for you.
2. find out statistics about where people are listening from
3. learn how to get more people on your mailing list
4. earn referral links when you sell your CD through amazon
5. see a map of your newsletter readers for touring purposes
6. Enjoy the fact that someone making your website has made other bands websites, and probably has good advice for you.

a few days later we built a website with a newsletter management system, integrated blog, music player for their albums, a location for press info, and concert calendar as well as concert archives.

login and visit your account. scroll down where it says “claimed blogs” and claim by typing in your blog address.

then they send an email with a code you need to put in a blog post. I think this is bogus but for example mine is:

We have just assigned the claim token CR8EJ4VPCDTK to this claim

Then they approve it.

• For PCs running Netscape or Internet Explorer: First place the cursor over the image you want to copy and press and hold down the right mouse button. A small popup menu will appear, giving you the option to save the image to disk. You should save it in the same directory as your Web pages.
• For Macs running Netscape or Internet Explorer: First place the cursor over the image you want to copy and press and hold down the mouse button. A small popup menu will appear, giving you the option to save the image to disk. You should save it in the same directory as your Web pages.
• If you are using a laptop without a “right click” you can usually hold down the CTRL Button and click on the image.

Where can I find “Buy from Amazon.com” graphical buttons?

You can use any of the images below as graphical buttons for add-to-cart links. See How do I copy an image from your Web site to mine? for more information on downloading graphics.

allows you to customize what you want it to look like and simply just paste in the HTML code to your website.
Tweet

See below all i did was paste

<a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”horizontal” data-via=”blairanderson”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script>

1. bank account routing # and account number
   • This is found on bottom of checks. The first number is the routing number, the second is the account.
2. Social Security Number or business tax ID#
   • If people subscribe to your blog and pay amazon, they have to tell the IRS when they pay you!
3. A Screen Shot of your Blog
   • This gives an Idea of what your blog looks like
   • open a new tab or window and press the “print Screen” key.
   • Its usually near F12 and might look like “Prt Scr”
   • Open a program like “paint” or visit http://pixlr.com and go to ” Edit > Paste”
   • Save your screen shot after you like it
4. A Header Image for your blog
5. The Feed Address
   • most blogs have a feed at “www.exampledomain.com/feed/
   • My feed is http://seoromeo.com/feed/ and also using feedburner in which they’ll give you an address like http://feeds.feedburner.com/seoromeo
6. visit http://kindlepublishing.amazon.com and create a NEW account. THIS MUST BE SEPARATE FROM ANY OTHER AMAZON.COM ACCOUNTS YOU ALREADY HAVE!!!
7. Fill in Everything You have gathered
8. publish your blog!

If you have any questions just leave a comment and subscribe to the comments

Create a WordPress Page from the “Add New Page” panel.

1. Title one as “Home” (or another name) that you plan to use as your “static” front page.
2. Add content you would like to see within the content area of the “Home” page.
3. Publish the Page.

Create a Second Page and Title the second one as “Blog” (or you could call it “News”, “Articles”, etc.). This page will be a place-holder for showing the Posts on your site.
1. Do not use a custom Page template for this page!
2. DO NOT add content to the Blog Page. Leave it blank. Any content here will be ignored — only the Title is used.
3. Publish the Page.

Go to Administration > Settings > Reading panel.

1. Set which page will be designated the “front” page. Choose from display your latest blog posts on the “Blog” Page and “static page” for the “Home” Page.
2. Save changes.

Click to See Larger

The Brown Agency badly needed to update from their flash template website made in 2005. Now they have a professional design with contact page and clear path towards collecting customer contact info and more.