If you can only read one post with big, red, bold letters today, may that post be
this rant by Dave McClure
[1] on how startups need more design and marketing studs instead of only focusing on hardcore engineering skills. Let I not distract you longer - you need to read this if you have a startup, want to have a startup, invest in startups, or just generally care for the startup business. If you are still unconvinced, here’s one of Dave’s main points:>
Hire people smarter than you. Find a decent designer who understands human psychology & sexuality, game mechanics, SEO, and conversion analytics. Find someone in marketing who understands how to send an email, write a blog post, use search engines, social platforms, social media, and has done landing page A/B tests. Find investors who have a clue about the products and services they invest in, who use the products, and maybe even write/speak about them frequently. Find people as advisors, mentors, and investors, who have the same operational experience you’d hope to hire into your startup. If we all take this to heart, we might just build a few more useful consumer internet products.
Seriously, you need to read this post.
[1]: Dave was was curiously one of the very few people we had at the first couple of Techcrunch Meetups at Mike’s place. I remember him bringing a couple of boxes of SimplyHired tshirts (I still rock one of them today). Dave was passionate about his business then, and he’s passionate about his business today - which is something I’m sure you can read through his posts.