BONUS: Entrepreneur′s Guide to Startup Marketing

If you are thinking about a new startup, already have one, or are just planning on starting a new project, there are a number of tips that we'd suggest. The following list has been pulled together from years of experience at starting new things. Although the list is not comprehensive, it captures some of our best thinking in terms of actionable items.

Startup Marketing Checklist

If we were starting a new company or project today, these are the things we'd do in the first couple of weeks.

Pick a name that will work long-term. Needs to be simple, memorable, and unambiguous. The “.com” domain should be available without playing tricks with the name (like dropping vowels or adding dashes). Also, just because there's no website on a domain doesn't mean it's available. Available means something you can register immediately, or that has a price attached to it that you're willing to pay. Don't wander down the rabbit hole of finding the perfect name if you have no indication that it's for sale. This will waste a bunch of your time. See the next section for more tips on picking a name.

Put up a simple website. Doesn't have to be fancy. The goal is to put enough content on the site to start the Google clock. Don't worry about the site not saying much (nobody's going to be looking at it anyway). Make sure to use a decent content management system (CMS). If changing your web page involves uploading files via FTP—or a call to a friend or family member —you're doing it wrong. Even if you have technical skills, just because you can handcraft HTML doesn't mean you should for your new website. The structure and features of a CMS are going to be very important someday. Trust me.

Get some links to your website. If you have a personal website, link to it from there. If you have investors, they're likely more than happy to link to your new website (if they aren't already). The goal is to get the Google crawler to start indexing your site and start building some authority and trust for your website domain. To check whether your site is being indexed by Google, do a search such as site:yoursite.com (not perfect, but good enough).
Set up a Twitter account. The name of the account should match your company/domain name. Link to your Twitter account from your main site and to your main site from your Twitter account. (Note: If you have a natural skepticism of the value of Twitter, you are welcome to this skepticism. But go ahead and grab your Twitter account name anyway. You can resume your skepticism after you do that.)
Set up an e-mail subscription. Although we're big fans of RSS, and we wish the rest of the world were too, not everyone is there yet. Allow your website visitors to be notified of updates by e-mail.
Get a nice logo. Don't obsess over it, and don't spend thousands of dollars on it. You can run a quick contest on 99designs or CrowdSpring, or find a freelance designer on the web or through your network. Make sure you get the vector file (Illustrator or EPS file) as part of the final deliverable. Logos are pretty important online, because you'll be using a variation of it for many of your online profiles. Quick tips on logos: Simple is better, because simple is more flexible. You're going to use the logo in a variety of ways. In print, online, and maybe even on marketing giveaways.
Set up a simple Facebook business page. This is also known as a “fan” page. You're not going to get many fans in the early days. That's OK. Just get something out there. Add a simple description of your business and link back to your main website.
Create a simple Facebook URL. Facebook now allows specifying a custom URL for your fan page. So, you can create something like http://facebook.com/hubspot (instead of the ugly URL Facebook gives you by default). Take advantage of this feature. For bonus points, set up a sub-domain and redirect it to your Facebook page. For example, here's what we did: facebook.hubspot.com. Setting up this sub-domain is free and usually pretty easy (it's done through the registrar for your domain).
Kick off a blog. You can use one of the free hosting tools (like WordPress.com), but don't use their domain name. Put your blog on blog.yourcompany.com, or if you have the technical proficiency, make it yourcompany.com/blog. Do NOT make it yourcompany.wordpress.com because you want to control all the SEO authority for your blog and channel it towards your main website. Chances are, WordPress.com doesn't need your help with their SEO.
Write a blog article. Talk about what you're passionate about. What makes your business different? Why did you start it? Describe your favorite customers. Just make yourself write. If writing doesn't come easily to you, it might be difficult at first—but it gets easier.
Set up Google Alerts. You want to create alerts for at least the following: your company name, link:yourdomain.com, and “industry term.” Try to find a good balance for your industry term so you don't get flooded with alerts that you simply will start ignoring. This may take some iteration and refining. (Oh, and use the “As It Happens” option in Google Alerts so you're not waiting around for new alerts to show up.)
Set up SiteAlerts. This is a new tool that Dharmesh built (because he wanted it for himself). It's like Google Alerts, but tracks many more things than just mentions on the Internet. It's a great way to track and learn from your competitors too (http://SiteAlerts.com).
Find your closest three competitors. Pretend someone is paying you $10,000 for locating each competitor. Really try hard. Barely managed to find three? Take a lot of effort? Great. Now find three more. Of these six, pick the two that you think have the most marketing savvy. They should have a website Grade > 90, a blog with some readers, a website that you can envision people using, a Twitter account that they actually post to, and so on. These are the competitors you're going to start tracking and learning from. Add their names and websites to your Google Alerts and SiteAlerts.
Update your LinkedIn profile. You do have a LinkedIn profile, right? Mention your new startup website, and add a link to your startup to one of the three slots for this purpose. Make sure you specify the anchor text. Don't go with the default of “My Website.” The anchor text should be your startup's name and maybe a couple of words describing what it does.
Find relevant Twitter users. Use the Twitter search feature to find high-impact Twitter users in your industry. Start following them. You want to start forging relationships and building your Twitter network. Resist the temptation to mass-follow a bunch of random people or play other games just to get your follower count up. That's not going to matter. Get some high-quality relationships going.
Create a StumbleUpon account. Specify your areas of interest (part of the registration). Spend 10 minutes a day (no more!) stumbling and voting things up/down. Start befriending those who are submitting sites that are relevant and interesting for your startup. Don't submit your own stuff—just start contributing.
Find the bloggers who are writing about your topic area. Subscribe to their feeds, and read their stuff regularly. Leave valuable comments and participate in the conversation. (Do not spam them or write “fluff” comments. If you don't have something useful to add to the conversation, don't comment.)
Start building some business contacts on Facebook. Organize your users into groups—one for your business and another for friends/family. This will come in handy later. Don't spam people and ask them to visit your website. At this point, your website is still probably not worth visiting.
Grade your website on Website Grader. Fix the basic errors it finds. You should be able to get a 50+ just by doing the simple things it suggests. Your goal within the first six months is to get to 80+.
Install web analytics software. You need to start tracking your website traffic. Where is it coming from? Where is it going? What keywords are pulling in qualified leads? The most popular option here is Google Analytics (which is free).
Engage your blog commenters. When you start seeing blog comments (it will take time, but you will), make sure to engage them. Leave a comment yourself to continue the conversation, or answer a question that someone had. This demonstrates that you care about the conversation.
Promote your promoters. When someone links to you or writes about you on his or her blog, help get him or her more traffic. Tweet about it. Stumble it. Digg it. Helping others helps you. Further, other people notice this behavior and are more likely to link to you and write about you because they know you're not the type to hoard Internet mojo.
Grab your company name on YouTube. Just like grabbing a domain name and a Twitter account, a YouTube username allows you to post videos and strengthen your brand (e.g., http://youtube.com/hubspot).
Create and post a video or screencast. A screencast is a simple recording of your computer screen and audio. Record a simple and short “how-to” for something related to your industry. Demonstrate how to do something simple (just because it's simple to you, doesn't mean everyone knows how to do it). Post this video to the YouTube account for your business. Write a blog article with some explanatory material, and embed this video in the article.
Make a list of all the top people in your industry. Convert this into a blog post. Example: “17 Real Estate Rockstars I'd Love to Have Coffee With.” Just list the people and why you think they're great. Link to their websites or online profiles (this is good, because it helps those that read your article and it increases the chances that the people you mention will notice your article and visit).
Subscribe to your personal LinkedIn RSS feed. It's helpful to keep up with your network of connections and do a quick scan of what's going on with them (who they connect to, which groups they join, etc.). The best way to do this is to subscribe to your personal RSS feed. To do this, click on the orange RSS icon in the “Network Updates” section of your home page on LinkedIn.

18 Simple Tips for Naming a New Company

Naming a company is hard. Very hard. Even harder than naming a child, because not only do you have to come up with something that “fits,” you have to be relatively original.

On the one hand, the pragmatic entrepreneur thinks: “I shouldn't be wasting time on this—for every successful company with a great name, there's one with a crappy name that did just fine. It doesn't seem like a name has much influence on the outcome at all. I'm going to get back to building the business.” I sort of agree with this. You shouldn't obsess about your name. But, you also shouldn't dismiss it as unimportant. Part of the game in growing a company is to try and remove unnecessary friction to your growth. Sure, you could build a spectacularly successful company despite having a lousy name—but why not stack the odds in your favor?

One more reason why spending calories on picking a great name is important: It's a one-time cost to get a great name—but the benefit is forever. Conversely, if you short-change this and dismiss it completely, you're going to incur what I'd call “branding debt.” Not bad at first, and maybe not a big deal for you ever, but every year, as you grow, you'll have this small voice nagging inside your head saying “Should I change the name of the company?” It's going to be annoying. And the longer you wait, the more expensive the decision is, and the less likely you are to do it. Save yourself some of that future pain, and invest early in picking a decent name. You may still get it wrong, but at least you'll know you tried.

So, here are some simple tips and suggestions for naming a new company. Not all of these are weighted equally. And, remember that these are suggestions, not laws.

Make sure it's legal! This should be obvious, but it's an important step that too many entrepreneurs skip. Before falling in love with a name, make sure that someone else doesn't already have claim to it by way of a trademark. In the United States, you should take a quick peek at http://uspto.gov. The good news is that if you satisfy some of the other conditions mentioned (domain name, Twitter handle, Facebook name), odds are relatively low that someone's already using the name.
Hint at what you do. You have two paths to go when picking a startup name. You can pick a name that is “synthetic” and made-up (example: Wufoo or Quora) or you can use something that is somewhat descriptive of what you do (example: Backupify or Dropbox). I lean a bit towards the descriptive side of the spectrum—but there are tradeoffs. A lot depends on what you're building. Synthetic names are often great in the long, long-term (easily trademarkable, and you can truly “own” them and infuse them with meaning)—but most of the time, I'm more worried about surviving in the short-term. So, I like simple names that convey a bit of what the company actually does or stands for.
Make it easy to remember. How do you know whether a startup name is easy to remember? You don't know. So, test it. Talk to people. Describe the company. At the end of a 2- to 10-minute conversation, casually ask them if they remember what the name of the company is. If it didn't “register” it's not a failure on their part (and make sure to tell them that), but a failure on your part for not having something that's memorable enough.
Make it unambiguous when spoken. A quick way to test this is to ask friends and family what they think of the name over the phone—and ask them to spell it back to you. If a decent percentage of them get it wrong—or are uncertain, you've got a problem.
Make it unambiguous in Google. Many of the tricks of the trade you'll use to monitor conversations that mention your company on the web will involve doing some sort of search. If your name is something like “Pumpkin,” you're going to have a harder time distinguishing when people are talking about the generic term, or when they're talking about your company.
Start early in the alphabet. In the pre-Google world, this was done so that you'd show up earlier in lists of things that are often sorted alphabetically (like when you win an award or your name is in the phonebook). In the post-Google world, a similar rationale applies, but what's more important is the position of links to your website when it shows up in a list of things (like a directory). If possible, you want to be in the first page of a multipage article that mentions a bunch of companies. The first page of a multipage directory usually passes more SEO authority to your website than subsequent pages.
The “.com” has to be “gettable.” By “gettable,” I mean that it is either not registered yet, or it is available for purchase at a price you're willing to pay. Don't play tricks with the domain name either, like including hyphens. Also, stay away from clever domain names like del.icio.us. The reason is simple: It's not natural for people to type domains that way. (Note: Even del.icio.us eventually switched to the much easier domain, delicious.com.)
The Twitter handle has to be available. No tricks with numbers and underscores and stuff. You want the most natural, obvious twitter handle that matches your company name. This is not quite as hard as .com domain names—but it's getting harder every day.
The Facebook page should be available. To test this, try visiting http://facebook.com/yourname and see if there's something there. Or, do a search on Facebook and see what you find.
Keep it short. Always good advice, but particularly true in the age of Twitter. The more characters in your company name, the more characters in the tweets that people write that mention your company name. The more characters your company name uses up, the less you can actually say in a tweet. Generally, try to stay 10 characters or under. Also, the number of characters is not the only consideration—it should be short when spoken as well (that is, have fewer syllables). The fewer the syllables, the easier it is for people to say. Great examples of one- and two-syllable names: Dropbox, Mint, FreshBooks, ZenDesk. I'd shy away from anything that is four or more syllables.
Don't leave out vowels or add punctuation. Just because Flickr was successful does not mean it's okay for you to drop vowels from your name. Name your company in whatever way is natural—for humans. And, don't add punctuation (like an exclamation mark) to your name.
Try to get your main keyword into the name. This helps with SEO and signals to potential visitors what they might find on your site.
Start with an uppercase letter. If it's good enough for Google, Amazon, and a thousand other really successful companies, it's good enough for you. Sure, starting with a lowercase letter is cute and might demonstrate some humility, but 99 percent of the people are going to spell it wrong and you're going to spend too many cycles worrying about training them—and you're still going to fail. If you're going to ask the world a favor, save it for the big stuff—not “can you please be sure to spell our company name with a lowercase letter.”
Don't name your company after yourself. Yes, I know it's tempting because it's so easy. And, you might even think “hey, customers should know who they're doing business with.” You might even make an argument like “there have been plenty of successful startups that were named after their founders.” Though that might all be true, on average, this is a losing approach. When customers hear something like “Dharmesh Shah Enterprises” (granted, your name is probably not as odd as mine), it doesn't make them immediately think: “Wow, that must be an awfully cool/successful/stable company.” It sounds a bit amateurish right at the get go. The other reason is that if you name the company after yourself, too many people are going to want to talk to you. That's okay when you're the only person in the company to talk to, but it becomes problematic as your company grows and there are other people trying to sell/support/market.
Don't use an acronym. These were all the rage at various points in time—but I'm not a big fan. It's hard to get emotional about a three-letter acronym. It's hard to hug an acronym. As a corollary to this, try not to have a company name with three words in it, because it's long enough that people are going to be tempted to reduce it to an acronym.
Have a story. When someone asks (and they will), “so why did you pick X for your name?”, it's nice to have something relatively interesting to say. Names are a part of your personality, and the absence of a personality is rarely a good thing. For example, when I started my first company (I was 24 and didn't know what branding was), the name I picked violated many of the rules in this list. The company name was “Pyramid Digital Solutions.” But, it had a pretty good back story. I started first with the acronym P.D.S. I wanted to name the company after my dad (whose initials are PDS). He's a tad superstitious and didn't want me to name the company after him (it's a long story). And, wanting to prove him wrong (as children are often inclined to do), I started with the acronym PDS.
Pay attention to character sequences in multiword names. This one's a bit subtle. But, if you have a name that is two words stuck together, be mindful of what character ends the first word, and what starts the second. I'd stay away from names where both of those letters are the same. Example: If your company name is something like BetterReading, it's suboptimal (because better ends with “R” and reading starts with “R.” Normally, that's okay, but when you type it out as a URL, people will often see: betterreading.com—which is not terrible, but does cause the brain to “pause” for a microsecond because it feels a tad unnatural. And, I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the widely popular example of unfortunate character sequences expertsexchange.com. When capitalized properly, this name is just fine (ExpertsExchange), which is what the site owners intended. But, it turns out, this can be confused as “ExpertSexChange” (which is not what was intended). Make sure you think through the combinations properly.
Seek timeless instead of trendy. It seems that every generation of startups has their own “trendy” approach to names. Examples are the dropping-vowels thing (like Flickr), the breaking up of words (like del.icio.us), or the newly fashionable “.ly” and “.io” names. Give your company a timeless name that will still work many years from now.

Insider Tips on Buying the Domain Name You Love

Chances are, as you try to think of a great domain name for your company, you're going to quickly encounter how formidable of a task this is. Every English word, and even combinations of English words are all taken. You could spend hours trying to come up with a name that is not taken yet—and still not come up with anything. So, you consider resorting to tricky things like dropping vowels from the name you want, or misspelling it in some weird way. This is suboptimal.

Though it is indeed difficult to find great domain names that are just available “free and clear,” it is still possible to purchase a domain name with a reasonable budget.

Here are some notes on domain names—how to look for them and how to buy them.

The first step is making a list of domain names that you think would be acceptable. A common mistake people make is trying one domain at a time, getting excited when they see that there's no website on the domain, and then getting disappointed when they can't register it. Then, they move on to the next one, and the next one. This is an inefficient process.

It's important to recognize that just because you visit the domain name and there is no website that does not mean that the domain name is available. Domain names can (and are) registered without any website hosted on them.

To determine whether a domain is registered, you'll need to use a “whois” tool. There are many options out there (most are free). I prefer using http://DomainTools.com, which is reliable and provides information about when the domain was registered, and who the domain is registered to.
The best way I've found to come up with a suitable domain name is to make a list of words that describe the business or are attributes that I might consider appropriate. Then, you can combine these words to see if a particular combination of words is unique enough whereby the domain is available free and clear.
My favorite tool for this is: http://instantdomainsearch.com. It's a quick way to test the availability of a domain (though it's not always completely accurate).
When searching for domain names, you may come across domains that are available for premium purchase. That's usually good news (as long as the price is something within your budget). In this case, the domain is being sold through one of the large domain resellers, and conducting a transaction is relatively straightforward. You negotiate a price, and use an escrow service to channel the funds through a third party. Once the domain is in your possession, the escrow agent releases the funds to the seller.
The toughest situation is when you fall in love with a specific domain but have no idea as to whether the current owner is willing to sell it, and for what price. Here are the quick steps I would take in this case:
1. Determine who owns the domain using http://DomainTools.com
2. Make contact (via e-mail) with the domain owner. This is an important e-mail. Remember the goal of this initial e-mail is to get a response. If you make the rookie move of saying “I'm interested in your domain name, would you like to sell it…” there's a decent chance that you will hear no response from the seller. If you want to maximize your chances for a response, you need to do a few things: (1) Make sure that you make a reasonable offer for the domain and put that offer in the e-mail. (2) Make clear that should you come to an agreeable price, you will immediately place the funds into escrow, pending transfer of the domain. (3) Let the seller know that you are considering several possible domain names—and you'll be making a decision quickly—but his or her domain fits the project the best, so it is your preference.