Hire for intellect not experience
Someone with no experience but intelligence will always perform better than someone with experience. Sure the person without experience will make mistakes but they will be able to learn from those mistakes with a greater resolve.
To give you a little bit of insights into the startup before we begin, there’s four of us on the team. A couple of technical founders in Donald and I, and a couple of business savvy individuals in Eric and Kevin. We have been slugging our Minimal Valuable Product out the last couple of weeks when it came upon us that we need to revamp our corporate site. The dilemma we are facing then becomes: with Donald and I heavily focused on developing our core product, how do we schedule time to developing our corporate to help with marketing/sales pitches.
Dedicate resources to the core product
We could have divided the work load and have one of the developers work on the corporate site but it really wasn’t the best use of time since we need to demo it pretty soon. Since Eric and Kevin are pretty well versed in the land of HTML, we got them going on setting up the pages in html. The other added benefit of this approach is that they can see their changes live on their machines instead of going through a middle layer (developers or a CMS system).
Distribute work load
In every development project, there always seem to be a time where it is development heavy (bulk of the work effort is placed on the development of the product). In this scenario, what better way to utilize the resources that we have and pull them in to do the development work themselves.
Furthermore, copy changes and simple mark-up can be handled by the business team for the time being, allowing the developers to solely concentrate on the product. There might be a time in the future where the developer’s time will be engaged to help out with sales pitches or marketing efforts, and this distribution of workload is reversed.
Simplify the problem at hand
I think all developers at some point in time over engineered and over analyzed a situation. Having limited time and resources puts you into a room that forces you be creative. Instead of spending the time developing/designing the site, we needed to think of what is the least amount of effort for the developers to get the job completed. For example, instead of designing or even finding a designer, we went to themeforest and purchased a theme to use as our base. From that moment, Eric and Kevin are off and running filling the site with content and images. Once they are satisfied with the end product, I just copied those files, fixed a few things and deployed it to our new front end site.
I am sure that the above is not only a representation of website design but other elements of what we are doing. Having everybody seemingly become closer to the development of the product will improve Eric and Kevin ability to land new deals or keep our clients happy!
CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — Mega-marketers Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble have taken major strides toward compensating their agencies based on the value they add to projects rather than the time they spend on them, but surprisingly few of their peers have followed their lead, according to a new survey by the Association of National Advertisers. Value-based fees — which compensate agencies according to an agreed-upon set of metrics for a given project — now account for less than 1% of pay agreements, the survey found. Meanwhile, fee-based models, which supplanted commissions as the dominant means of agency compensation during the 1990s, have soared to an all-time high of 75% this year, up from 63% when the survey was last conducted in 2006.
Source
Media agencies and their relationships with advertisers is very one-sided. Businesses take all the risk and pay all the costs without the slightest pretense that any reward will come of it. The vast majority of ad campaigns do not directly show their value.
Newspapers, Meet Groupon
Here is a success story from San Diego News. The below piece was written by Ryan Chartrand, a fellow Canadian living in California. Great post, its clear that media companies need to start moving quicker to get in the game, with the Group Buying market still in its infancy and the lower cost of entry there is nothing standing in the way.
This is the reason we built DailyRed to help media companies stay in the game.