Casey A. Gollan: Notes + Links

We have so many customers that I can’t always write freely without inadvertently insulting one of them.

Joel Spolsky, in his announcement that he is quitting blogging. (via @caterina)

Spolsky has really interesting opinions on running a company (these are the posts that have always brought me to his blog) and I understand the whole corporate responsibility thing—grow the business!!—but it’s a shame that he’s quitting blogging because, he says:

1. It’s too time consuming (no ROI)
2. He has fished out the blog-reader-as-customer market
3. He can’t please every single one of his customers while voicing his opinions.

He continues:

My hope is that giving up blogging and the rest of it will be the equivalent of making a cross-eyed kid wear an eye patch on his good eye for a while: The weaker eye will grow stronger¹. My company needs to get better at what every other company already knows — how to promote and market products without depending on one single channel. We’ve completely saturated a small slice of the target market, and now we have to go after a much larger group of potential customers.

It just seems kind of sad to see businesses transition from startup to corporation and leave their voice behind.

On the advertising end of the communications spectrum, which Spolsky is hoping to skew towards, is this profile of pants-by-mail company Bonobos from AdAge:

Mr. Dunn says the company spent little on advertising until its second year when it took to Facebook with the slogan, “End Khaki Diaper Butt.” About 20% of Bonobos’ current base was acquired through Facebook. Because of its direct-to-consumer model, Bonobos can be efficient with ad dollars, tracking which sales result from a specific click-through behavior.

With the average Bonobos customer spending $200 on his first visit, Mr. Dunn drew up a cost-per-acquisition model that concluded the company can spend up to $100 per new customer and still have a profitable first transaction.

…

“You’ve got to focus on the product, not the marketing,” Mr. Dunn said. “If word-of-mouth isn’t there, it’s hard to get to those first 10,000 customers.”

Though the advertising clearly works, I’m wary of all this coming from AdAge (a publication about how great advertising is). But $100 per new customer is a pretty enticing number…imagine all the things you could do with that!