Starting out, we relied on typical business growth strategy. We advertised. We supported local causes / charities. We fed off referrals and general word of mouth sentiment. We focused on markets.
Don’t let the past tense fool you, we still do all of this and probably will for a while. But if we were starting out today, our strategy would be different. The standard rules of business no longer apply to web companies.
That might seem like an obvious statement. But if I would have used “development firms” rather than “web companies,” it might have a different effect. Typically, the success of any service business is tied to local market conditions.
Today, the idea of markets is gone. Local conditions have very little unimagined impact on the health of a web [service] business. Even considering that many of our most successful client relationships have been developed by focusing on local markets, it’s safe to say that the number of outside leads coming in each day would be sufficient to keep us busy.
Let me get a quick disclaimer out of the way before I take this further. Pulp is 10 years old, has 11 employees and maintains relationships with approximately 150 ‘immediate’ vicinity clients. Our current array rewards and requires a certain amount of local market focus. But this is a post of hypothetics. Assuming we were just out the gates, none of that perspective would apply.
The new way
Think of what it takes to saturate a market with enough brand awareness to keep your business busy (without outbound sales efforts.) For us, it took about five years of focus on two markets. The effort has paid off, but we’ve seen gains from other efforts as well — efforts that didn’t take five years.
Today, we get about a thousand site visits a day from design galleries, blogs or bookmarks. My gut instinct says that traffic accounts for about a third to half of our daily quote requests coming from our site (more if you look just at the four weeks since our redesign.) None of this is market based (in the traditional sense.) It’s traffic that grows totally independent of offline effort. This has grown dramatically over the last 18 months. So has search traffic. And direct-type traffic. And site referrals.
With all of these market-agnostic leads, it’s easy to see how a web company could form, grow and succeed totally independent of any local focus at all. Two years ago, I would have said that a degree of market focus was necessary to grow any service business larger than a single-person freelance gig. I get a different vibe today.
It’s time to rewrite the b school textbooks.
4 Responses to “Markets”
Being the same market as Aaron, I’ll corroborate his account. I’d estimate that less than half our business comes from the local market, and our larger relationships in particular are national and international.
Covering the four directions from Sioux Falls, we’ve gone from Santa Monica to London, and from Toronto to Dallas. San Francisco alone will likely be 20% of our 2007 revenue.
We find that we’re priced very favorably to outfits on the coasts. My partner likes to call Sioux Falls “Mumbai on the Prairie.” It’s fitting.
I too in in the same local market as Deane and Aaron, but I could care less about local clients…local means meetings rather than efficient calls and emails, face-to-face drop-ins, hard timelines based on “office hours”, nagging stuff that creates inefficiency.
Hey, but if you guys start to care less about local, where can I send the business? You guys still care :) Heck, you own the market for best-of-breed.
My clients, I do not even have a clue where 60% are based. Different game too though.
No wonder I don’t see you guys at chamber mixers. (Okay, maybe it’s because I don’t go.)
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