Josh Colter

Most people who follow our blog either are looking for a developer or are a developer themselves. And quality Magento developers are in high demand right now. So how do you get a top-notch developer to work on your project, Check out more from Palo Alto executive search services.

Seth Godin wrote a blog post today about how to be a great client. Personally, I would jump at the chance to work with a client who follows Seth’s suggestions. In fact, we decided to work with our clients because they fit several of the characteristics. Here is a copy of the post. I took the liberty of replacing “innovator” with “developer”. My guess is that our Magento developer following will strongly agree with the list.

As a client, your job isn’t to be innovative. Your job is to foster innovation. Big difference.

Fostering innovation is a discipline, a profession in fact. It involves making difficult choices and causing important things to get shipped out the door. Here are a few thoughts to get you started.

1. Before engaging with the [developer], foster discipline among yourself and your team. Be honest about what success looks like and what your resources actually are.
2. If you can’t write down clear ground rules about which rules are firm and which can be broken on the path to a creative solution, how can you expect the [developer] to figure it out?
3. Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.
4. After you write down the ground rules, revise them to eliminate constraints that are only on the list because they’ve always been on the list.
5. Hire the right person. Don’t ask a mason to paint your house. Part of your job is to find someone who is already in the sweet spot you’re looking for, or someone who is eager and able to get there.
6. Demand thrashing early in the process. Force [developers] and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end.
7. Be honest about resources. While false resource constraints may help you once or twice, the people you’re working with demand your respect, which includes telling them the truth.
8. Pay as much as you need to solve the problem, which might be more than you want to. If you pay less than that, you’ll end up wasting all your money. Why would a great [developer] work cheap?
9. Cede all issues of irrelevant personal taste to the [designer]. I don’t care if you hate the curves on the new logo. Just because you write the check doesn’t mean your personal aesthetic sense is relevant.
10. Run interference. While innovation sometimes never arrives, more often it’s there but someone in your office killed it.
11. Raise the bar. Over and over again, raise the bar. Impossible a week ago is not good enough. You want stuff that is impossible today, because as they say at Yoyodyne, the future begins tomorrow.
12. When you find a faux [developer], run. Don’t stick with someone who doesn’t deserve the hard work you’re doing to clear a path.
13. Celebrate the [developer]. Sure, you deserve a ton of credit. But you’ll attract more [developers] and do even better work next time if [developers] understand how much they benefit from working with you.

Exceptional marketing is a formidable barrier to entry. At least that’s what Dharmesh Shan thinks. And given the success of his company, Hubspot, it might be smart to listen to him. Here is one of Mr. Shan’s thoughts on how to execute exceptional marketing:

Create content that kicks butt.

It’s really simple. If you produce things that are useful/interesting to your target customers — you win. You win by drawing people in to your business not because you had the largest marketing budget, but because you created something of value. The kind of stuff that people tweet about, link to in their blogs and and share with their friends. That’s magical. The type of content can be varied. At my startup HubSpot, we’ve tried lots of different things: “normal” blog articles, music videos, parody videos, songs, cartoons — and of course, free marketing tools. For most startups, if you took every dollar you would have spent on advertising to try and beat your prospects over the head in the hopes that they’ll buy from you and instead spent that dollar on actually producing useful content, you’d win. Seriously win. This worked so well for us that almost all of our increase in marketing spend is allocated towards hiring people that can produce content. They make videos, write blogs, create research reports and develop software tools. The beauty of this content is that long after you’ve invested in creating it, it’ll continue to generate traffic and leads. To this day, some of the early articles I wrote for our marketing blog drive consistent cash into our bank account. We don’t have to spend a penny for those leads. I’ll summarize again in four words: Create content. It works.

I’ve been trying to follow this strategy since the inception of Elias Interactive. It’s simple hard. Writing a blog is not difficult. In fact, there is something therapeutic about communicating thoughts, ideas, and observations via a blog. Writing awakens the creative side of me. But blogging after a day of coding, following up with new prospective clients, and balancing the books is hard. I think this is true of most small companies where the founders must wear several hats. And so creating content is usually the first item on the to-do list to be pushed to another day or time.

Why we focus on creating content at Elias

Putting off creating content is not smart because content works – at least it has for Elias. We don’t spend money on marketing because we work hard to keep up with the clients and prospects who are already contacting us to ask for help with Magento. Most of this steady stream of new business comes from reading this blog or twitter or an answer to some question on Magento’s forum. Without this blog we would have to work a lot harder to find new clients and build trust. Content works.

But the benefits of content are not immediate. I have a theory about sales and marketing: results trail effort by 3-6 months. So what you do today to bring in new business will have an effect on your business in about 3-6 months. That’s why consistency is so imperative; and why ignoring content for too long will have a negative effect on business in a few months.

Help Wanted

We are about to roll out a new website platform here at Elias that will give us a solid foundation to better serve Magento users. I need help creating content for this platform: things like blog posts, pictures, tweets, tips, solutions to Magento, examples of excellent online stores, webcasts, or anything else that might add value to the community. If you are interested in working with us on content then write a comment below or drop me a note at josh[at]eliasinteractive.com. I’m interested in how we can help one another.