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Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close. And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account.

With the rise of the glorious interwebs, customer behavior has changed radically. Historically, gathering information about anything required an enormous amount of time and resources. Talking to sales reps was the ideal way to learn about product features and benefits, learn about the market, and see how everything worked.

As we all know, that’s no longer the case. With Google, Twitter, Facebook, and every other platform we use to connect, we have an unlimited access to just about any topic. This means we’re more informed as consumers than we’ve ever been.

1. 80/20 rule from Noah Kagan Appsumo’s founder, Noah Kagan, notes that one rule of thumb that they follow is to use 80% of their marketing budget for things that are working and 20% on newer marketing initiatives. One more thing: they go all in when they find marketing channels that work. You can watch one of his presentations where he shares his experiences of growing Mint, Facebook, and AppSumo here.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate At Treehouse, we work remotely and as you might imagine. There are some that think there is no replacement to working in person while others support it. For us, we’re half and half – we have an office in Orlando and we also have a team up in Portland. The rest of us are distributed. But hey, it works because we communicate a lot. If you don’t feel like you are running enough A/B tests, speak up about it. If you feel like the team needs more developers, speak up. If you feel like an executive decision is going to cost the company money in the long run, talk. People might not always agree with you but it’s your job to communicate. You’re doing the company a disservice if you aren’t being honest. To get you started, here are some tools we use to communicate: Campfire Skype Google Chat Google Hangout GoToMeeting – we use GoToMeeting for our leadership meetings. It’s very simple to use and the video quality is pretty good.

3. Be a voracious reader Although there’s a lot of crappy content circulating the internet, there’s always going to be someone you can learn from. The key is being able to discern signal from noise. For example, if I’m looking to learn more on conversion rate optimization, there are great blogs such as Unbounce, ConversionXL, KISSmetrics, SEOmoz, and more. Just look at the detailed blog posts that they write: 10 Useful Findings About How People Use Websites – ConversionXL 5 Landing Page Conversion Killers – Unbounce The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – SEOmoz If your goal is to squeeze every penny out of your website, you should be reading conversion rate optimization articles like the ones above. They cost no money to read and stand to help create original ideas that will eventually create more profit for you. This applies to any topic you’re interested in. Using the right tools can go a long way in helping you save time. If you’re on the go and don’t have time to read, you can use Pocket. To help you find relevant topics/articles via Twitter, you can grab curated lists using Listorious. Finally, I like picking off interesting topics from Inbound.org or Hacker News. Key takeaway: don’t read every single blog out there. Find the ones that actually add value and follow them.

Ramit:  I want to emphasize a couple of things you mentioned. One, if you’re charging 5, 10, 20 bucks an hour, it’s very, very difficult to go from that to charging 200, 300 an hour or 10,000 a week.  It’s very difficult to make that transition. If you do it when you come in, that can happen. But going from one level to another is extremely difficult.

Thumbnail sketch: You can get from $20 to $100 by getting serious as a professional, and you get from $100 to $200 by getting really good as a professional (or working in a high-demand speciality), and then somewhere between say $150 and a weekly rate in the tens of thousands you probably repositioned your offering such that it is no longer directly comparable to what you were doing before.

Can you sell Rails at $50k a week?  I'm going to go with "almost certainly yes."  I think there are probably people who do that, and if you listened to them pitch clients, they would speak a language that holds very little in common with what you hear from a $100 an hour Rails developer.  Want to speak that language?  Keep reading for some thoughts.  (It will also help to get pretty darn good at Rails... though I think most people in my audience probably overestimate how skilled you have to be to move up that ladder.)]

Marketing is about segmentation and targeting there is nothing more to it. Segmentation is recognizing that different people buy different products for different reasons and  finding those reasons, occasions, usage scenarios and hence what the customer is willing to pay for.

Targeting is delivering versions that meets those reasons and customer’s willingness to pay. I started a new series of articles on what I called “Fidelity Trap“.

The spacing effect is "one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning,"

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn — words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details — don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, what really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.

"The people who criticize memorization — how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every word they read?"

Create case studies If you really want to show the value in what you offer, you have to create case studies. The simple ones won’t cut it, you have to give detailed ones… ideally with the exact things you provided and the results. To legitimize the case studies, make sure you put in testimonials from customers. This can be done in the form of video or text and if you happen to go the text route, make sure you include: Their full name Company name Their picture Title at the company If you want to see an example of a good case study, check this one out from Conversion Rate Experts.

Offer a free trial One of the easiest ways to handle price objections is to offer a free trial. Remember, just because you are offering a free trial doesn’t mean you can’t take a credit card up front. With Crazy Egg, one of our biggest objections from people is that our prices are too high. We created a “free trial” offering in which people had to put in their credit card up front. That offer converted at 59% higher than our 30 day money back guarantee offer. Keep in mind that you will get a lot of people who will cancel your service before their free trial is up, so when you a/b test this you have to also include cancelations into your calculations.

Explain the value The easiest way to demand a high price point is to explain how much money you are going to either make a company, or how much money you will save them. If you can explain this in an easy to understand fashion and provide case studies to back it up, it shouldn’t be hard to demand a premium price. A great way to do this is through sales copy. And don’t worry, your copy doesn’t have to be sleazy. I do this with Crazy Egg, NeilPatel.com and I also used to do it for my Quick Sprout Traffic System. You could even spice up your sales copy by including a video incase people don’t want to read your copy.

To ensure that you get results, you might want to give your clients that nudge at specific times, such as when:you’ve solved their problemthey’ve achieved success through your offeringthey express that they’re happy with your workthey thank you profuselyyou successfully deliver a product on time

Of course, most of your clients will be busy people who don’t have much time set aside for tasks like this. That’s why it’s your job to make it easier for them. One way to do this is to provide them with a few sample questions in your testimonial request email. Here are a few that you might want to put to use:What prompted you to seek [your/your company’s] services? What situation or problem did you need to solve?Why did you specifically select [you/your company] for this project?What made you believe that [you/your company] was the best for achieving your desired result?How did you benefit from working with [you/your company]?What are the two most significant improvements that have resulted from your work with [you/your company]?What exactly did [you/your company] do to contribute to the outcome you wanted?What were the results of working with [you/your company]?Describe why you feel that working with [you/your company] was successful.In the future, what type of businesses would most benefit from working with [you/your company]?If a potential client was on the fence about whether to work with [you/your company] or not, what would you say to them?

Letter to a client whom you’ve asked to write a testimonial:Dear [Client],Working with clients like you makes my business a great joy. Thank you for agreeing to provide a testimonial. Your story will help inform our potential clients why it’s good to work with us and how they can benefit.To help you get started, I’ve included a few questions, but please feel free to write whatever you like.[Include two to four questions, using the above list as a guide.]Thank you for your time and kind support. We value your business and look forward to working with you again in the future. Please let me know if there is anything further I can do for you.[Your preferred closing],[Your name]

The question The main question in play here is: How thick should clients be? Let me define my terms: I define the Client as the thing which is used by exactly one user, which interacts directly with that user, and which is probably physically close to that person. I define the Server as the thing which is shared by multiple users, which interacts directly with the Client, and which could be physically located anywhere. I define the Pipe as the connection between the Client and the Server. I define the notion of a Thick client as a relative term. Thicker clients have more app-specific code and are less dependent on the Server. Thinner clients leave more of the app-specific work to be done on the Server. There are two main variables in decisions about the thickness of clients: The quality of the Pipe: This includes bandwidth, latency, availability, reliability, and cost The Client side costs: This includes cost of hardware, software development, deployment, upgrades, and maintenance. And, there are two laws which apply: As the quality of the pipe goes up, the client can get thinner. As the client side costs go down, the client can get thicker.

why does the thickness of Clients vary? Because varying Client thickness creates opportunities to compete in the marketplace. You can differentiate yourself from your competition by making your Client thicker (more expensive) and talking about performance and a better user experience and stuff like that. Or, you can differentiate yourself by making your Client thinner (less expensive) and talking about lower Total Cost of Ownership and easier installation and stuff like that.

This issue is not new Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when we only had mainframes and minicomputers, there was a distinction between smart terminals (thick clients) and dumb terminals (thin clients). In the 1980s, we got workstations (really expensive thick clients, purchased by people who perceived them as cheap compared to the mainframes and minis) and microcomputers (far less expensive thick clients, purchased by people who previously didn't have a computer at all). In the early 1990s, the high cost of workstations gave rise to X terminals, thin client devices which couldn't do much more than display the graphical user interface. My manager bought one of those fancy new 19.2k modems and actually tried doing Motif widget development from home. In the mid 1990s, web browsers appeared. For a very brief time, this technology was regarded only as a way to collaborate on hypertext documents. This phase of the web lasted for most of an afternoon. Meanwhile, back in Champaign, Illinois, the Unsung Hero and His Eminence were busy building a web browser which had more "stuff" in it. What kind of stuff? The sort of stuff that made web browsers into a platform for delivery of apps. And the technologies of the web have been moving primarily in that direction ever since.

The question The main question in play here is: How thick should clients be? Let me define my terms: I define the Client as the thing which is used by exactly one user, which interacts directly with that user, and which is probably physically close to that person. I define the Server as the thing which is shared by multiple users, which interacts directly with the Client, and which could be physically located anywhere. I define the Pipe as the connection between the Client and the Server. I define the notion of a Thick client as a relative term. Thicker clients have more app-specific code and are less dependent on the Server. Thinner clients leave more of the app-specific work to be done on the Server. There are two main variables in decisions about the thickness of clients: The quality of the Pipe: This includes bandwidth, latency, availability, reliability, and cost The Client side costs: This includes cost of hardware, software development, deployment, upgrades, and maintenance. And, there are two laws which apply: As the quality of the pipe goes up, the client can get thinner. As the client side costs go down, the client can get thicker.

This issue is not new Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when we only had mainframes and minicomputers, there was a distinction between smart terminals (thick clients) and dumb terminals (thin clients). In the 1980s, we got workstations (really expensive thick clients, purchased by people who perceived them as cheap compared to the mainframes and minis) and microcomputers (far less expensive thick clients, purchased by people who previously didn't have a computer at all). In the early 1990s, the high cost of workstations gave rise to X terminals, thin client devices which couldn't do much more than display the graphical user interface. My manager bought one of those fancy new 19.2k modems and actually tried doing Motif widget development from home. In the mid 1990s, web browsers appeared. For a very brief time, this technology was regarded only as a way to collaborate on hypertext documents. This phase of the web lasted for most of an afternoon. Meanwhile, back in Champaign, Illinois, the Unsung Hero and His Eminence were busy building a web browser which had more "stuff" in it. What kind of stuff? The sort of stuff that made web browsers into a platform for delivery of apps. And the technologies of the web have been moving primarily in that direction ever since. Java applets (developed a fatal disease called Swing) ActiveX (declared dead seven years after it went missing) Flash (murdered by Steve Jobs) Silverlight (murdered by HTML5) In the late 1990s, people (Oracle, I think?) tried to sell something called a Network Computer. It was a little PC with a video card, some RAM, an ethernet card, a web browser, and no hard disk. Thin.

HTML5 arrived. Actually, the spec is still a long way from being finalized, but nobody knows that. People needed a name, so they started saying "HTML5" before it was fully cooked. Common usage of the term "HTML5" is actually fairly accurate, at least compared to the way telecom companies use the term "4G". And now, this war has moved to the battlefield of mobile. Smartphones and tablets.