Its hard going back into the same river twice, but assuming the general thrust of the question is If you were to take your existing knowledge but no connections/code/etc what would you do?, I think id:

1.  Mid-term plan: Start a SaaS business targeted at any B2B market where I had the trifecta of domain expertise, desire to be in the market, and any idea for transformatively improving a core business process.
2. Short-term plan: Write a book about the problem space for the SaaS business in #1 PRIOR TO LAUNCHING THAT BUSINESS.  For example, if I were biting off im going to once and for all solve email marketing for software companies, Id write about the strategy of doing so prior to making software.

Why?  Its easier to get to market with a book than it is with software.  It is an easier sell, since it takes $50 and a few hours versus a $X00/$Y,000 commitment plus having to change how ones business does things.  It ships in weeks rather than months or years, requires no maintenance, devops, or complicated customer support.  It plants a flag in the Internet which allows you to build links and algorithmically and human-ly perceived authority.  It allows you to numerous ways to quickly start developing permission assets, such as a list of hundreds of people who asked for a free chapter of the book, which you can use to market the software when it is ready.  It also lets you start identifying PEOPLE WHO WILL PAY YOU MONEY and getting them to trust you, such that when you have a SaaS ready to ship, you wont be doing what I did the first time and shipping it to a grand total of 60 non-paying visitors on day one.

So yeah, thats the plan.  What would I target for my first SaaS?  Personally, since I seem to have fallen backwards into marketing for software companies, enjoy it, and am really good at it, if I had the pick of all possible spaces id be pretty silly not to do something which markets for software companies.  I wouldnt recommend *you* do marketing for software companies because I dont think thats what youre great and and excites you, but pick something youre great at that excites you&

& if it is a B2B space and key to the business.  I brought pretty solid execution for years to bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers and probably hit the asymptote of what is possible in that market, and that is about $10k a month.  If id put that much work and savvy into a better market, Id probably have 10X+ the results.  (I recently had a business buddy do everything right with SaaS market selection and he solo-bootstrapped to $X0k MRR in literally 6 weeks.  Not that Im jealous but, well, maybe a little bit?)

The great thing about things which asymptotically approach Create A Business From Scratch in execution difficulty is that your competitors cannot conveniently duplicate them even if they *want* to overuse them.  

Howdy Ed.  Thanks for having me.

It goes strongly against the grain for me, since im an engineer by training and inclination and have always put the majority of my efforts on scalable marketing channels rather than one-on-one work, but if youre doing a standing start and youve got no platform then I think your first priority is figuring out how to make between 1 and 8 hours of your time turn into a sale.

The answer to this question is probably high-touch sales.  If youve got no better option, cold-calling.  ive always treated it as a weird dark art but a) Ive seen it work on myself, b) ive seen it work on my consulting clients (by people other than me), and c) ive seen really talented sales folks make it rain like they were a 5th level cleric with Create Water memorized.  (Sorry  im a geek.  Wait, never mind, not sorry.)

I recently did a podcast interview with Steli Efti, who unlike me actually has both the knack and the experience of doing this really effectively.  Give it a listen: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/07/24/kalzumeus-podcast-episode-8-high-touch-software-sales-with-steli-efti/ (or read the transcript).  One surprising thing I learned was that it is actually MUCH easier to get started than I thought it would be.  I naively assumed youd have to have a bit of a permission platform built up prior to selling.  That helps but is not a pre-requisite.

The thing I would be doing in parallel with cold calling is, you guessed it, building up assets to start marketing with.  Priority list:

1.  Two really fantastic emails with advice about my problem domain, which will be sent the day after and 5 days after someone signs up to my email list.
2. A landing page for the above which stakes a flag on the Internet out for my problem domain.
3. One piece of pillar content about the problem domain, which I will use to plug the above landing page, probably in the last paragraph.
4. One piece of gated pillar content  probably in the form factor of an ebook or special report  which I can swap people for their email on the aforementioned landing page.
5. Fill out email auto responder to 6 to 8 emails over a one month period.
6. Only after reaching this point do I start doing blog posts and one-off emails.  id target reaching this point at within two to three months of starting the business.  (I could get all of the above out in about two weeks if it were my only priority, but im assuming that id also be the guy building the stuff we have to sell, so splitting 25% talking to target prospects, 50% building, 25% building marketing assets strikes me as roughly reasonable.  If anything Im skimping talking but, hey, thats always sort of been my style.)

im a much, much more effective entrepreneur for having a few years in Industry (TM) under my belt.  It gave me some very useful professional seasoning on top of my CS degree, without which id be even less capable of shipping production-worthy code than I am right now.  (One of my regrets in being the only full-time employee of my business is I have nobody to learn from about proper coding practices like I did when I was working, and as a result I think my rate of growth on programming skill is much lower than it would be if I were e.g. working at a Valley startup or one of my consulting clients.)

id suggest that you do a few years in industry, probably as a developer if I had my druthers.  Be the developer willing to work with the marketing and sales teams.  You will amaze and delight them, even early in your career.  Keep an eye open for all the NUMEROUS totally borked things you will see in those departments, because for want of a for loop the war is lost, over and over and over again.  Resolve to do them differently when you run the show.

If you want to do side projects at the same time, thats also a great idea, but youre better off investing in your personal skillset rather than your business at the present moment in time.  Building an Internet business up to  pick a number, $5k monthly?  is not *nearly* as lucrative for your long term as becoming 10X better on Rails programming and marketing than you are presently.  (And believe me, I 10Xed as an engineer after graduation.  At least.  I didnt even graduate knowing *source control*.)

Three years from today, have a heart to heart with yourself on whether working for other people excites you enough to keep doing it or whether you want to take the new-and-improved you and try the business thing.  Either way, best of skill at the adventure.  (Word of advice: choose the one which makes you happy, rather than the one that makes anyone else happy.  Nobody else lives your life.)

I dont know if ill ever release a playbook since I prefer discussing things in depth versus in breadth.  id prefer to explore a particular topic (like, say, email marketing) in a dedicated fashion and go VERY, VERY IN-DEPTH on one particular aspect (like, e.g., my guide to lifecycle emails  lifecycleemails.com) rather than trying to write Patricks Big Book Of Grabbag Marketing Advice and hitting 400 pages without more than scratching the surface anywhere.

As for near-term plans for releasing things: ive been working for almost a year now on a video course about A/B testing for software companies.  If any of you would like to get a free one-month course delivered over email about it, you can do so here: http://training.kalzumeus.com/conversion-optimization-mini-course .  To the extent that I have productized consulting available in the future, thats about the right level of focus in a product.  (Shipping this one has taken much, much longer than I expected.)

With regards to other places to learn about technical marketing, id agree that there are not many great products which teach it, though theres a lot of snake oil produced about online marketing that I try to stay far away from (as both a consumer and producer).  My go-to places were historically the Moz blog and the SEOBook blog/forums, for what it is worth.

Also, worth mentioning: this discipline is new.  A consulting client of mine recently asked what single book id recommend to do marketing at a SaaS company.  Ill tell you what I told them: if you want to read that book youre going to have to write it first, because only a few hundred people in the entire world have experience at it at all, only a few dozen are good, and of those guys all of them are too busy running software companies to write books.

My feelings about Bitcoin remind me of a fractal.  Its a bad idea, and you zoom in at any part of it and discover new bad ideas, and there is in fact infinite resolution on how bad those ideas get.  I have been working on a Why I Dislike Bitcoin For Technical Reasons essay for almost a year and cannot just hit publish because I dont know if ill ever be able to finish it.

Lets talk non-technical reasons.

When will I add support for crypto-currencies?  Well, I sell a variety of products and services at price points between $29.95 and $30,000 a week, almost exclusively to professional Americans, with a small portion of the business being B2C and the larger part being B2B.  I would accept Bitcoin if it were in demand from my customers.  It isnt.   It *never will be* because *taking payment for legal products from the global rich is straightforward.* 

If you, like me, want to sell software, get a Stripe account *and youre done*.  If you cant code sufficiently then use Gumroad or one of the numerous e-commerce systems *and youre done.*  You will, at no point, have to explain to a Kansas schoolteacher (who thinks Internet Explorer is called the blue Googles) what crypto currency is, why she needs to download a new program to pay you, why she needs to give a company shes never heard of which isnt you withdraw access to her bank account to buy Scary Internet Voodoo, or how to process a novel transaction type shes never had to deal with before.  You just get her to put in one of the several visa cards she has in her pocket.

But wait Patrick.  You routinely transfer tens of thousands of dollars from the US to Japan.  Wouldnt Bitcoin make that fast and easy?

No.  Wire transfers are fast and easy  annoyingly expensive, to be true ($50 in fees plus the currency slippage), but J->US takes 45 minutes and US->J takes 48 hours.  Throwing Bitcoin in the mix introduces numerous sources of risk.  The odds-on place to do business for them in Japan  which people told me I should go get a job at (!)  is currently undergoing bankruptcy proceedings after losing about half a *billion* dollars of depositors money.  If one of my $50k transfers had been tied up there, well, thats all she wrote for that, but at least I saved $50 on wire fees?

Asking my clients to acquire Bitcoin and pay me in them, which cuts out Bitcoin exchanges from the value chain, is a poor use of my time.  Large companies, like the ones which happily pay $X0,000 invoices, will not do it.  Full stop.  To the extent that I want to change their minds about processes which are deep in the sinews of their company, it should not be their Accounts Payable department but rather their Marketing department, and after successfully implementing my ideas (which, unlike Bitcoin, will make them a lot of money) I will send in an invoice for a huge amount of money *and predictably receive it*.

But Patrick, isnt Bitcoin a great platform for remittances?  No, its a terrible platform for remittances because 98% of the problem of remittances is what is called in networks the Last Quarter Mile Problem and Bitcoin has no infrastructure for solving it on either end of the remittance and, even if they did, would not find themselves cost-competitive with Western Union.  (The part between the last quarter miles being close-to-free doesnt help.  Western Union can transfer money internally for close-to-free.  The supermajority of their costs is maintaining an office which someone can go to in abuelitas village.  Seriously, check their annual report.)

I could go on but more questions await.  Ask me later!  Ive got a lot more to say!

I recently blogged about Stellar here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/08/05/harry-potter-and-the-cryptocurrency-of-stars/

Short version: cautiously optimistic (parts of it intrigue me quite a bit), but Stellar is minimally years away from being production-ready anywhere.

Congrats, that's very impressive, particularly if it is your first rodeo.

I'll come back to this question in a few minutes.  If you see this before then, don't be shy -- drop a link for us.  I'd like to see what you're doing in terms of building an audience.  Broadly speaking my answer is going to be "start building an audience" and "bootstrap your audience by borrowing the audience of other people", but more in a few minutes.

Thanks!

Some quick nitpicks first:

• Never refer to anything you make as content, because that framing devalues it.
• You say What should I buy?  Depends on your budget.  What a terrible way to convince someone to pay more money.  id say If you just want to dip your toes in game development, the book alone will get you there.  If youre serious about finally launching a game this year and maybe making some money on it, the code samples in the other package will shave weeks off of your time-to-market.  Your game will be better and your players (and pocketbook) will thank you.
• Good H1 and H2.  The first paragraphs of copy need work.  id focus more on the desired state  I want to publish video games!  first and then sell Phaser as a great option for getting there.  Then you have to sell the book as a great way to get started with Phaser.  This is a bit more indirect than Id want but, hey, thats the nature of the product.  (I think youre correct in assuming that most of the market wants to Make Games rather than Learn Phaser.)
• Has anyone actually made a game after reading your book?  If so, feature a screenshot from it and a quote from the author saying how your book helped ship that game.

OK, quick sales page teardown aside  how are you going to market this in an ongoing fashion?  Id first go to places where aspiring game developers hang out  not sure where that would be, but presumably you know  and offer a trade like this: Hey, GameDev Podcast.  I have a lot which I could teach your audience about HTML5 game development, which you can see from my well-received articles like X, Y, and Z.  I think your audience would learn a lot if you had me on your podcast  wed have a really crackling conversation on anything from how to optimize sprites to why HTML5 is a great option for shipping mobile games.  

You can make similar pitches to blogs.  Again, 95% of the pitch is value for them and their audience, 5% is Why am I doing this?  I wrote the book on it  literally  and need to get my name out there.  No sales pitches though.  In lieu of a sales pitch you send people to a pre-prepared landing page Especially For The Listeners Of The Game Dev Podcast where you give them even more awesome stuff for totally free if they give you their email address.  (To see an example of someone doing this for real, see Ramit Sethis interviews on my podcast.  Example: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/09/21/ramit-sethi-and-patrick-mckenzie-on-why-your-customers-would-be-happier-if-you-charged-more/  Note that after talking for quite a while in a fantastically valuable fashion  and theyre some of my most popular episodes  he just drops a one sentence CTA like If you want to hear more about this, I have a specially prepared guide for Kalzumeus listeners at $SPELLS_OUT_A_LINK.")

Thanks for taking the course, Luiz.  It always makes me feel good to hear that something I made improved someones business.

I dont have a functioning crystal ball, but im going to guess in the near term (three to five years) that email remains massively underinvested by most companies (most B2B companies could *today* move $1 million from ads to email and achieve a double-digit growth in sales virtually overnight& and have $900k left over to throw a victory celebration).  There will be increasing competition for attention and inbox space.  Spam filters and automated prioritization of attention (e.g. Gmail tabs) will continue to tighten, squeezing the worst actors and also people who do email but dont do email *well*.  

What I *do not* see happening: people stopping using email.  It is embedded in the lifestyle of knowledge worker employees and cannot be driven out without a shift as tectonic as the Internet (or email) itself were.  Social networking?  The rush to mobile?  etc?  None of these will stop email being the prime communication tool at businesses.

With regards to A/B tests: I have some other questions to get to so Ill keep this brief.

1.  Testing the H1 on the homepage (or primary acquisition pages at top of funnel) is far and away the best ROI on time and yet very few people do it.
2. People *tend* to do hill climbing rather than big bang tests.  im a big fan of hill climbing, but big bang tests have their place in life.  ive got a meaty writeup of Amy Hoys redesign of the Freckle homepage (which increased trial signups by *140%*) available in the aforementioned free one month course on email marketing (sorry for the plug, but its directly responsive to what you wanted to hear about): https://training.kalzumeus.com/conversion-optimization-mini-course  and she has an ungated but less detailed writeup here: http://unicornfree.com/2013/how-i-increased-conversion-2-4x-with-better-copywriting

Howdy John.  im wearing your shirt!  (Explanation for peanut gallery: John gave me a shirt at Business of Software one year.  The front reads Ask me about A/B testing.  The back reads: Talk to me about split testing.  Its my favorite T-shirt.)

I would stay away from tools and products for verifying that a potential audience for a paid product exists.  We want to retreat to that because using e.g. the AdWords Keyword Tool seems more efficient and less scary than talking to people, but it produces *radically worse results*, so we need to put on our Big Boy Entrepreneur pants and talk to people.

Jason Cohen talks extensively about this in the first 10 to 20 minutes or so of his Microconf 2013 talk (which is uniformly fantastic): http://www.microconf.com/videos-2013.html

Have I told you how I de-risked Appointment Reminder?  After being clued into the fact that (at least) massage therapists have a problem with no-shows by watching it drive my Ogaki massage therapist to distraction, I took $400 out of an ATM in Chicago and walked around the Gold Coast / Magnificent Mile (upscale neighborhoods which have lots of businesses with money and fairly few murders of visually non-intimidating software entrepreneurs with $400 in their pockets) for a few hours.  

I went into every hair salon and massage therapist that I saw and asked the lady (invariably a lady) behind the counter if she took walk-ins.  If she did, I told her that id take the 30 minute shoulder massage but, while happy to pay for it, I had a request: in lieu of the massage, Id prefer to talk about the industry for half an hour, because I was interested in getting into it.

I then asked about their scheduling practices  what they took appointments down in, whether they used computers, what percentage of bookings were pre-booked versus walk-ins, whether they did reminder calls, whether they thought they had a no-show problem, etc.  For ones where it made sense, I said As it turns out, I am a software entrepreneur and am building something which could help you.  It doesnt exist yet and I have nothing to sell you, but want to see something cool?  It will take five minutes.

Then I whipped out my iPad and pointed us at this page.  https://www.appointmentreminder.org/a/calendar  Its a faked, minimal interaction for Appointment Reminder, which didnt exist during this process (because I wasnt sure folks would buy it).  All it does is take a phone number and immediately call that number with a custom-but-fake reminder about their upcoming appointment.

That demo knocked socks off to many of the people I showed it to.  When it did, I said It will be ready later this year.  Would you like me to get in touch when it is ready?  About a dozen people gave me their email addresses.  I lost them  whoops  but that wasnt the important part of the exercise.  The important part was confirming that the pain point (lack of consistent reminders leading to no-shows and revenue loss) existed and that my solution to it was something theyd strongly consider adopting.

If I were doing it again today, Id steal a play out of Jasons speech and ask for them to write a check for the first month to reserve their spot.  Ten $50 checks wouldnt make or break the business, but asking for money has a wonderful way of concentrating the mind.  After all, its easy to tell someone Oh Id totally use that! because you want to be nice, but its much harder to say Yep, im totally going to ditch my existing calendar and re-train all my employees to use your totally unproven software.

Post-script: only one lady actually accepted my money.  Everyone else was happy to chat just to have someone listen to their frustrations about running a business.

Yes, a mockup or other low-fidelity prototype is a decent way to make sure you're on the same page, so to speak, though you have to steer the conversation to be about the problem rather than about the mockup.

>> Which do you think is the better strategy when we're trying to elicit the feedback of busy people? 

I don't know.  They're not competitive with each other -- doing one doesn't mean you can't do the other.  Try both!

One of the things I like about AMAs is folks ask questions and they get answered honestly.  Heres the honest answer, even though it isnt flattering.

im not marketing Appointment Reminder in any sustained fashion.  If another software entrepreneur had the same business and asked me to candidly evaluate their efforts, Id rank them as C-.  Since im me and marketing software is theoretically something im really good at, Ill give myself a solid F.

The overwhelming majority of signups for Appointment Reminder come in from organic search traffic for [appointment reminder] or a close variant thereof.  With regards to [appointment reminder] specifically, im winning because I chose an Exact Match Domain for the product.  (Which I paid $8.95 for from GoDaddy, because the .com  I have the .org  was quoted to me at $30,000 and, sorry, there isnt $29,991.95 of difference in their values for a bootstrapped company which doesnt particularly rely on brandability anyhow.)

The only thing I do right with regards to marketing AR is that it has a fairly decent sequence of lifecycle emails.  It didnt even ship with that for the first two years  I only got them out the door when I was doing a product on lifecycle emails and felt guilty that I wasnt taking advice id be charging people for.

Why such slackadaisical efforts?  Well, since shipping AR ive had a few things go on  from weddings to hospitalizations to really fun consulting gigs to other things  but I certainly havent been busy every day.  The main reason is that I ignored a key bit of advice from Peldi at Balsamiq: Is optimizing the scheduling for dentist offices what gets you up in the morning?  No?  DOnT DO IT, PATRICK.  Peldi was so, so right.  Id have a much easier time if I actually enjoyed the problem space at all.

I have reasons why I didnt ship a software marketing software that Id do marketing for, which are slightly outside the scope of this reply, but ask if you want me to elaborate.

(Pre-empting a followup question: So how is AR doing?  It makes good money because its a good business idea and even with 95% of my hands tied behind my back im not terrible at what I do.  That said, it would be at least one, and possibly more, orders of magnitude more successful if it were something I enjoyed as much as, say, the product a typical consulting client of mine makes.)

Filling these holes has basically turned into my entire career.  Software companies, in general, do an *atrocious* job of marketing themselves.  To the extent that they have marketing departments, their marketers have many, many, many ways where their life would be better if they just applied a few hundred lines of code.

If I could make *one* sale at my consulting clients, it wouldnt be Write me a big check!, it would be Get one intermediate engineer who is willing to learn this marketing thing, assign them full-time to the Marketing team, and tell them that they have carte-freaking-blanche to ship any software which makes the company more successful.

Heres an easy example: one of the smartest SEOs I knew was once showing me his project for a morning.  He had a keyword list from Google Analytics and a keyword list from his AdWords account, and he was matching up the keywords to find which were in List A but not in List B, for the purpose of evaluating them for including in AdWords.

By hand.  In Excel.  This is a guy whose time is worth, conservatively, $100k per week, and that was eating up a day of his week several times a year.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: people who don't read binary, and people who are sitting in slackjawed amazement right now.

Here, let me code you the solution to this IN NOTEPAD:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

file1, file2 = ARGV[1..2]

lines1 = File.readlines(file1) rescue die usage: compare_me.rb file1 file2

lines2 = File.readlines(file2) rescue die usage: compare_me.rb file1 file2

in_file_2 = lines2.inject({}) {|acc, line| acc[line] = true; acc}

lines1.sort.uniq.map {|line| puts line unless in_file_2[line]}

There, I just added tens of thousands of dollars of value to that business in, hmm, a minute?  

Is this the most effed-up thing I have ever seen a marketer waste time doing?  NOPE.  Is this the highest-leverage per line of code ive ever gotten?  NOPE.

For more examples of things you can do, see, well, my entire body of work, or ask a question about any marketing topic and I'll name three things you can build to do it better.  Learn to code, even if you don't want to become a developer.  It will open your eyes to a hidden world of opportunities like that.

The best thing on the Internet about A/B testing is http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/ .  I didn't have it available when I was learning, sadly.

I hope that my forthcoming course will be as useful as that.  One major reason that I chose that course to launch is that, despite being The A/B Testing Guy, I have never really found a good, comprehensive overview to actually producing business results out of it.  It will be on your local Internets when it launches or you can sign up for an email announcement at the link I've already dropped twice in this thread.  (And the engineer in me is feeling very guilty about that, because it might read as shilling, and I'm here for your benefit rather than mine but, hey, the business owner in me says "Well, the existence of unanswered questions about A/B testing IS WHY THAT PRODUCT NEEDS TO EXIST.")

This is a broad question.  I lived for ten years in Ogaki, a small town in central Japan.  Ogaki was the first place Ive ever felt at home  Chicago where I grew up had family and friends and St. Louis had a great university, but as places they felt like places I was passing through.

I dont know if I can describe why Ogaki is beautiful in words.  Japans most famous poet ended up there at the end of his cross-country trek and he didnt do it justice, either, so Im probably screwed.  Briefly: its the kind of place where little kids stop you on the street and ask you what its like in America.  Going out for coffee at 8:50 AM takes you past the little old lady who has cut your hair for ten years greeting the bank president as the town comes alive with the quiet sounds of commerce.  I got married in the Catholic church there  after having found it by going to the only church I could find and asking the minister Excuse me, the Nagoya archdiocese believes there isnt a church in this town but ive heard differently.  Where do you keep your Catholics?, upon which the minister walked a mile with me to made sure I found it on time (on a Sunday morning no less), because thats how Ogakians roll.  Ten people from church came to my wedding because they had nothing better to do that day and thought my wife and I could use some people in the pews who knew the songs.  Theres a dish named after me at the local diner, because it was the thing I ordered as their first customer and then weekly for eight years.  (Chorkys Burger ala Patrick: the Chorkys burger with no sauce or tomato.  The sauce isnt bad, mind you, just not my favorite.) 

What kept me in Japan so long?  Ogaki, for most of my time here.  Recently, I got married, and I now have an even better reason.  She doesnt like Ogaki, sadly, so we moved to Tokyo as of two weeks ago.  I was previously down on Tokyo but it does have the most wonderful woman in the world living in it, so im cracking my knuckles and building a new home for myself here.  Its been really fun for the first two weeks: a tech industry, for one thing, which Ogaki doesnt *really* have going for it.

Scout's honor: I wanted to get a nice safe job at a megacorp, but was worried that all engineering jobs would go to India/China because the Wall Street Journal told me so.  I thought "Hmm, Spanish was really hard in high school.  If I learn a commercially viable foreign language, then instead of competing with 100k new graduates from India/China every year, I'll be competing with only the set which is trilingual in their language/X/English.  That must be less than a few hundred.  What's a commercially viable language in software?  It has to be a high-tech Western nation which buys billions of dollars of US software whose English education system sucks and for which there are few native speakers in the US.  ... Gadzooks, JAPAN.  I will become the Project Manager for MS Excel Japanese version and I'll have a nice safe job for life!"

So I double-majored in CS and East Asian Studies ("Japanese plus Japanese Economy") and went to Japan after school to firm up my business Japanese.

Short version of a long story: Bingo Card Creator snapped me up before Microsoft could, and I ended up staying here.

>> Are there any major differences between (tech) startups in Japan in in the US/Europe?

Don't do A/B testing early -- say, until you've got 3k uniques a month to the page you're testing (assuming a low-touch free signup available to trail or email list).  I'd spend most of my experimentation budget -- brainsweat more than money -- on "What can I try to get us in front of qualified prospects?"  The thing that will kill you isn't a low conversion rate -- you have all the time in the world to fix that later -- it is "Nobody knows we even exist."

Most B2B SaaS products make one business process transformatively better, and require substantial skill to operate because business is hard.  They tend to evolve embedded infoproducts with tooltips, training, lifecycle emails, etc, and those embedded infoproducts are often fairly low quality because they distract the product team from actually building product.

Build the embedded infoproduct *first* and have that be the 90% focus for at least a little while rather than that being the 2% detail work on your software.  See other replies regarding "planting a flag" for more elaboration.

Past that stage?  You can use the same friendcatcher that consultants do -- conferences/events and teaching.  Do you work with dentists?  Throw a local event saying How To $WHATEVER In Your Dental Practice.  Rent out a room and buy coffee and donuts or, well, whatever people who care about their teeth prefer for snacks.  Focus 95% on improving their businesses and 5% on mentioning that you have a product which makes this easier.  Get mobbed by dentists after the talk ends. 

Try that a few times.  Got an offering that works really well?  Great -- now do that as a webinar for dentists all over, or teach a bunch of people to do The Talk then send them all over the US and other target-rich environments.  Constant Contact does The Talk about email marketing and it let them grow to ~$50 million or so recurring revenue $35 at a time.  See Gail Goodman's talk "The Long, Slow SaaS Ramp of Death."  (Best single presentation about SaaS ever, by the way.)  http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/

That doesn't seem to have a lot to recommend it.

If I had an army of robot minions ^H^H^H^H people who would do whatever I told them to do, I might tell them to go to Google, start typing the biggest generic keyword in the industry, and then finish typing a brandable variation of it.  e.g. Start typing [software marketing] and then finish typing [software marketing for ninjas].

People Googling [software marketing for ninjas] would find themselves at a landing page I controlled, probably at softwaremarketingforninjas.com (presumably not registered, but have at it!), which would have a kick-butt visual design and offer a guide to turn you into a master ninjas if you give me your email address.

The intent of the exercise is -- and it's, uh, what color would you describe a ninjas's clothes as?  trick question, nobody sees a ninjas's clothes -- is to get Google to autosuggest [software marketing for ninjas] as one of their top ten autosuggestions, and some portion of the audience for [software marketing] which isn't in your ecosystem yet (and which you cannot attract because that click costs $X0 on AdWords) are exposed to your ecosystem at an entry point you control, for free.

Incidentally, if a Google engineer were to read my explanation of this and say "That's manipulative!  We're yanking that autosuggestion.", it would still retain 90% of the business value, because you still have a very brandable asset.

I cant talk much about my time in the Fortune 500 due to a legal team which is better funded than the Axis of Evil and twice as intimidating.  Short version: few things in (business) life bring me as much joy as not selling consulting services to the Fortune 500 any more.  Can they benefit from the same things that a 30-man software company can?  Broadly speaking, yes, but 99.54% of their problems are deep-seated organizational issues.  That might be true of smaller companies, in some cases, but theyre rarely as pathological about it and you have, as an outside consultant, a snowballs chance in Smaugs belly of *actually convincing a small company to change*, whereas you will not accomplish that in a company with 10,000 employees.

There is *substantial* room for improvement in pricing in low-touch SaaS sales.  Ive resolved to write a book on it at some point in the indefinite future.  The title of the book will be Charge More.  I am not joking in the slightest.  It is a shame I dont have a landing page for it, since this is the first time ive broached that thought in public, but hey, you asked.

The reason that that is the title of the book is that almost all software is vastly underpriced, and often *just bumping the numbers up across the board* works great.  A more advanced version is rethinking segmentation and pitching the software at a market segment which oozes money  this may or *may not* include much in the way of changes to the software proper  and then charging what that new, well-heeled, more exclusive market will bear.  You can often throw in information or consulting-esque services to justify the substantial premium.

I dont know if hiring me for a year would be a great idea, but if any company wants to give it a shot, id at least entertain the offer if it includes at least seven digits and I get total run of the place.  Nobody has been leaping to give me that offer so I had to build my own company.  Great news for me, less great news for hypothetical people wanting to buy a year of my time in a chunk.

Anyhow, the main thing that would be nice about that sort of continuity is ability to course-correct on experiments.  For example, usually I just get to have some input on strategy, start a few experiments, *maybe* review those experiments after N months, and train the team to keep doing it when Im not in the building.  A year would, optimistically, give me enough time to do experiments, build a staff capable of doing so without me, and hopefully really, really move the needles.  But this is *probably* not what im going to end up doing with any of the next 50 years of my life.

"Hey Patrick, did you notice anything when signing up for inbound.org for this AMA?  Signed, A Multiple Personality"

Great question!  Inbound.org makes a lot of the classic mistakes of software signup pages, so I took the liberty of writing them out.  If your software/etc business does any of them, you can pick up some quick wins with ~15 minutes of work!

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s423/sh/d514e3b0-04aa-4b93-96b3-eb9ef8a80949/0b09aa36835b08a66248827318118aa8/deep/0/Signup.png

Howdy guys -- thanks much for coming, this has been great fun.  Unfortunately, ~3 hours into our 90 minute AMA, it is 3 AM in Japan and I'm bushed.  If you have any questions, my inbox is always open.  http://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation  (If for some reason I miss an email, that's likely me being busy rather than me hating your guts.  Ping me on Twitter about it -- @patio11.)

@Ed -- If you could update the page to make it obvious that this is no longer live, I'd be obliged.

Thanks!  I'm glad it makes a difference to people.

If you don't absolutely need to store SSNs, don't.

If it is unavoidable for the product to store SSNs, you have two problems: a) securing them b) allaying your customer's fears about your capability to secure them.  A requires 100X more effort than B and is also more important.  It is also outside the scope of this comment.

How do you convey to your customers/prospects that you're secure?  You assert so in two sentences of copy on the front/features page and back it up with a Security page which says very little, technically speaking.  Here is one of mine: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/security  Or here is Basecamp's: https://basecamp.com/security

Prominent points of note:

Customers in non-technical markets don't know what SSL is and wouldn't care about it if they did.  Break down the benefit for them: "We secure your data using the same technology your bank uses."

Why should people trust *you* to secure their stuff?  One reason is simply that you've thought through this enough to say "Yes, that IS a priority for us!"  (Don't underestimate this!)  What other reasons are you uniquely trustworthy?  Put them on that page.  I might say, for example, "Our CEO has been published in an academic journal about securing the software technology we rely on."  (That's absolutely true for me, and tends to increase the trust an office manager at a dental clinic would have.  I don't say exactly those words because, well, I guess I'm a picky engineer.)

In addition to marketing security, I like the main security page to have a prominent call out to security researchers.  This is a preventative inoculation: a widespread culture in the whitehat community is "If they publish their email and a PGP key, I'm honor bound by the Code of Cool People to email them about a vulnerability prior to posting it to any text area available."  Costs you nothing, and who knows, you may even get heads-up about vulnerabilities and fix them prior to someone ruining your day.

I strongly doubt your customers heard of or remember heartbleed.

Security certifications are, in general, not worth the paper they're printed on.  Might as well put a stock logo of a lock next to the statement We're Secure.  (I've tried that before in an A/B test, actually.  No significant improvement when on the BCC purchasing page.  MacAfee et al claim their Hacker Safe logos increase sales by quite a bit, but I've not seen confirmation of that from people I trust, and it does not ping my Has The Ring Of Truth radar.)

I'd start by getting hired at a company which makes 100% or so of its money online, has a reputation for being smart, and has a minimum of political BS, in any marketing role.  Then, I'd start doing the job you want to have, and telling your team, peers, manager, and company every week "Hey guys I built XYZ and you'll never guess what happened next..."

I watched someone do this, and his emails routinely had the punch line "... added 5% to enterprise value.  Was a good week.  See you next week!"

If you need specific examples of companies which are hiring and want to hire this person, an abbreviated list would include Moz, Hubspot, Basecamp, Fog Creek, Matasano, Optimizely, CircleCI, and virtually any other savvy software company.  But the easiest way to get this job is to get it the Dwarf Fortress way -- show up in the wilderness with a pickaxe and Strike The Earth.

I regret that I'm not going to Business of Software this year.  There's literally one thing which could keep me away from BoS: the birth of a child.  It happened.  Or, well, will happen, roughly contemporaneously with BoS.  See you next year!  (Well, unless we're blessed again.)

I didn't start in medical, despite knowing it was going to eventually be a big part of my business, because HIPAA was big and scary.  I wouldn't advise starting in medical for any small startup unless medical is the only vertical that makes sense for what you're doing.

Overwhelmingly, the user and buyer of AR at SMB medical practices is the office manager.  I occasionally speak to doctors and am CCed in on a directive to the office manager to start using it.  As stated in another question, I don't do any outbound contact for AR -- if you don't pull answers out of me, you'll never hear from me about it.  As mentioned elsewhere, that certainly isn't optimal either for me or for the people whose lives would be better if they started using AR.