You're a little company, now act like one

Summary

You’re afraid that looking like being a small company means you’ll lose sales. It’s actually the opposite – you’re alienating your best customers. I talk to a lot of companies that are still hunting for customer #1, or a few sales have been made but the ball isn’t rolling yet. Most of them are making the same mistake: Their public persona is exactly wrong. I know, because I made the same mistake! But I learned my lesson, and I’d like to share it with you. Nobody’s this happy about installing new software. Even before I had a single customer, I “knew” it was important to look professional. My website would need to look and feel like a “real company.” I need culture-neutral language complementing culturally-diverse clip-art photos of frighteningly chipper co-workers huddled around a laptop, awash in the thrill of configuring a JDBC connection to SQL Server 2008. It also means adopting typical “marketing-speak,” so my “About Us” page started with: Smart Bear is the leading provider of enterprise version control data-mining tools. Companies world-wide use Smart Bear’s Code Historian software for risk-analysis, root-cause discovery, and software development decision-support. “Leading provider?” “Data mining?” I’m not even sure what that means. But you have to give me credit for an impressive quantity of hyphens. That’s what you’re supposed to do right? That’s what other companies do, so it must be right. Who am I to break with tradition? Surely my potential customers would immediately close the browser if they read: Hi, I’m Jason and I built an inexpensive tool for visualizing what’s in your version control system. It’s useful for answering questions like “When was the last time we changed this file?” Check it out and tell me what sucks! I mean, can you just imagine a person with “Software Engineer III” on their business card taking me seriously if I talked like a human being? What if someone gets offended by the word “sucks?” No no, big companies want to see professiona...