A commonsensical approach to sales and marketing

First, congrats to my friend Gina for becoming a partner at Postlight. Second, I love how Postlight thinks about their sales and marketing process:

“Sales” at Postlight is probably not what you’re thinking. It’s an un-flashy, consultative process done in everyday clothing (although sometimes we put on nicer shoes). Our goal is always to figure out what a potential client really needs, and then to figure out the fastest way to make that happen. By the time we get to a formal proposal it’s usually exactly that — a formality. Gina has been involved with the Postlight sales process for many months now, and has proven to be a natural.

Similarly, “marketing” at Postlight is less about brochures and more about sharing what we know, giving good talks, hosting events for the NYC tech/design community, interviewing podcast guests, and saying good, true things about Postlight when appropriate. Here again, Gina’s experience as the founder of Lifehacker and her years of experience giving conference talks around the world comes to bear.

Seems to me that this approach gets you closer to potential clients and employees and hews more to the truth than “traditional” methods.

• Gina Trapani
• Postlight

Gawker’s Kinja, circa 2003

Gawker has rebranded their new commenting system…it’s now called Kinja. The name is recycled from a project that Nick Denton worked on with Meg Hourihan starting in 2003. Kinja 1 was an attempt to build a blog aggregator without relying solely on RSS, which was not then ubiquitous. Here’s a mockup of the site I did for them in late 2003:

Luckily they got some real designers to finish the job…here’s a version that 37signals did that was closer to how it looked at launch.

Where is the team that worked on that Kinja? Nick’s still hammering away at Gawker, Meg is raising two great children (a more difficult and rewarding task than building software), programmer Mark Wilkie is director of technology at Buzzfeed, programmer Matt Hamer still works for Gawker (I think?), intern Gina Trapani is running her own publishing/development empire & is cofounder of ThinkUp, and 37signals (they worked on the design of the site) is flying high.

• 37signals
• design
• Gawker
• Gina Trapani
• Jason Kottke
• Kinja
• Mark Wilkie
• Matt Hamer
• Meg Hourihan
• Nick Denton
• web development
• weblogs