BlogMutt Co-Founder Offers Insights for Successful Market Testing

Meg Rayford Mar 9, 2012 Tweet

Writing is hard, yet you know you need to fill up your blog with great content that will help brand your company and sell your products and services. BlogMutt, which we covered back in October, is helping companies solve this problem with the motto, “We work like a dog to fill up your blog!”

Boulder-based BlogMutt is a crowdsourced blog writing service providing all original content for just about any business blog. The company differentiates itself from other content providers by being easier to use than comparable, lower-priced services and much less pricey than contracting PR agencies to do similar work.

I asked co-founder Scott Yates if he had any advice for those wanting to launch a professional services company.  Yates cautioned against relying on friends for market testing.

“If you think you have a good idea, don’t test it with your friends, who will tell you that they like it because they like you,” Yates said. In fact, even in the testing stages, Yates recommends asking for money to try out your service.

Test it with someone you don’t know and test it by asking them to pay for it, even if it’s not built. You can always give the money back, or even better, you can build the thing to provide the service. When you want to test the market just remember that people will always tell you how much they like your new thing, but the only test that matters is if they are willing to pull their credit card out of their wallet.

As for those already running a company, Yates believes in focusing on your core business.  “New businesses should outsource whatever is not core to your business,” he said. “If you are a technology business, you need to have the technology in-house, but you can certainly hire out things like logo design or writing blog posts.”

Be sure to stop by and meet the BlogMutt team at the Tech Cocktail SXSW #StartupLife Celebration tomorrow.

Editor’s Note: Thank you to Vitrue, a sponsor of our #Startuplife Celebration and Tech Cocktail’s special SXSW video series. Check out Vitrue’s live daily updates from SXSW!