A Blogging Retrospective: My Personal Top Five Blog Posts of 2012

December 31, 2012

At OpenView we entered our fourth year of blogging in 2012, and our team at OpenView Labs committed to an aggressive schedule of one blog post per team member per week.

Over time, our effort has generated an enormous amount of content. For those of us who have been around since the beginning, we’ve now written nearly two hundreds blog posts, each. Just keeping track of what we have written and making sure we refer back to it can be a challenge! That is why this year I am posting a year-end review of my own blog entries, so any interested readers can quickly capture the essence of my blogging themes and focus for 2012.

This list is also meant to help me navigate my own content in the future, so please forgive the personal slant of this post.

1) Startup Marketing: When Less is More

This is a rather popular post and one that I think is helpful for any startup technology executive. The theme is simple, but often overlooked: there is always more marketing to be done, but that doesn’t mean it needs to cost an arm and a leg.

2) Does Your Website Speak to the Right Audience?

If you continue to follow my blog over time, you will find that I tend to emphasize strategic segmentation and focus in marketing strategy. It reflects OpenView’s essential belief that a company can only grow profitably in the expansion stage if it focuses its resources and operational strategy on set of target segments. This post discusses ways in which a company’s website content and information architecture needs to be tailored to the right target segment prospects.

3) Sales Force Compensation: Challenges of Growth

This post is the start of a blog series about the art and science of sales force compensation. It is part of a larger theme that I tend to go back to time and again: challenges and opportunities facing companies that are undergoing massive growth.

4) Can You Do Market Research for Free?

As the leader of OpenView’s market research team, I tend to write a lot about market research techniques and tools that are meant to help either our portfolio companies when they need to do market research or my own market research analysts when they are working with the portfolio companies. This post lists out eight different internal data sources that a market researcher can leverage to infer key insights about the customers and users in any project

5) A Sense of Urgency in the Expansion Stage

This blog post touches on a theme I have worked a lot on this year: how to enhance and improve the impact that OpenView Labs teams are making with our projects working with the portfolio companies. A key concept we have worked on is demonstrating “A true sense of urgency,” and how it can be maintained and encouraged both within OpenView and in our portfolio companies.

Thank you for reading my blog in 2012. Let me know if there is anything I can do to improve my posts in the coming year!

 

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.