We are happy to announce, that as you look around, you will notice that this blog is ensconsed in a shiny new wrapper. Welcome to the new MidVentures website.

We redesigned for clarity, for upkeep, and mostly for improved communication. You will now find information on our who/what/where/how on the tabs about 150 pixels above. This blog will remain on the front page, as it always has been. Also, take a moment and preuse the “Incubator” tab. There is some very exciting stuff to be read.

So, welcome! It’s nice to have you back, we hope you like our new threads.

The largest and fastest-growing companies do not cold call new customers. In fact- the fastest growing companies have no real sales or marketing at all.

A company with a genuinely useful technology product will have customers who would use- and often pay for- the product. Which sounds obvious- except that the classical mode of sales and marketing forces companies to spend high overhead on pushing customers into using their products.

Your youtubes, facebooks, twitters, 37signals, even googles, hotmails, meebos, flickrs, and even your Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and UBS’s have a simple sales and marketing strategy: when customers use you, they tell more customers about you. Sales not required.

But the innovation of ’selling without selling’ is more in terms of indirect sales strategy. Instead of directly approaching customers with your product; approach them from a different angle. Become a resource in the sector you do business. Create a compliance or seal of approval that creates your market for you. And like Apple; reinforce the culture (art, music, aesthetics) of the world your customers inhabit. Universities sell the requirement of remaining on campus 4 years; not the luxury.

Search Engine Optimization is a shining web 2.0 example of selling without selling. Create a valuable resource that other resources link to; and sales will happen anyway. One of the reasons the internet sees a better ROI for marketing dollars is that the ads are ‘targeted’ and often they are not ads at all- merely blog or forum posts. Help your customer do what they wanted to do- and they’ll probably buy your product anyway.

Selling without selling is a principle that works in most walks of life. In relationships; do not directly confront your peers and list on your fingers your good qualities; you should instead subtlely reference capabilities and interests. Sometimes selling a quality is a matter of concealing it. One of the most powerful references to your own abilities is to conceal capabilities until others ask for help in mastering those themselves. Teaching is one of the most effective forms of sales.

You should still have a sales team to close on the leads. But acquiring leads is better accomplished by pull than push. You know you have chosen a good store location when customers are already knocking on the door. All you have to do is respond.

Pownce, a microblogging and file sharing web application, has just failed. Its collapse was wrapped in the comfort of some sort of purchase (with possibly no money on the line) by Six Apart (blogging company), but it was a failure. Once a hot startup, backed by some of the biggest names in the tech world, including even Kevin Rose, it has now crashed among the other failed companies in the deadpool.

What happened? Well, as with any failure, a variety of things. But from the public rumblings we can glean a number of factors that lead to it’s untimely demise.

Firstly, it ran headlong into the industry elephant, Twitter. Attacking the great beast when your product is similar often leads to problems. Increased differentiation would have helped keep it relevant. (I know that it did have quite a varied feature set, but still, its core was microblogging, and there it met its resistance).

Secondly, it was not free. I am a diehard advocate of charging for webapps, but in this case I think it was the right move, but done too early. Pownce never hit the critical mass to make it worthwhile to charge its premium users. So, it crippled itself, limiting the adoption that would have made it viable. They should have waited for a year of two, and then tacked on added features for a fee.

Don’t fight with your cheerleader. Pownce got into a public brawl with Kevin Rose, internet god, and that cost them. When Pownce launched, Kevin pimped the service weekly on his show, Diggnation. By the end he was strictly promoting Twitter. He even went as far as to have contests on the show to attract people to his Twitter account. Burn. That could have culled thousands of users to Pownce.

In the end, it all went to hell. Not that it is all bad, the Pownce team has new jobs at Six Apart, and Kevin got some advisory role. But still, Six Apart acquired the company and all its tech, to promptly shut it down. No questions asked. It’s sad to see something fail, but then again, not too many people are going to mourn this one.

Better luck next time.