Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By Sasha Pasulka

Editor’s note:  Monica Harrington is speaking on marketing and branding for startups at  StartupDay .
 
This is the second part of a two-part profile of Monica Harrington, who lead the marketing efforts at startups like Valve and Picnik, and is currently at Intersect. You can read part one about her experience at Microsoft here.
 
The second half of this profile focuses on Monica’s experience in the startup world, and how her approach to startup marketing has launched her projects to enormous success.
 
Marketing in a Social Media World

I ask Monica how a marketing team today can rise above the noise – all the Twittering, all the blogging, the Facebook pages, the tens of thousands of startups competing for coverage on Mashable or TechCrunch.

“I don’t come from a classical marketing background,” she says, “so I’ve always viewed it a bit differently.”

She recommends I read a book called The Power of Pull, which explains that the best marketers use people to pull products along with their enthusiasm and excitement, as opposed to the notion of pushing from the top.

“To me, good software marketing is all about pull. It’s about finding the people who are motivated and excited about products, who then want to introduce them throughout their organizations, and to their friends. It sounds obvious now,” she says. “But it wasn’t obvious then.”

I’ll disagree with her there – it’s not obvious, not to the mass of companies dizzying themselves to blog more and tweet more and retweet faster and to move users, by shovel if necessary, to their Facebook pages. This approach is not about targeting and understanding influentials and nurturing those relationships. This is about shouting louder. We’re still trying to use a world full of pull tools to push products from the top.

“You didn’t really have the social media tools back then to enable pull efforts on a large scale,” I note.

“That’s true,” she says, “but we did have things like user groups. I spent a lot of time with user groups, and I understood how those motivated people could be an extension of your team if they believed in what you were doing. The first part of that was to honestly believe that it was in their best interest [to use your product] and then to listen very carefully to what they were saying, and to use that feedback to help make the products better and sell them.”

The Beginnings of Valve

During her time at Microsoft, Monica married Mike Harrington, a fellow Microsoftie. She opens up about this when I ask her what her favorite work of fiction is. It’s a question I’ve found helps glimpse the inner life of anyone who spends most of his or her time reading and writing non-fiction across assorted media.

“Gone with the Wind,” she responds without much pause. “It helped me marry Mike. The book is about these people who couldn’t get together at the right time, and I decided I wanted to marry Mike before he decided he wanted to marry me.”

I prod further here. I’m looking for any sign that this woman – perfectly and almost robotically accomplished on paper – has ever shared any struggle with someone like, say, me.   

“There was a point at which we broke up, before we got married, and I said to him: ‘I want to marry you, but I’m moving on with my life. And if you change your mind, or if you decide you want to marry me, and I’m still available, call me.’ And that’s essentially what happened.”

I giggle and mention something about how men, one way or another, always come back; this is the full extent of the hard-earned wisdom I’m capable of contributing during the entire conversation.

“We weren’t even going out when we got engaged. About three months after we broke up, we spent the day together and he proposed.”

They’re still married today. When Mike left Microsoft to create Valve, a gaming startup, with Gabe Newell, Monica remained at Microsoft, now managing a consumer product marketing group that included Games.

She watched her own Games group closely. The group included a marketer who’d been recruited from the gaming industry. “I didn’t always agree with her approach to marketing. I kept thinking, ‘If I only had a good game, I would know how to market this.’ I just had that sense.”

Mike and Gabe landed a million-dollar advance thirty minutes into a meeting with the co-founder of Sierra – “He just thought they were really smart, really brilliant” – and began work on Half-Life. It was still a long shot – of the 5000 games being introduced to the market each year at that time, only the top twenty or so made any money.

“There Was This Very Painful Decision to Start Over”

Monica advised the Valve team on the side, maintaining a rigorous transparency with her bosses at Microsoft. They saw no conflict of interest, but eventually Monica did.

After over eleven years at Microsoft, she left to become the Chief Marketing Officer of Valve.

“We wanted to do a game that was worthy of game of the year,” she says. “Gabe and Mike initially thought they would do a B title just to get the company started. My advice was to really go for it right from the start.”

Valve spent more than Half-Life’s million-dollar advance during its development. The product won Action Game of the Year at E3, but Valve’s own game testing showed that it just wasn’t fun enough.

“So there was this very painful decision to just start over,” says Monica. “It couldn’t be fixed. It had to be redone from the ground up.

“The team at Valve had learned enough that they thought they would know how to do it better the next time. So we started over. It was a very exciting, tense, draining time, full of highs and lows.”

I ask her: “Did you believe you could do it?”

She pauses, but only for a second. She chooses her words deliberately. “I believed that if anyone could do it, that team could do it.”

Half-Life won over 50 PC Game of the Year awards when it was released for Windows in 1998.   

Why Is Seattle the Right Place to Do a Startup?

I ask her how she views Seattle tech culture today – as a newbie to the scene, I’m genuinely curious.

“The thing that makes tech culture thrive is having a place where people can come together and collaborate really easily. Some of the things that make it work for Seattle are having a Microsoft, Amazon, and Expedia. People get experience there. You get to this critical mass where there’s enough talent to do interesting things.”

“Are we there?” I ask.

“You can always get better. I’m really surprised that there aren’t more people who left Microsoft to start companies.”

I blink at her answer here – I feel like Microsofties are now, and have been for all eternity, leaving Microsoft to start their own companies. But I suppose there are still an enormous number of immensely talented people who choose the relative security of a corporate environment over making an all-or-nothing gamble on themselves.

I realize suddenly that the sample I’ve used for my own analysis is the people I meet in my startup circle. I’ve made a broad judgment based on a narrow view of the market – and I will learn over the course of my conversation with Monica that this is a mistake she makes rarely if ever.

Why is Seattle is the right place to build a startup?

“The fact that you have people in this area with the experience you need for a startup [is valuable]. With a startup, it’s really hard to train people. So you need for people to come in knowing how to build products that are actually going to ship.“

What Makes for Good Tech Marketing?

“I come into [a marketing team] and I think ‘Who’s likely to be most interested in this [product], and, if we do it well, whose lives are going to be changed?’”

As an example, she talks about her experience with Picnik, the web photo editor she marketed before Google acquired the company in March of this year.

“I considered Photoshop experts. They could dismiss [Picnik] as a lightweight photo editor. Instead, you think about what it’s like from their perspective. Why might they be interested in this?”

She made it a point to reach out to design professionals, to clarify that Picnik was not a replacement for their skill set, but rather a tool they could introduce within their companies or even to friends to lessen their work load.

“There are always people like that for any product. You think about what’s in it for them, in a really genuine, authentic way.”

It’s a theme that strikes again and again in our conversation – Monica approaches marketing from a people-centric perspective, and always from a place of authenticity. She thinks both about who it can help and how, and she thinks about this with both depth and breadth.

Code for America: The Potential for Change

It’s no surprise, then, that Monica advises and supports multiple non-profit organizations. She’s on the Board of Code for America, a non-profit founded by Jen Pahlka – to whom Monica refers as “a force of nature” – with the goal of bringing the best minds in Web 2.0 into municipal service.

Modeled after Teach for America, developers who could arguably make six figures in the private sector accept a stipend of $35,000 for the opportunity to spend a year developing a Web 2.0 application for a city government.

“Code for America has the potential to change the way citizens interact with their local governments,” she says. “It’s an opportunity for transformative and powerful change, to change the way IT gets done in cities across America. It can play that catalytic role.”

Intersect and What’s Next

I bring the conversation back to Intersect, which she won’t speak about beyond what’s already on their website. It’s clear that the focus of the site is personal narratives, but how these stories may, well, intersect remains to be seen.

“Everything you touch turns to gold,” I comment. “Do you ever worry about the winning streak ending?”

She says she doesn’t.

“I would say that I like working with enormously talented people. And that’s what I’ve been fortunate to do throughout my career. I’m excited about Intersect because it actually speaks to my personal passions. Stories are incredibly powerful. They are how we learn about each other, how we connect with each other and, throughout my career, I’ve seen the power of stories drive people to action in ways that are amazing.”

 
Monica Harrington will be speaking about marketing and brandingat StartupDay. Register early for priority advisory slots!
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