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The following are some lessons I learned about early-stage startup marketing. Because market is such a broad topic, I’m restricting these lessons to PR marketing (as opposed SEO, SEM, product marketing, etc.). In my experience, entrepreneurs who are overly paranoid or are information hoarders rarely do well.
Mostly it’s because your marketing campaigns suck. Or more directly – they are likely narcissistic resuscitations of your newest features or bragging points that nobody but your marketing team and your mom care about. Plus they run conferences with the top people (which is another form of POV marketing by the way).
To be a great entrepreneur you really do need talent. You need to be great at something: technology back-end, front-end design, usability, sales, marketing, quantitative analysis, leadership –> whatever. So they set out a grass route’s effort to go directly to the market. And they have done hundreds of them.
On why you should be an entrepreneur, “A lot of people do what they have to do. He stood up, grabbed the mic and gave a heartfelt overview of his experiences in experimenting with new technologies to build relationships with his audience, get feedback on his product quality and to market his music all the way to the top of iTunes.
But being best-in-class at online marketing is also a sine qua non to standout from your peer group. The starting point of product IS marketing, which is what a lot of young entrepreneurs that never studied business don’t realize. Online marketing uses techniques for driving promotion and place.
Serial entrepreneur, venture investor and startup accelerator pioneer Brad Feld has notoriously mocked traditional marketing throughout his career. If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial. If you have $hitty products, the marketing is impossible. Trada – Guerilla Marketing In Action.
It is simply the most important way to proactively control your career development and how the market perceives you. This started as a post in which I was going to write out tips to personal branding and became in stead an essay of my own branding journey. That was fine with me – the market is the market.
If you want the full SlideShare deck with many slides not in either post it’s in this link –> The LA Tech Market. ” It’s the most common refrain I hear from investors and even entrepreneurs these days. Has it begun to mature or is it just better marketed than in was say 5 years ago?
My advice to entrepreneurs was and is “ when the hors d’oeuvres tray is being passed take two ” (e.g. So I agreed to offer my current thinking on the economy and what it portends for the VC industry & fund raising for entrepreneurs. raise money now to weather any storms). VCs get paid to “put money to work.&#.
I use George Bush vs. Al Gore as allegory and I’ve been using it with entrepreneurs for years to sink in a simple point about how to communicate with the market. This does not mean you shouldn’t solve big, complex problems or write complex code. Most Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs I know are more like Al Gore.
This is part of my new series on what makes an entrepreneur successful. I originally posted it on VentureHacks , one of my favorite websites for entrepreneurs. Thinking out loud – I’m sure that’s important for entrepreneurs as well. He told me that when the markets soured they were no longer hot.
But should you actually write one if you’re a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? This is a post to help you figure out why you should write and what you should talk about. Or “I’m a new entrepreneur, why would I offer advice on how to run a startup?&#. Absofuckinglutely. You wouldn’t.
As an entrepreneur, I helped create companies which achieved two IPOs and two trade sales totaling $385 million. Perform China Syndrome Market Analysis. In order to reasonably assess the size of your addressable market, you must perform a bottoms-up analysis which is based on a number of elemental assumptions. Fallacy: Yes.
TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world. We were based in London.
Consistent with the statistics cited in Why Entrepreneurs Hate (Most) MBAs , the large majority of John and Kyle''s classmates accepted positions at investment banks and consulting firms upon graduation. We weren''t marketing the newsletter, it was just out there, sort of growing organically.". According to John, "So, we, we sent.(an
When second place isn’t good enough because we live in winner-take-most markets. This blog started from a series of conversations I found myself having over and over again with founders and eventually decided I should just start writing them.It Leadership Tech Market Analysis' In fact, think about it. Larry / Sergey.
This sometimes frustrates entrepreneurs who just want to “get back to running the business.&# But if you understand it you’ll see that it is perfectly rational and it should also influence how you form relationships with investors. For this reason I tell entrepreneurs the following: Meet your potential investors early.
It’s the entrepreneur’s equivalent of “ 10,000 hours.&#. A smart young marketing exec? If you wait until you need to fill somebody in a roll you’re losing valuable time as an entrepreneur. Help them write other stories. One day they’ll write yours. Recruiting. 50 coffee meetings.
In my Twitter bio is says that I’m “ looking to invest in passionate entrepreneurs ,” which almost sounds like I was just looking for a cliché soundbite to describe myself. Passion is also the featured heavily in nearly every presentation I give to entrepreneurs or on college campuses or in talks with MBA students.
I started in 2007 with a thesis that my primary investment decision would be about the team (70%) and only afterward about the market opportunity (30%). Of course these are great places to network with other investors, meet great entrepreneurs and keep your connections strong with senior execs at larger companies like Yahoo!,
Steve Blank , January 25, 2010 10 Tips for Adding Game Mechanics to a Non-Gaming Service - ReadWriteStart , September 21, 2010 Startups & VCs: Learn How to Design, Market, & Eat Your Own. - . - 500 Hats , February 1, 2010 When to Use Facebook Connect – Twitter Oauth – Google Friend Connect for Authentication? First Principles.
As a result I didn’t write my first venture capital check until March 2009 – exactly 5 years ago. It turns out it actually takes time to build a high-growth business with differentiated intellectual property and roll out large, enterprise-class marketing solutions. 5 years ago. 5 years ago. The monkey on my back.
Prorata rights are one of the most important rights of a private market technology investors and yet are seldom fully understood. For starters some funds are small and thus while they put $750k into your company to own 10% of your company they might not be able to write another $2 million if you then raise a $20 million round (10%).
I get paid (well) for interesting people to come in and tell me how they want to change the world – Being an entrepreneur is like having blinders on. At least for the best entrepreneurs. Some people do the conference circuit too much, get involved in lots of side projects and attend every entrepreneur dinner. I love it.
Understanding “The Funding Angle” I sit at enough board meetings to hear conflicting advice given to entrepreneurs about how to handle PR and announcements at startups. I will add to this as I write more in the coming weeks on the topic. For starters, once you announce your competitors instantly will start tracking you.
Some people even believe that entrepreneurs must be born with the right genes, and no element of education is relevant. In my view, the most effective entrepreneurs are those with a background of an array of real-life experiences, both positive and negative, as well as good academic and coaching activities.
2 preamble issues having read the comments on TC today: 1: I know that the prices of startup companies is much great in Silicon Valley than in smaller towns / less tech focused areas in the US and the US prices higher than many foreign markets. I can’t control the market. Private markets for stocks are the opposite.
One of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs ask about when they raise a little bit of money or are getting close to launching their first product is whether they should hire a PR firm. PR isn’t something that can be delegated – The other thing that tech execs often want to do is to delegate the PR to their marketing person.
What every entrepreneur needs more than anything else, after they have built an innovative new product or service, is visibility, credibility, and trust by customers, potential employees, and future business partners. Yet, most good business people I know agree, but don’t know where to start.
I began our discussion by asking Guy, “Why should entrepreneurs read your latest book, Enchantment?”. The reason why an entrepreneur should be interested in this book is because entrepreneurs have to overcome resistance. An entrepreneur, in particular, has to be likeable and trustworthy AND have a great product.
One of the hardest things for most entrepreneurs to know is how hard to push in situations where people tell you “no.” ” But then again most entrepreneurs fail. I’d say less than 20% of of entrepreneurs fit into that bucket. ’ “ In fact, NO is the one word that no entrepreneur should accept.
It’s what life was like as an entrepreneur. According to the SEC we’re not allowed to market the fact that we’re fund raising, so I won’t. I plan to write about it early next year when we’re all through. But this is nothing like the stress of being an entrepreneur. And so it goes again.
This is something I think entrepreneurs don’t totally understand and it’s worthwhile they do. So VCs started writing some smaller A-rounds. Entrepreneurs started demanding that VCs call their first-round financings “seed” rounds even if they were $3 million. and there''s always a but].
A personal story as an investor … [Email readers, continue here…] My very first investment as a professional angel was in a small startup where the entrepreneur’s vision fueled my imagination in the audio market niche where I had run a business in an earlier life. Trust works both ways.
This is a blog post I really didn’t want to write. I didn’t want to write it because I have mixed feelings about AngelList. I didn’t want to write it because the bloggosphere doesn’t always do nuance well. So why I am writing it then? But it +is+ an anti-entrepreneur stance.&# A few reasons.
I’m an entrepreneur at heart so I’m always inspired when I hear stories about innovation. awards dinner on Thursday night I started reflected on what it would take to “change the trajectory&# for Seattle or for any regional market, really. This article originally ran on TechCrunch. I’m in Seattle this week.
I sometimes feel that the Silicon Valley culture and we as technologists more broadly can breed monoculture in our approach to entrepreneurship, problem solving, market analysis and technology solutions. Esther was talking about problems and entrepreneurs as far away as Russia. It was an “enterprise 2.0” But then the world changes.
This was an audience of mostly first-time entrepreneurs. They have seen one side of a market where many of us have seen the ebb and flow multiple times. Still, market amnesia by ordinarily rational actors always surprises me. It is great for entrepreneurs and great for VCs. If you are interested the Vimeo is here.
It should help some entrepreneurs to better access early-stage capital and should allow some angel investors better access to deal flow. If you know, VCs end up writing sizable checks into their own funds, which is important in better aligning interests. million round I might write $1.8 – 2.2 So What’s the Big Deal?
As a mentor to entrepreneurs, I tend to see many of the same obstacles appearing in every new startup, and since I don’t want to appear to be a downer , I’m not sure how to properly warn people ahead of time to be on the alert for these challenges. Too many entrepreneurs think that expert external advisors are suspect, or will slow them down.
We need venture debt, factoring companies and public markets. These days that’s not the case and it’s a great outcome for entrepreneurs and for innovation. A new group of investors have clustered around writing earlier-stage, smaller checks. A: Only because it’s a nicer branding for entrepreneurs.
Let me start by saying that Clayton is one of the most influential people on my thoughts about markets that led to both the concept behind my first startup and my main theses in investing. In many ways I think general purpose writing & thinking skills are as valuable as math skills. Internationalization of Technology.
Although many are entertaining, most fail to provide entrepreneurs with a sufficient return on their time investment. Unfortunately, most business books do not offer entrepreneurs an adequate payoff. At the beginning of the index, Guy writes, “I hope Robert Cialdini checks this index.” No doubt, he did. Ask For Mentoring.
As a market we seem to be incapable of temperance. And even the best teams combined to create big innovations sometimes don’t time markets well, are surprised by unexpected technology breakthroughs by competitors or just don’t find the magic the leads to mass customer adoption. I started by writing 3-4 times / week.
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