A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
NOVEMBER 7, 2017
We’re tired of hearing how small software companies usually fail. The data show that the two most common causes are: (1) Product isn’t useful to enough people, and (2) Problems with the team. But what about the companies that die even though they did sell some copies of software, and where the early team isn’t dysfunctional? I don’t have data for that cohort (tell me if you do!
Both Sides of the Table
NOVEMBER 14, 2017
Nearly every successful tech startup I’ve observed over the past 20 years has gone through a similar growth pattern: Innovate, systematize then scale operations. An alternate outcome that I also unfortunately observe in some cases are companies who had extreme early success with an initial product adoption but failed in key areas that limited the growth and therefore the ultimate financial outcomes.
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Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 1, 2017
This article first appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog. Jeff Immelt ran GE for 16 years. He radically transformed the company from a classic conglomerate that did everything to one that focused on its core industrial businesses. He sold off slower-growth, low-tech, and nonindustrial businesses — financial services, media, entertainment, plastics, and appliances.
YoungUpstarts
NOVEMBER 15, 2017
by Celina Kirchner, full-stack attorney at Michelman & Robinson, LLP. Yep, you read that title right. Insurance is the next big industry due for a disruption. And with that I know just what your thinking: insurance = SNORE. But wait, before letting your eyes glaze over or clicking out of here entirely, give me just two minutes of your time to explain – because the opportunity is big and the technology is really cool.
Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic
Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 25, 2017
Every entrepreneur and business leader waits too long before really working on the legacy that he wants to leave to society and his family. They realize too late that they don’t really want to be remembered for how many hours they spent on airplanes, how many emails they produced, or even how much money they made for the business. If you disappeared today, what would your legacy show?
Up and Running
NOVEMBER 15, 2017
Editor’s note: This article was updated in November of 2017. One of the best ways to prepare to conduct a SWOT analysis is to use examples for help and inspiration. Even if you already know what a SWOT analysis is and what it’s used for, it can be tough to translate that information and examine your own business with a critical eye. Reading an example SWOT analysis for a business that is either in your industry or based on a comparable business model can help get you started.
Start Up Roar brings together the best content for start up professionals from the widest variety of industry thought leaders.
Startup Lessons Learned
NOVEMBER 8, 2017
“A remarkably useful playbook that every business, government, and nonprofit needs to ignite the spark of innovation and fuel the fire of change.” -Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals , Give and Take , and OPTION B with Sheryl Sandberg Since The Startup Way came out on October 17th, I’ve had a great time traveling with the book, speaking to audiences, and meeting amazing people creating change in all types of organizations.
Version One Ventures
NOVEMBER 7, 2017
A few years ago, we began to see SaaS companies integrate payment processing into their software. This push to integrate payments was due to a couple of factors. First, it offers a better user experience – why send somebody off-platform to pay for a product or settle an invoice? Next, adding payments to a platform is very profitable, since the SaaS company gets a cut of the payment revenue.
YoungUpstarts
NOVEMBER 29, 2017
by Itamar Gero, founder and CEO of SEOReseller.com . Each day is an opportunity for SEO agencies and experts to peddle their services to businesses who aim for online marketing success and have the money for it. If you’re about to embark on growing your SEO agency, you’ll quickly find yourself in the thick of this competition. First, let me point out that there are many ways to get ahead.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 11, 2017
In my experience as an advisor and mentor to entrepreneurs in business, one of the biggest failures I see is a lack of self-leadership. You can’t lead a business to success, if you can’t lead yourself. I define self-leadership as the capacity to set direction and make decisions, to positively drive your own performance. Leadership in business starts with making good personal choices.
Up and Running
NOVEMBER 1, 2017
Product descriptions are meant to convince customers to buy things, right? But if a shopper can’t find your product description, it will never work its magic. That’s why you need to make sure that your product descriptions pop up higher in the search rankings. But how do you do that? Writing a good product description so that a search engine can find it is a subset of a larger discipline called search engine optimization, or SEO.
The Startup Magazine
NOVEMBER 30, 2017
Technology has the ability to disrupt the marketplace, which is the Holy Grail for any entrepreneur. It means offering a completely different way of doing something and capturing the interest of millions of people who may or may not have anticipated the idea, but were anxiously awaiting the reality. Keep in mind that investors are motivated by only two different types of businesses: a market disrupter, or a business with an already established audience.
ConversionXL
NOVEMBER 21, 2017
At TelTech , it took our product-marketing organization more than a year to get to something that resembled a true growth team, running high tempo testing. So, if you are struggling to implement the growth hacking methodology, I get it. We assembled a team, achieved product-market fit, and identified our growth levers, but got stuck when we tried to put process behind our testing.
Hearpreneur
NOVEMBER 29, 2017
Being in love is great. Being in love with your business, when you’re an entrepreneur, is even better. Waking up each morning knowing you are getting to do exactly what you love is more than most people could ever say about any “job” they have had. Although there are days when tossing in your hat seems like a viable option, remembering how much you love your “job” can quickly snap an entrepreneur out of that mentality.
YoungUpstarts
NOVEMBER 7, 2017
by Jessica Thiefels, owner of Honest Body Fitness. Whether you’ve been selling your product for years or just a few months, seeing a slow stream of sales, or no sales at all, is disheartening. You start questioning yourself and your product: What did I do wrong? Should I change it? Should I start over? Believe it or not, many entrepreneurs experience this.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 19, 2017
Success in any business these days requires a constant flow of new and innovative solutions, to keep up with changes in the market, competition, and to attract new customers. Yet in my role as a small business advisor, I still see a singular focus on achieving repeatable processes and “cookie-cutter” manufacturing. I don’t believe these two objectives have to be mutually exclusive.
Up and Running
NOVEMBER 6, 2017
Financial contingency planning is a must—not just for established small businesses, but also for businesses in the earliest stages of formation. If you’re pre-launch or have only recently gone to market, a contingency plan is likely to be the last thing on your mind; after all, your efforts are focused on making your business a success, and not necessarily thinking about what could go wrong.
Austin Startup
NOVEMBER 27, 2017
I was recently a member of a really great engineering team which also happened to be made up of all women. For a stretch of around six months, there were between four and five engineers on the team, all of us women. Our program manager was also a woman and for part of the time our manager was a woman. Anyone in tech will easily understand how unusual this is.
ConversionXL
NOVEMBER 29, 2017
If you’re invested in improving your A/B testing game, you’ve probably read dozens of articles and discussions on how to plan and run A/B tests. In reading advice about how long to run a test or what statistical significance threshold to use, you probably saw claims like “Always aim for XX% significance” or “Don’t stop a test until it reaches YYY conversions” – where XX% is usually a number higher than 95%, and YYY is usually a number higher than 100.
Hearpreneur
NOVEMBER 11, 2017
The idea of exactly what your business is going to be usually comes first. Secondly, most often, is giving a title to your idea. What exactly is going to be the name of your business? Some people turn to their childhood for inspiration or a beloved family pet. It could be a made up word you dream of one night and feel it has the right ring to it. Even still there are some people who study foreign words for the perfect meaning behind their chosen business.
YoungUpstarts
NOVEMBER 15, 2017
If you are looking towards the end of 2017 and you plan on jumping out of your comfort zone for 2018, you may be an entrepreneur in the making. Entrepreneurial flair and tendencies are something which many people may have, a lot will act upon, but only a few will succeed. If you are looking to build a business from scratch in the new year there are a few things you will need to know and consider. 1.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 13, 2017
Everyone in business loves to complain about their boss, and a classic Gallup study found that 50 percent of current employees have left at least one job in their career to get away from a bad manager. When asked for clarification, the most common reason seems to be a managers lack of clarity in setting expectations, which is obviously one of the most basic of employee needs.
Up and Running
NOVEMBER 22, 2017
Whether the widely reported statistic that eight out of ten businesses fail in the first 18 months is accurate or not, few will disagree with the fact that most startups fail. However, it’s rarely from a lack of owner passion, interest, hard work, or desire for success. In many cases, businesses are started by people with years of corporate experience.
The Startup Magazine
NOVEMBER 30, 2017
The success of any business begins and ends with people. Finding the right team at any time of the year can be a challenge, but it can be particularly trying during the holiday season, when demand is high and time is short. Keeping up with the season can test anyone’s management mettle, but if you put these time-honored people skills to work, you can ring in record profits for the new year. 1.
ConversionXL
NOVEMBER 9, 2017
Learning stuff online is the new standard for learning. It’s not just “how to tie a tie” how-to videos, it’s also learning hard skills. In fact, according to a recent report 59% of employed data scientists learned skills on their own or via a MOOC. But how can we take better advantage of online learning? What’s the most efficient way to learn as much info as quickly as you can?
Hunter Walker
NOVEMBER 8, 2017
The “Honest Ads Act” is, well, boring. As a bipartisan proposal to evolve the way Facebook and other online platforms treat political ads it checks a bunch of boxes. Publicly available records of ad spend and the viewing metrics associated with the campaigns would be an improvement on today’s black box, but would this fundamentally change discourse in American politics?
YoungUpstarts
NOVEMBER 10, 2017
by Brian Sutter, Director of Marketing, Wasp Barcode Technologies. There are plenty of ways to promote your small business for free. The tactics listed here are tried and true winners. They’re proven to work by tens of thousands of small businesses. Oh yeah – and they’re all free. 1. Partner with a company that complements your products or services.
The Equity Kicker
NOVEMBER 14, 2017
You might have seen that the week before last Balfour Beatty ( here ) and Mace ( here ) weighed in on the future of construction. Both are quite radical in the breadth and depth of impact they predict, whilst the technologies they choose are perhaps unsurprising to anyone immersed in the startup ecosystem. The Balfour Beatty piece is more detailed and they predict humanless construction sites by 2050 (which is admittedly a long way off – broadband is less than twenty years old) saying that
Up and Running
NOVEMBER 13, 2017
They say that some people are born entrepreneurs. While this is certainly true, there are also lots of us who know we have the drive and skills to run our own business if we could just decide on the right product or service to offer. If you’ve been searching for the perfect business for you, you’ve probably considered many factors such as time commitment, initial startup costs, and competition.
Duct Tape Marketing
NOVEMBER 21, 2017
Why Nobody is Finding Your Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Marketing Podcast with Brian Dean. I believe that elements of SEO are now elevated to the strategic level. In other words, as you plan your message, website structure, and content for your marketing, you better include some research commonly seen as a technical aspect of SEO.
deal architect
NOVEMBER 18, 2017
I get invited to a number of user conferences. I must admit I often feel I am intruding there on customer time with vendor executives. I much prefer smaller analyst summits and Plex has honed such summits to an art.
Hunter Walker
NOVEMBER 5, 2017
One of our most recent seed investments recently posed a question to me. They had designed a technical hiring process to try and eliminate gender bias but were losing all the women midway through their funnel when a take-home project was introduced. What was going wrong? I reviewed their current approaches alongside Homebrew’s Head of Talent Beth Scheer and we made a few recommendations, but there was nothing glaringly broken.
YoungUpstarts
NOVEMBER 6, 2017
by Lewis Robinson. A lot of startups fail within the first few months due to some commonly acknowledged culprits – picking a bad time to scale, running out of operating capital, lack of a steady customer base, high customer acquisition cost, and low to nonexistent repeat business. All of these problems can often be traced back to an ineffective sales approach.
Startup Professionals Musings
NOVEMBER 4, 2017
You have to be extra tough mentally to start a new business venture. While thinking about it, I realized that it’s really not that different from the toughness required and trained into America’s elite military force of Navy SEALs, who are known to be cool under fire, able to sense danger before it’s too late, and never give up on achieving their objective.
Up and Running
NOVEMBER 8, 2017
For many years, veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces were successful at starting and growing small businesses. In fact, almost 50 percent of veterans owned a business after World War II. But today, veteran entrepreneurship is on the decline. The most recent Kauffman Foundation research found that veterans accounted for 12.6 percent of new entrepreneurs in 1996 and that by 2014, this number had fallen to just 5.6 percent.
Duct Tape Marketing
NOVEMBER 4, 2017
Weekend Favs November 4 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week. I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.
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