Can’t figure out how to beat your lower-priced competitors? Don’t let predatory competitor pricing strategy destroy your business.
The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization comprised of ambitious startup founders and business owners.
There’s one thing a client will always privilege over low cost, and that is specialization. If a client has the choice between a cheap offer and an offer that is specifically geared towards them, they will choose the latter nine times out of 10. Find a way to tailor your product or service to sub-groups of customers. You can still hit the entire ma...
In the early years of your startup, you may feel like a one-person show. You have infinite faith in your product or service, but how do you translate that commitment to investors and stakeholders? How can you raise brand awareness before you have the funding necessary for marketing and PR?
Despite these obstacles, you must find a way to gain traction in building a community or generating sales. Otherwise, you risk stalling or, worse, folding. Fortunately, this is where “strength in numbers” comes into play. Find out how you can get your show on the road with a strategic startup partnership.
Validation by large enterprises generates the credibility and exposure you ne...
If idea validation is about taking your business idea for a test-drive, then pricing your product is where the rubber really hits the road.
This is it. You’re done piloting. You’re done validating. You’re really done living on Ramen in an apartment you share with five roommates. You’re ready to come out and tell the world: “I have a product or service that provides value – and this is how much my product is worth.”
Needless to say, product pricing strategy is an essential piece of the startup puzzle – and it’s a notoriously tricky piece to get right. There are about a dozen moving pieces you have to take into account. Getting them all aligned just right is like unlocking the most complicated combination lock ever.
Britt Crawford knows a thi...
If there’s one thing that’s more available than ever for founders in 2018, it’s advice. Not a day goes by without someone recommending a book, blog, podcast or conference that I can’t miss, or someone I ‘have to meet’.
On the other hand, we all know that the secret to success is not as simple as following instructions from [insert your favorite unicorn]’s playbook and just doing what those before you have done successfully.
Perhaps this explains why it is so easy to forget the obvious source of insight, advice and perspective that you have right in front of your nose, the people that you have spent the most time courting and that have cost you the most – your team.
This article shares some of the reasons why our own team has become one of t...
Continuing in Phase Four of a four-part Funding Series:
Phase One - Structuring a Fundraise
Phase Two - Investor Selection
Phase Three - The Pitch
Phase Four - Investor Outreach
Part 1 - Investor Outreach
Part 3 - The Investor Email Pitch ( ←YOU ARE HERE 😀)
Part 4 - How to Contact Investors
Let’s dive in!
Nearly all potential investors require a solid email pitch before they are willing to take a meeting with a startup. A great Email Pitch won't guarantee you a meeting, but a bad one will definitely prevent one! Therefore, creating the perfect Email Pitch is essential if you want an investor to respond.
The perfect Email Pitch is very tight — just a few very well-crafted sentences to create a great fi...
In 2002, when Craiglist, Friendster, and MySpace were the popular social networks, Divya Narendra was a Harvard College student who identified with the idea of online social networking.
“Its usefulness was obvious to me as a student, because I felt like I was in this campus with a lot of students, 6000 undergrads, but I didn’t know that many,” said Divya. “In Boston, there are around 50 colleges within 50 square miles — it’s very dense city as far as universities go, and I had no real great point of contact between the various universities, so I felt like bringing that community together was sort of a no brainer. When I thought about the scaling opportunities, it was pretty obvious as well — this was a use case that would be applicable to ...
In this age of social media, entrepreneurship is at an all-time high. The time for creating a start-up company has never been more optimal, thanks to recent interest in technology and innovation. Profit valuations of successful start-ups have also skyrocketed in response to a rise in venture capital investors. Creating a start-up also celebrates low-cost entry, making it easier than ever to jump in and play a hand at the game of business. As many as 40 start-ups in 2013 were valued at $1 billion or more, according to a NY Times article.
But as effortless as it is to create a start-up business, the real challenge lies in evolving it. Only 1 out of every 10 start-up companies make it to the 5th year. What are the barriers that prevent the suc...
One of the biggest reasons that a startup’s marketing initiative fails is because they aren’t treating potential customers like people. It’s an easy mistake to make.
When you have target KPIs to meet, you need to be thinking in terms of numbers and metrics. But if you start seeing the world merely through the lens of numbers and begin to neglect the human element, your message is unlikely to connect with your target audience.
What’s the solution? Buyer personas.
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data and categorized by market segment.
When you envision a composite “person” as you’re creating your marketing content and messaging, you’re more likely to create something that’s relevant and mea...
How could we possibly be "right" as Founders when literally everything we are doing is unknown?
Think about it — we're building a startup that has never existed with a product that's being invented and run by a team that's never worked together delivering to a customer who has never heard of us. Oh, and did I mention as Founders we've probably never done this before?
What about that formula drives certainty?
Let me start by saying this — there is no possible way, NO possible way, that as startup Founders (especially first-time founders) we could possibly make the right decision over and over in our early-stage startup.
In fact, the only way TO make the right decision is going to be to make tons of mi...
What an exciting moment! You’re looking to scale up your startup and need to bring in a growth agency to help you do that. But, it’s a big decision. Choosing the wrong agency will lead to months of delayed growth, thousands of dollars in wasted spend, and difficult conversations down the line trying to understand where it all went wrong.
This means it is vitally important you make the right decision from the get-go. There are hundreds of marketing agencies out there, but if you are in the startup phase of growth I’d recommend going with a startup growth agency that has experience in the earlier stages.
I have done some of the research for you by putting together a list of the top 9 startup agencies I know deliver great results. So, at least...