“Our target market is everyone!”
If we had a dollar for every time we heard these words from Founders here at Startups.co, we would have… okay, so we’re not quite sure. But it would be a lot of dollars.
We get it: planting your flag and defining your target market can be scary. It means taking a stand and proclaiming to the world, “This is who we are.” And, maybe just as scary and definitely just as important, “This is who we aren’t.”
But let us give it to you straight: your target market is not “everyone.” At least, not right away. And you know something else? You don’t want it to be, either.
In layman’s terms, a target market is a group or groups of consumers in which a product or service is intended for.
When you meet someone, you know whether there’s a connection. Shared experiences, interests, and values can quickly bond total strangers.
Brands aren’t people, of course, but branding is about humanizing a brand in a way that helps consumers connect with it.
Today, brand authenticity and trust top shoppers’ priority lists. Sixty-four percent say shared values influence their authentic brand relationships, and 63 percent prefer to buy from brands they perceive as honest.
Just look at Warby Parker. “We believe everyone has the right to see,” its slogan proclaims. By selling designer frames with a socially conscious and a frictionless customer experience, the scrappy eye wear brand found friends in an overpriced, impersonal market.
Seemingly o...
Today I’m really excited to share some great news: we’ve just completed the acquisition of Zana.io, a world-class educational platform for startups.
Zana is the brainchild of my friend Shea Tate-Di Donna. While at True Ventures, she created the well-regarded “True University” to help educate their 150 portfolio companies on the best practices for starting a company. That effort led to the formation of Zana as an extension of Shea’s dream to democratize the type of learning often reserved only for venture-funded Silicon Valley companies.
Educating entrepreneurs is one of the most critical initiatives we’ve embraced at Startups.co, and we couldn’t be happier to bring Zana into our family to help drive us forward.
Now 1 million startups on our...
The answers below are provided by members of FounderSociety, an invitation-only organization comprised of ambitious startup founders and business owners.
Before there was Yelp, there was CitySearch. It was a similar concept and was the go-to site for finding places around the city. But just as quickly as it rose, it declined. It stopped innovating and updates to the site were slow. From the outside, it seemed as if hubris and failing to innovate killed them. The lesson learned for me is when you stop innovating, your company fades away.
— John Arroyo
Arroyo Labs, Inc.
As the founder of a rapidly growing food startu...
Let’s talk about the “f” word. No, not that “f” word. Let’s talk about startup fundraising.
We’re living at an exciting time for startups and funding. For a long time, access to capital was restricted to the elite “in-crowds” in marquee cities like New York and Silicon Valley. If you didn’t live in one of those select few areas, you basically didn’t have a prayer of seeing a check from an angel or a VC.
But the tide has started to turn. Innovation can come from anywhere, and now, thanks to the Internet, the JOBS Act, and the rise of crowdfunding, so can startup funding. Even VC’s are getting wise to the fact that the best investments may not all come from the same zip code.
So now that we’re living in this brave new world of democracy in st...
Warren Buffett, at the ripe age of 18, learned to grow his wealth in a way many young startups couldn’t. Buffet and a high school friend bought a pinball machine to put in a barbershop, hoping to make a few bucks. However, he didn’t run out and spend his earnings on new sneakers or a cool car: He reinvested them.
Buffet and his friend bought more pinball machines, eventually stocking eight local barbershops. When they sold the fledgling business, he used his profits to buy stocks and start another company. Today, Warren Buffet — who once was nothing more than a kid with an arcade game — is worth more than $67 billion.
Regular reinvestment has huge benefits for startups. Reinvesting increases working capital and leads ...
About time we had a little word on siloed organizations—many departments and sometimes even frontiers! Does this look familiar?
Nodding head? Ok!
What does this look like to your customers?
They don’t see silos—they see content!
It starts with perspective — different teams have a different idea on the role of content. Let’s look at a typical marketing team — lots of people with a tendency to wear black. And then there is the guy who runs the show and is responsible for content marketing.
This role did not exist 5 years ago because something has radically changed. As Lori from Forrester said: “74% of business buyers told Forrester they conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline...
Got questions? Ask thousands of world class expert mentors from Clarity.fm!
Once you’ve selected a target audience how do you value market size?
Let’s say I have defined a target audience for my startup, defined a clear problem to be solved and the type of customer I want. How do I go from there to calculate the market size? Are there any good free tools out there for entrepreneurs and investors to figure out the monetary size of the market or to estimate the number of potential users?
Serena De Maio, Brand Builder, Marketing Strategist, & Entrepreneur, answered:
Let’s take the example of Uber, shall we? You have defined the following target group: 30-40 who use taxis but that are dissatisfied with the current taxi offer.
You could est...
Hiten Shah, Co-Founder of Quick Sprout, KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, is a proven sales and growth expert. His years of experience founding, advising, investing in or working with startups have crystallized into a wealth of knowledge about how to grow a successful company.
If you have the time, watch the video below to hear Hiten reflect on how he thinks about sales funnels. To help you out, we’ve outlined the major points below for your easy perusal, as well as provided some foundational information about sales funnels to further illuminate Hiten’s point of view.
Hiten explains that essentially, a sales funnel is the “step-by-step process of things your user or customer does to accomplish a goal.” You may not think that your customers go th...
Startups.com marketing technology stack
First up, what even is Martech? This is an abbreviation of “marketing technology.” It’s the tools and software you use in your day-to-day sales and marketing.
The reference to the “stack” has been used by developers for years, in reference to the technology and codebases they use within the products they build. Martech Stack references the marketing technologies and tools you use within your marketing infrastructure set-up.
By stacking these tools together and integrating them you create a consistent, automated flow of data between your tools.
The likelihood is that you already have some form of Martech Stack in place, even without...