If you’re going to create a great product that people love — and maybe even pay for — then you have to know your customer. And the best way to get to know your customer? Market research.
Market research is essential for any company, from tiny startups to massive corporations, but you have to do it right for it to work.
What steps are involved? Well, it starts with an organized and thorough market research process.
The very first step to conducting great market research is defining your goals. What do you want to learn from this research? What questions are you answering? In order to get the most useful information, you’re going to want to develop defined research or a hypot...
John Tabis was doing fine at his old job. More than fine, actually: he was Director of Corporate Brand Development at Disney.
But instead of continuing to rock the cushy corporate life, John teamed up with his friend Juan Pablo (JP) Montufar-Arroyo and launched The Bouqs, an online flower delivery company. Neither of them had very much money so they went to friends and family and pulled together $13,000 to get started.
That was four years ago. Today, they’re working with nearly $20 million in VC money — and John definitely doesn’t miss Disney.
A native Ecuadorian who grew up on a rose farm, JP witnessed firsthand the low prices, slow payment, and rampant waste that plague the traditional flower supply chain. And on the online branding side ...
Nearly every Founder feels woefully behind their friends in life.
As it happens, we picked a particularly shitty profession to ever feel "ahead" of our friends and colleagues. Most of our friends have regular jobs where they actually get paid every week, whereas we spend the entire month wondering if and how we'll get paid at all.
The problem compounds when we start to look at our successful Founder colleagues because the delta in success can be so astronomical so quickly. We start to assume that their successes become a reflection of our failures. But what we're missing in that comparison is how the benchmarks themselves are completely broken.
It all starts when we try to invent where we should be in life as if our pat...
I going to share the story of the creepiest, least appropriate guerrilla marketing tactic I’ve ever come across. I’m not going to name the startup founder who did it, nor am I going to tell you identifying details about his company. I just want to make sure that no founder trying to get ahead hears a story like this and thinks, “Oh, that’s a great idea!”
No. It is not a great idea. It’s terrible.
Let’s rewind. The other day I came home to a package on my couch. Now, this isn’t a rare occurrence — I order off of Amazon as much as the next Millennial American — but I didn’t recognize the return address. “Weird,” I thought. “What’s this?”
My boyfriend poured me a glass of wine and I absentmindedly ripped the package open while telling him abou...
There are a lot of options when it comes to startup funding. And sometimes those different options can overlap — or at least seem to. That’s the case with private equity and venture capital.
The biggest differences, traditionally, between VC and private equity are the stage of the company they invest in and the type of growth they’re looking for. Venture capital tends to go for early stage, higher risk companies with potential for “hockey stick” growth, which is when a company goes from nothing to everything, super fast. Private equity, on the other hand, is interested in companies that have already established themselves, but need more capital in order to thrive.
Another bi...
The question of whether entrepreneurship can be "taught" has been volleyed back and forth between academics and Founders forever.
The academics believe that entrepreneurship is a process that can be learned and executed, while the hardcore Founders feel like you either have "the right stuff" and figure shit out or you don't.
This is one of those cases where both are right, but both are asking the wrong question.
A ton, from how to validate an idea to managing your finances or setting up marketing campaign can absolutely be taught — and if we're being honest, are sorely lacking amongst most startup Founders today.
If you don't think those fundamental skills are helpful to building a startup, t...
The myth of the "stolen startup idea" somehow continues to live on, despite an insane lack of proof to the contrary. The thinking goes that if someone else hears our idea, they will simply take it and create a billion dollar business from it.
On paper (and in movies) that can happen. In reality, it's basically a Sasquatch myth.
Just having an "idea" for something accounts for nothing. Great companies aren't built because someone had an idea for something that no one else thought of — we all have novel ideas.
Great companies are built through an insane amount of dedication and execution that (rarely) leads to a big outcome.
By the way, plenty of people had the idea for a social network — and built them — before Facebook was ever "stolen."
...Ask any startup marketer out there and they’ll tell you: email marketing is the gold standard of early-stage marketing strategies. If marketing is the car that gets your company where it needs to go, email marketing is the Volvo. It’s affordable, it’s reliable, and it’s known for unbeatable performance.
“Email marketing is the best and most affordable way to market anything to any audience, and in a highly personal way.” says Cyberwalker Digital Founder (and email marketing expert) Andy Walker. “The return on investment is better than any other technique to reach customers. And it works for brand building and generating direct sales.”
But let’s not kid ourselves: email marketing strategy is notoriously difficult to get right. If it were eas...
If starting a company is a race (and it is – it really, really is) then launch day is the starting line.
Everything you do before your product launch is the warm-up. (The very essential, very unskippable warmup). Everything that comes after? It’s the frantic, mad dash to the finish line, whatever and wherever that might be.
Your product launch is the inflection point. It’s the point to which everything before it leads up, and everything that comes after comes out of. And a successful product launch starts with a successful product launch strategy.
We all want our product to start out of the gate strong. But what exactly goes into a successful product launch? Stuart Brent, Co-Founder of MapPlug, has an idea or two on the subject. Not only h...
Social media is a marketing tool pre-Internet marketers could only dream of. A virtually complete directory of every consumer on the planet? Indexed and targetable by age, gender, location, and a hundred other identifiable details? Maybe in science fiction, a marketer of 40 years ago would have said.
Never forget, startup founders and marketers of the 21st century: we are living in the future.
But, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Social media is a tool. And, like, any tool, it is only as good as how it’s used – and what it’s used for. Nowhere is that more clear than in the world of social media advertising.
When it comes to social media advertising, execution is everything. And here’s the thing: ninety percent of t...