This is a guest post by David Hug, a Zürich-based professional startup investor, currently acting as Managing Director at Ringier Digital Ventures. Innovation, entrepreneurship and venture capital are almost synonyms of the Silicon Valley. Over the last years, this way of thinking is gaining more and more attention in Europe. Not only famous examples from the West Coast like Facebook, Twitter and Uber started dominating our life. Also European start-ups like Spotify, Zalando or Skype changed our habits. Especially Zalando, which has chosen a new way of aggressive TV marketing to gain our attention. Most of us asked ourselves, how can a new venture finance such an aggressive marketing campaign? The solution used by Zalando to invade TV screens? Media for equity (M4E)! You may have never heard of it, and this post you’ll get more familiar with this interesting …
Launching your service: think about UX !
You often hear first-time entrepreneurs with an idea that they need to find a technical co-founder, a software developer. Which is quite a tricky thing. Why ? Because everybody understands that you are looking for someone who you won’t have to pay to build your product. Why is it so difficult for business guys with an idea to find a technical co-founder? Software developers have ideas (the good ones) and they can build things on their own. Without the business guy. So, first hand, you have to convince them that your idea is better than theirs. Given they have or can get easily (at least in Switzerland) a very decent, safe salary in a bigger company… Mission : impossible ? But, to quote Che Guevara : « Be realistic, demand the impossible ! » (Che Guevara) Developers are probably even more skeptical as all the other people …
What Is the Difference Between Marketing and Growth Hacking?
(Guest post written by Vincent Cassar) Many people do marketing for startups, and like most of them the term ‘growth hacker’ is a term I both love and loathe. Of course the words ‘growth hacker’ has given startup marketers the ability to separate themselves from their brothers in Corporate America, however those two words still bother me a lot. Anyway, it looks like the term is here to stay, so we should now decipher what this term ‘growth hacking’ really means. Once we understand it, then we can use it to our advantage. So, What Is the Difference Between These Two Terms? A growth hacker is basically a marketer, but a marketer with different tools to work with and a different set of challenges to face. There are some major differences between a startup and big business: A startup is …
SALES: the challenges of selling your product as a startup
It has been quite a long time without any post from me… I hope you haven’t missed me too much! I’ve been extremely busy these last weeks with travelling (music summit in Ibiza, the Venture Leader trip) and so on… But I’m back again to blogging! I’ve been thinking a lot about sales in the last weeks. During my flight to the US, I’ve beed watching « The Wolf of Wall Street » (OK, I know it was released 6 months ago… I’ve never had time to watch movies !). It’s a really interesting story, especially on the selling point of view. Jordan Belfort (Leonardo di Caprio) is an expert in sales. It’s amazing to watch the techniques he’s using (even if we can argue that he’s selling with a really shortsight view). While teaching his friends how to sell anything, he used a …
Smooth scaling
(Guest post by Shane Russo) Starting and running a business is a great adventure; however, in order to succeed in the massive sea of competition, a business must be able to adapt to the constantly changing tides, particularly with scalability. If a business is unable to start strong, it is likely that they’ll run into some rough waters as they begin to expand. As the market changes and evolves, so must a business. According to this infographic created by SmartTollFreeNumber.com, startups who are willing to redesign are often able to raise 250% more money, as well as see a 360% increase in user growth. Not only that, but these more flexible startups are also 52% less likely to scale prematurely. With these numbers in mind, it would appear that scalability is the essential cornerstone of your startup. With so many …
Public Relations for Startups
from Ballou PR Public Relations is not easy to master when you’re doing your startup. Yes, you’d like to get press coverage. But you don’t know how to handle it and how to get in the mind of the journalist you try to attract attention. In one sentence: you don’t know how to hack public relations. There are many public relations agencies out there, but most don’t tell entrepreneurs they shouldn’t hire a PR firm before raising a proper Serie A financing round. But so does Colette Ballou, a PR expert active for startups in a European level (with offices in London, Paris and Berlin) and who provides mentoring at famous startup accelerators like TechStars, Seedcamp and 500startups. Colette hosted a workshop at NEXT Berlin 2013 (study and bookmark the Slideshare presentation above!), extremely insightful and with directly actionable advices. …