Did you know that one of the biggest media event of the world will happen in Lausanne area end of April? As well as I know that there are many things that I don’t know, this event hasn’t reached my ears… until Eileen asked me if I was interested to attend as an official blogger! Of course, it has directly excited my curiosity. And what I’ve discovered is that it seems to be a MUST-attend event, at least for everyone active in the media and brands industry! Main objective of Festival of Media Global, taking place from 28th to 30th of April 2013 in Montreux, is to bring together professionals of media trading (which is the art of buying and optimizing advertising spaces). And to show what’s next in the brand communications industry… so, something where media startups can easily fit! Event …
You’ll fail… so what?
If you’re planning to start a business, you probably know that the odds are big that you’ll fail your venture. Or if you don’t know it, wake up. There are many smart guys out there who did many things right and finally failed their startup. You’ve probably heard about these statistics: on 10 investments, only one will be a big success, 2-3 will reimburse the investment and all the other ones will be worthless. What can be scary is that it only takes into account the funded startups. But how many get financing? One on ten? If we take these (probably wrong) numbers as a basis to evaluate your success chance, we can assume that you have a 3-4% of beeing financially OK with the company you’re putting in so many efforts. OK, here, I’m consciously neglecting lifestyle business (you’re …
Where to get the skills you need for your startup journey
It is (or it should be) common sense that the team is what matters the most in a startup. And its ability to execute. Because if you have a rockstars team which fails to work together, well… It doesn’t bring the venture anywhere! You can be extremely competent in sales or in UX or in software development. But starting is a business is often tricky. You have suddenly many things to learn on the go, alongside working on your product. And no time. Yes, no time. The scarcest resource for startup entrepreneurs is T-I-M-E (well, money comes second and is really close, of course). As an entrepreneur, you only have “priority 1 tasks”… and everything seems urgent. Scaring? But so exciting, too! How do you get the skills you need as quickly as possible? Yeah, you can read blogs and …
SBB.connect, an awesome idea! BUT…
Last December, the Swiss national railway company SBB/CFF launched a new mobile application to connect rail travelers. The basic idea is to let you check-in for all your trips and… BOOM: you see who is in the place or in the train (Facebook and twitter connections, random people), and you can even chat with them. As well as I didn’t put much value on at first, I’ve experienced it 3 times: 2 times, someone I’ve met years before chatted with me, once I’ve seen a friend was on board (and bumped at him randomly right after, looking for a seat. But the main point off the app is to record your travel routes and collect points (you can even buy train tickets from the app). And become a mayor and/or benefit from vouchers at rail station shops. You can get specific badges …
10 hot things you didn’t know about e-commerce
At LeWeb, I’ve mainly met people rather than listening to keynotes and attending workshops (even if some of them were amazing… it’s unfortunately difficult to duplicate itself!). One of the workshop I have listened to was hold by LaPoste.fr and was about e-commerce. Here after you’ll find some key learning from this workshop! Behind an enviable growth, e-commerce is an industry making little money! Because of: two e-commerce websites are created every hour gross profit is tiny, except if you integrate the complete value chain digital production + logistics + marketing is extremely costly. Cost of customer acquisition is growing and conversion rate is decreasing repeat purchase doesn’t happen so often, even at Amazon (only 3 times per year, and when you recognize they have a huge inventory… that’s scaring for e-commerce players!) Customers are mutants, changing much quicker than …
Is wine the new goldmine?
There are many entrepreneurs out there desiring to start an incredible business to change the world. You sometimes hear people expressing they’d like to launch something, but they don’t have THE idea now. Or you meet people reinventing the wheel, copying a business that was already successful in the US (on this topic: in the recent years, business models originally launched in Europe were also copied in the US, like Criteo or Vente Privée). In my opinion, there is nothing wrong to adapt a business model to fit the local needs. Because 1-to-1 implementation often doesn’t work (2 Swiss show cases of this theory are Ricardo.ch or DeinDeal.ch), especially in a tiny but complex market as Switzerland. Problematic can be when a dozen of entrepreneurs are hunting the same game. In Zürich, the Graal seems to be the parking solutions: …
7 tips for a successful social media campaign
Last week was LeWeb conference happening in Paris. Again, a lot of interesting talks and amazing people to meet during these 3 crazy busy days. Alexis Thobellem, Global Digital Manager at Evian and one of the guy involved in the amazing “Roller Babies” video clip success (60M + views by now), gave a talk about Evian’s experience on brand curation and editorialization of content to better engage its fans. At Evian, they started not by the question “what can do web & social media for the brand?”, but by what their brand could do for the web! I’ve found some offline content about Alexis’ beliefs on what are the key indispensable factors to run a successful corporate social media marketing campaign and I thought it was worth sharing. So here they are! Be sure you have something to gain by jumping …
HOW TO get press coverage for your startup?
When you’re starting your awesome startup, you’re facing many challenges and you have a lot of assumptions you have to test. For instance, you often don’t know if your Minimum Viable Product will find its market fit (OK, you can meltdown this a bit thanks to customer development), if you’ll be good enough to motivate people (read: other fools) to join your journey, if your business is really scalable, if investors will catch the potential of your startup and if you’ll be credible enough to convince them to bet on you… And there are many other assumptions I’ve not written here. And there’s also getting known on the market. How do you handle that? For sure, you can build your brand awareness by making targeted advertising. But that’s often too expensive for startups and probably not so effective. Or you can establish …