Startup Weekend UW 1/25/13

We’ll talk about Startup Weekends in class, but here’s an event you should consider signing up for – or at least stopping by to check out.

http://swuw.eventbrite.com/

About Startup Weekend: Startup Weekends are 54-hour events designed to provide superior experiential education for technical and non-technical entrepreneurs.  Beginning with Friday night pitches and continuing through brainstorming, business plan development, and basic prototype creation, Startup Weekends culminate in Sunday night demos and presentations.  Participants create working startups during the event and are able to collaborate with like-minded individuals outside of their daily networks. All teams hear talks by industry leaders and receive valuable feedback from local entrepreneurials. The weekend is centered around action, innovation, and education.  Whether you are looking for feedback on a idea, a co-founder, specific skill sets, or a team to help you execute, Startup Weekends are the perfect environment in which to test your idea and take the first steps towards launching your own startup.

Welcome to Winter Quarter, Marketing 555

More updates will be added in the coming weeks, but here are some good quotes my business partner drew from a great article.  Read the whole post from Paul Graham if any of these bullets spark your interest.

“Thanks to Sam Altman, Mike Arrington, Paul Buchheit, John Collison, Patrick Collison, Garry Tan, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this, and Marc Andreessen, Joe Gebbia, Reid Hoffman, Shel Kaphan, Mike Moritz and Kevin Systrom for answering my questions about startup history.”

• When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they’ll use it even when it’s a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they’ve never heard of? If you can’t answer that, the idea is probably bad.
• Live in the future, then build what’s missing.
• The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not “think up” but “notice.” At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders’ own experiences “organic” startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way. it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend. when these problems get solved, they will probably seem flamingly obvious in retrospect.
• Working on things that could be dismissed as “toys” often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It’s cool; users love it; it just doesn’t matter. But if you’re living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think At YC we’re excited when we meet startups working on things that we could imagine know-it-alls on forums dismissing as toys. To us that’s positive evidence an idea is good.
• Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that’s the real recipe.
• Worrying that you’re late is one of the signs of a good idea.
• It’s exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors—so rare that you can almost discount the possibility
• Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors.
• The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There mustbe things you need.
• It can be a good trick to look for those that are dying, or deserve to, and try to imagine what kind of company would profit from their demise. For example, journalism is in free fall at the moment. But there may still be money to be made from something like journalism. What sort of company might cause people in the future to say “this replaced journalism” on some axis?
• When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but important market that the big players ignore. It’s particularly good if there’s an admixture of disdain in the big players’ attitude, because that often misleads them.
• More precisely, the users’ need has to give them sufficient activation energy to start using whatever you make, which can vary a lot. For example, the activation energy for enterprise software sold through traditional channels is very high, so you’d have to be a lot better to get users to switch.
• This is an instance of a more general rule: focus on users, not competitors. The most important information about competitors is what you learn via users anyway
• Paul Buchheit points out that trying to sell something bad can be a source of better ideas: “The best technique I’ve found for dealing with YC companies that have bad ideas is to tell them to go sell the product ASAP (before wasting time building it). Not only do they learn that nobody wants what they are building, they very often come back with a real idea that they discovered in the process of trying to sell the bad idea.”

Pareto Principle…a cure for marketing decision fatigue

One of the biggest takeaways for me was getting familiarized with the plethora of options available to today’s digital marketer. From Twitter to Foursquare and SEOmoz to FollowerWonk, I learned there is no shortage of digital channels and optimization tools available. Resultantly, I also learned that digital marketing can quickly become a daunting task with a near infinite number of options. I believe the real question marketers should be asking themselves is not what more they can do but instead what they should eliminate. To answer this question, marketers should turn to the Pareto Principle which states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the efforts come from 20% of the causes. I believe this principle holds true for many digital marketing efforts and is a perfect tool for eliminating the decision fatigue that plagues many marketers. For instance, to determine the best time to Tweet marketers should use FollowerWonk to pinpoint the exact hour when the 20% of customers who comprise 80% of their site’s traffic are most active on Twitter. Doing less is more with the Pareto Principle which is especially important for marketers who are increasingly overwhelmed by the number of digital options available to them.

In terms of companies, I look forward to following Evernote. While not a startup, it is interesting to watch them build a robust ecosystem of 3^rd party apps which is a compelling reason for users, like me, to fork over $5 monthly fee.

Oh Yeah, And Do a Social Media Campaign…

The breadth and depth of topics covered in Entrepreneurial Marketing this past quarter has been expansive, to put it mildly.  Some of the key points have been stressed often enough throughout my MBA career: know your customer, size the market, have a plan! For me, the one key take-away is this: social media is more than a channel, it’s a community – or rather, series of communities.  And in order to leverage social media successfully to build your brand and market your product, you need to engage in community service.  Simply having a company Facebook page won’t cut it anymore – you need to engage with your customers, your peers, and yes – your critics, too!

Furthermore, each forum is unique – customers use Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest in different ways, to different ends.  Understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of these channels will help you develop a campaign that can not just reach, but also connect with your target consumers.  The best social media campaigns are rooted in interpersonal interactions – that is, they are linked to the humanity behind your brand.  And in order to get your customers to connect with you, you need to contribute something to them – something beyond the service your product provides.  A great way to do this is through social media.

One company I will continue to follow is Glympse, which provides a timed, ephemeral glympse of a user’s real-time location via a map-sharing app.  Glympse brilliantly recognizes a key concern of privacy among consumers in an overly-social-networked world, and therefore stops sharing your location after the user-determined period of location-sharing time has elapsed and does not keep records.  This allows customers to reach out to individuals in their social networks and effectively solve the age-old “but where ARE you and when will you get here?” problem while respecting customers’ desire to keep that information protected from the world at large.

Holiday shoppers

As the holiday season hits full swing millions of web shoppers are opening their virtual wallets to find that perfect gift for their loved ones. Whether its toasters, lawn furniture or tablets, everyone is out for the best possible deal. Shoppers share the worry that their target item will soon go on sale. Enter Decide.com. Their mission: Providing objective, data-driven shopping advice to help consumers make the best buying decisions possible.  Decide.com is located right here in Seattle and is backed by Madrona and Maveron. Using data driven analysis, Decide.com predicts price movements on millions of products across dozens of the top retailers (e.g. Amazon, BBY, TGT, SHLD).

Consumers demand more from their online shopping experience (listen up Amazon) and are willing to pay for more. What else you ask? Consider the following, you are near making a significant investment into a new DSLR Camera. Such a purchase carries a hefty price tag and only occurs every 5-7 years for most consumers. Knowing whether or not the model of interest is due for an upgrade or next generation model is a nugget of information of great value. Decide.com is currently charging $10/month for the service (no lock-in) and is expected to grow and mature their offering as the user base expands. Decide.com, if they get the technology and consumer experience right has the potential to, at a minimum, get large share of the online shopping search traffic. NY Times has boasted “Perhaps the biggest consumer weapon arrived this year in the form of Decide.com” Pretty powerful stuff, eh? Try it and let me know what you think.

The Power of Social?

To be upfront, I was a social media skeptic. I think the industry has been hyped too much and is still way too young for anyone to truly say how much social media actually drives sales. It feels like companies have traded in measuring revenue growth for clicks, impressions, views, like, tweets, followers or whatever the latest “trend” in social media is. While I do still believe that the social media realm is being relied on too heavily, I am a firm believer that almost every marketing approach has its place in the business world.  Perhaps the most important concept I learned in the Marketing class was how to use social media to accomplish a specific task. Social media isn’t some magic bullet that will sky rocket sales, but creating a social media strategy to accomplish a specific and measurable goal is incredibly useful. Whether the goal is the spread your product through word of mouth, create awareness for new products, retain customer or simply provide a platform to interact with your customers, social media plays an important role int he business world when it is applied appropriately. So while I do still believe the vast majority of companies are using social media too broadly, I have leaned that when given a specific and measurable strategy, social media can provide a business a differentiating factor from its competitors.

Review: real and practical marketing strategies

I am not a business major student, but I have learnt a lot from this excellent class. To me, this marketing class is different from what I know about marketing. I learnt the basic knowledge of marketing, but I think my knowledge has been updated from this class a lot.

First of all, Internet has been enrolled in our everyday life, web marketing becomes more and more important. I had never noticed the importance of the web marketing as well as the role of social network. Most start-ups are doing web campaign instead of traditional one. The usage of Facebook and Twitter show me another world in marketing. Moreover, the design of website for a company is crucial. Learn who your target customers are and where they can find you, and then tailor your website for them. It is like to tell a compelling story to your potential customers.

Secondly, from this class I know what is real marketing. A real marketing strategy is totally different from fancy strategies from the book. From case studies and panels, I realized that some strategies are fantastic but only in books, which cannot be applied to real campaign. Real case studies did not include many fancy ideas, all of them are basic but tailored according to the companies’ characteristics.

I also benefit a lot from searching for information. In case studies and assignments, we have to discuss with the entrepreneurs as well as search the Internet for data. Moreover, when you have the access to huge amount of information, how to get what you want is also a necessary skill. The companies I want to follow up include, Innovatively Organized, portfolioGen, and Glympse, SEOMoz to learn more stuff of marketing.

Think it out, and implement your marketing plan on the fly!

While there were valuable nuggets of entrepreneurial marketing goodness jam packed in every week, the most valuable thing I learned was where to look for particular marketing and entrepreneurial resources, both online, and in the real world.  Each class session was jam packed with great resources including SlideShare decks, valuable frameworks, and practical knowledge that comes from the experience of marketing a product firsthand.  One of the best ways to learn is simply by researching and digging up information via Google or a couple of speciality resources.  From companies like 9Slides and HaikuDeck for making powerpoints simpler, SlideShare for viewing past presentations, to local tech press like Geekwire SportsPress NorthWest, that help in staying with the local current events, there was value to be had at every step of the way. 

 

However, the most important thing I believe I learned was the importance of a well thought out marketing plan.  While we went through each step in a well crafted marketing plan each week, we often times were working with Entrepreneurs in the real world who haven’t taken in this type of assessment.  Often times when you are in the day to day of building a company, you don’t stop and think about the strategy of putting out the product in the most marketable way.  By doing so, using appropriate frameworks and understanding the need to pivot when necessary, one can help steer the company forward.

 

I’ll continue to read Geekwire regularly after this course, as well as SportsPress NW, and have a much better understanding of SEO now after looking into SEOMoz.  I lso think that I will use SlideShare in the future, as well as follow Steve Blank’s blog, since the information there has been helpful in framing my Entrepreneurial experiences.  While some of my classmates may not be pursuing entrepreneurship in the future, I have a feeling that some of these resources could prove to be valuable if entrepreneurship is in my future.

Entrepreneurial Onwards

This has been one rewarding class. Working with entrepreneurs and other in the startup community, especially the Seattle community has inspired a sense of comfort. It’s encouraging that those entrepreneurs who have come before me are so willing to help and makes the risky venture of start-ups seem a lot less daunting.

Prior to this class, I was all about B2C marketing and start-ups in this sector. However, I was able to understand the appeal of B2B, and got introduced to the concept of B2B2C. I think I will continue to follow Liz from Liquid Planner and Adam from Simply measured and see how their business progress and increase traction. I will also continue to learn from their experience of business expansion.

Practical Credit FTW!

For this Entrepreneurial Marketing course, I’ll break my key takeaways down to “Entrepreneurial” and “Marketing” aspects. And for no specific reason, I’m gonna start with Marketing.

[Marketing]

Coming from a corporate marketing background, I’ve always linked “great marketing campaigns” with “great amount of marketing budget”. Throughout this course, we were introduced various marketing tactics and tools that actually won’t cost a fortune. I couldn’t help but wonder, what if the companies I worked for can adopt those tools? How much SG&A expenses they can save? Will they need to hire an additional employee to manage these tools? In that case, should they just hire another agency or consulting firm to do so? What will be the most cost effective and strategic way to arrange this?… And then I realized, hmm, I am turning into an MBA! Yay…?

Nevertheless, I highly appreciate this opportunity to not only refresh our core marketing strategy memories, but also apply the concepts we’ve learned in classroom to a (fake) real world startup idea.

[Entrepreneurial]

As a risk averse person, I’ve doubted myself will ever work in a startup or an entrepreneurial-minded company. Therefore, I’ve never tried to develop personal or professional relationships in the startup network. In this 10 week course, more than 20 entrepreneurs or startup professionals came to speak to this small group (which I believe is one of the most valuable elements of this course). By listening to their stories and experiences, I’m gradually taking my “corporate-employee-to-be” hat off. One of the key takeaways was actually what we’ve heard frequently from entrepreneurs, “just start doing stuff, and learn from mistakes!” Although I’m not 100% sure, I think I will be ready to start taking unknown risks, soon, maybe.

On a side note, one of my high school friends launched an iPhone app called “Prototyping On Paper“. We recently had a casual conversation about his business plan and marketing strategy, and I was extremely excited about applying what I’ve learned from this class! Practical credit FTW!

[What/who I will follow]

• For learning stuff: SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin, Kate Matsudaira
• For their business model and development: Z Girls, SportsPressNW, Korrio, Haiku Deck
• For their marketing strategy: Glympse, Brandbudee
• For investment opportunity: Orabrush!

Stories and Customers

Two big takeaways for me this quarter were know your customer and have a compelling story. The idea of who your customer is and where he/she can find your product or service was key this quarter. If you don’t know who your customers are and where to find them, then all the marketing strategies you come up with will miss the boat. You have to go out and dialogue with potential customers to see if they will buy and what would make them buy or prevent them from buying. Knowing your customers will help you reach them, sell to them, and establish a relationship. I really liked the idea of treating your first 100 or 200 customers special and going out of your way to reach out to them. Not only will this create more customer loyalty and satisfaction, it will provide an entrepreneur crucial feedback. Feedback from the first customers will help a business make the important adjustments to appeal to other customers.

It is not always easy to have a compelling story. We all start businesses because we are passionate about something. There is something out there that we think we can help fix or solve. Taking your passion for your business and making a story out of it can be very compelling. Not everyone out there will care about what you are doing, but there will be people who connect with your mission and passion; those are the people who will be excellent customers, partners, and promoters. A compelling story helps a business gain customers and convey a message. A compelling story will help a business obtain media coverage and a social presence. A compelling story will also help a business acquire funding from investors.

Position: One and DONE

I’ll be honest here. The truth of the matter is — I will probably never start my own business. Yeah yeah, I know you should never say never, but I haven’t been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, and I’m not sure if I ever will. I must have coated myself with anti-startup bug spray at some point in my life. Having said that, I found this course to be extremely helpful in understanding how entrepreneurs think (or at least, SHOULD think). And while I don’t envision myself on the cover of Fast Company any time soon, the topics covered in Marketing 555 are actually quite applicable — regardless of whether you work for yourself, or work for a large enterprise (a.k.a. The Man).

One golden nugget that resonated with me over the past quarter is Andy’s Rule of Positioning:

You must always be able to tell everyone you meet the same sentence about your product or company. If everyone receives a customized version of a positioning statement, no one can repeat what they’ve heard.

Well… what would you say you DO here?

I think this rule can be applied to a business OR your functional role WITHIN a company. If someone asks what your job is, you should be able to answer with one clear, concise statement. I can vividly recall one situation from my consulting career where this advice could have really helped someone. My team was doing a meet and greet with a client, and as such things go, everyone went around in a circle and stated what their responsibility was for the project. When it was my team lead’s turn, I thought to myself, “What is she going to say? She doesn’t ACTUALLY add any value around here. I’m sure she’ll make something up.” No. She couldn’t think of anything. She fumbled her words and finally spit something out about managing people or something. It was painful — like the scene from Office Space where Tom has to explain to the Bobs what his job entails. SPOILER ALERT. He ultimately gets fired. Ouch. Should have taken Andy’s class.

Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the #@$&%! customers so the engineers don’t have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can’t you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!

As far as the company I plan to follow going forward… I’ll follow a few. One of them will definitely be Golazo. I’m a huge advocate for the product because I actually think it’s a superior and better tasting product than many (if not all) other energy drinks I’ve tried on the market. Since we’re on the topic of positioning statement — I’m waiting to see if this will evolve at all. I’m not Hispanic, and I’m not into soccer, but I love the product. Go figure.

SEOMoz: The Final Frontier

Being an entrepreneurial marketing professional is probably not too different from being a space explorer. I’m not sure what Alan Shepard felt when he was the first American to enter outer space and see our lonely blue planet from his Mercury capsule window, but I’m certain that it is not significantly different from what an entrepreneur feels when he/she is entering uncharted territories within today’s dynamic marketplace. Okay… It’s probably a little different. But the uncertainty and risk involved in starting an independent venture is slightly relatable.

Marketing 555 provided the framework to venture off into these unknown territories. A broad swath encompassing everything from determining financial and market feasibility to execution and distribution was explained over 10 or 12 weeks. Companies exist to address a problem that may or may not exist in its targeted customers and alleviate it with its marketed solution. A go-to-market strategy is essentially that. What is this problem? How does this start-up address this problem? If customers are unaware that this problem even exists, how does a company go about educating them? Where do we find and deliver our products to these customers?

One company that I found particularly effective on all of these frontiers was SEOMoz. Specifically, their culture of transparency provides a very accessible solution within a service (SEO) that was traditionally shrouded in mystery and special-sauce secrecy.  They are part of a new frontier of Internet services. The greater Internet movement that they represent is the democratization of commerce and elimination information asymmetry between businesses and clients. As explained by SEOMoz CEO Rand Fishkin, this total transparency was something that was scoffed at by the industry and by its competitors. However, as the past several years have show, SEOMoz is an extremely disruptive model and will ultimately drive greater innovation and customer centricity in this industry as well as within the client businesses.

Know Your Customer!

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking- of course it’s all about the customer. But it really is! During our first panel, I was surprised by Richard Tait’s obsession with the young, football-crazy Hispanics that inspired Golazo. But now I get it. Brilliant product ideas and genius marketing strategies are doomed to fail if the brilliant geniuses behind them don’t understand their customers. Sometimes it was obvious, sometimes it was just under the surface, but the theme was consistent, particularly with our panelist.

The class was called Entrepreneurial Marketing, but could’ve been called Entrepreneurial Strategy. Incorporating the start-up practical exercise was a great way to force us down in the weeds to wrestle with all the concepts we learned. I don’t know how many times I drove myself crazy thinking, “this’ll never work…but it’s a great idea, how can it NOT work?” Shifting on the fly, reacting to new ideas and information, believing in the concept but not knowing how to make it fly, hours of work undone by one brutal but accurate observation- this class left me with a new sympathy for innovators and entrepreneurs.

Of all the companies we looked at over the last twelve weeks, I’ll keep an eye on GroBox. It seems like tech steals the show these days, so it’s fun to see a start-up with tangible offering. They have a really cool product, and it’ll be interesting to see if a market develops for it.

What I Learned: Nike Edition

The average person usually has a few “business ideas” sitting in their back pocket. Maybe they tell their vision to everyone they meet, or perhaps they keep their idea hidden from the world in the fear that another entrepreneur with more time, money, or ambition will snatch it from their grasp. Most of these ideas go undeveloped, as millions of armchair da Vincis don’t have the desire to start their own business. This is completely acceptable, and illustrates the broad range of lifestyles and goals that humans can have.

However, it is far less palatable when aspiring entrepreneurs let their ideas go untested. There are many resources available to entrepreneurs today that allow them to get feedback on the viability of an idea, and the cost of this validation is little more than time or a nominal fee. Testing venues include a combination of Google Analytics, Adwords, LaunchRock, SEOmoz*, FollowerWonk, online forums, focus groups, and in-person networking and pitching. With the explosion of social media, it has never been easier for a young company to manage their online presence and develop owned media. Products (especial digital ones) are becoming increasingly easy to produce and distribute, and companies are even able to generate buzz without even having a functioning prototype.

My biggest takeaway from MKTG 555 is also my advice to entrepreneurs, which can be summed up in three iconic words (courtesy of Nike): Just Do It. You don’t have to commit 100% to an idea, taking out millions in debt to produce trinkets that may or may not sell. However, you can commit 10% of your money and 90% of your free time to finding out if those trinkets are valuable to your target market, and if it’s worth it to quit your day job. Startups are leaner than ever, and feedback is cheap and abundant.

In the end, it’s just as difficult as it always has been to succeed in starting your own business. However, there are far more tools available to entrepreneurs to help them weed out the bad ideas before they become expensive mistakes. Information spreads like wildfire, and it has never been easier for news of a product to reach its target audience. While not everyone is cut out to run their own business, the few that are can remove more risk from the process than ever before.

*On a related note, I’m excited to continue to follow SEOmoz. It’s interesting that a small startup can grow like they have and become known as an industry leader in SEO. We’re in the age of intellectual property, and it’ll be interesting to monitor their relationship with companies like Google and Microsoft. Will they continue to be symbiotic, or grow more competitive?  Time will tell. 

Just Facebook won’t cut it. . . .anymore

It is becoming increasingly important for companies to emerge through the online social noise as a though leader in their industry, and utilizing the various social media channels is a phenomenal way to accomplish this.  During the course of developing a go-to-market strategy, it’s become very clear how difficult it is to plan and execute a successful social media campaign.  Social media presence isn’t established by just setting up a Facebook page, a Twitter handle, a Pinterest account, a blog and a Youtube channel.  The channels by which a company communicates their message with customers and the public, has to be thoughtful, aligned with their strategy, and the company must be an active contributor.  They can’t just set up their accounts, sit back, and passively watch their customers interact.  To grow their customer and user base the company has to be an active contributor of meaningful content to the ongoing conversation. 

 

These social media channels are definitely an inexpensive way to gain brand recognition and awareness, but this doesn’t happen overnight.  It takes time for an individual or a company to establish themselves as a though leader in their industry.  There are a numerous free, online, social platforms for a company to utilize and just picking one of these channels traditionally won’t cut it.  A company has to utilize multiple lines of communication, and all the messages sent out have to be consistent with each other. 

 

When executed correctly, a social media campaign can be a very powerful strategic tool, but it’s not a one-time effort.  It has to be an ongoing effort on the part of the company.  For every online social channel there seems to be two analytical tools that measure traffic, relevance, users, friends- there seems to be a growing number of metrics that companies can use to evaluate the success of their social media efforts and effectiveness. It’s important for a company to develop a strategy, and a strategy execution plan that has clear objectives, and it’s equally important for them to measure and analyze their success. 

 

One of the companies that I will continue to follow is Airbnb.  In my opinion airbnb is one company that has utilized the principles and tactics that we’ve studied throughout this quarter and has seen great success.  They have a deep understanding of their customers, they have a clear passion for what they do and they have a phenomenal social presence.

MKTG 555 – Review

Major Takeaways

My major takeaway throughout the course -from session 1 to the final presentations – was to always beginn with your customer:

1. Find a big enough target market
2. Understand the needs of this target market
3. How you can solve a problem for your target market
4. Develop your product together with your customer and get frequent feedback
5. Sell to the customer via appropriate channels.

From Golazo to Jury members for our final presentation, they all mentioned how important it is to start with customers and put them in the center of all actions.

One of my roommates currently starts a company. They NEVER focused on the customer before but only made assumptions about what they may like or not like. After telling him about the importance of customer focus from teh very beginning, he started surveying members of the target market. What he ended up with was a very different product & functionality compared to what they were developing. They could have saved a lot of resources had they included customer feedback very eraly on.

What Company I Will Follow

My major interest lies in the food industry. So I will definitely follow start-ups in the food industry.

555 in review

This class was one of the more interesting classes I’ve had at Foster. The entrepreneurs that come in and speak offer a great perspective on successes and failures in all types of businesses. The recent venture capital session resonated the most because I’ve never been exposed to VC’s before and to hear their perspective on what it takes to get a foot in the door at a VC and what they are looking to hear was very insightful. Julie from Madrona VC, Chris from Ignition Partners and Kelly from Zapd were great. I even liked how they disagreed with one another and offered different viewpoints. Another session that I found really useful was the one on mobile marketing. A guy – whose name I can’t remember and notes I cannot find right now – gave a great presentation on mobile marketing and the need to get businesses on the forefront of the next boom – if we aren’t already in the middle of one right now.

Overall, this class gave me exposure to startup information, websites, and thought leaders in the market. Seth Gogan – “if you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position.” and John Cook from Geekwire to just name a couple. Lastly, the individual case studies were beneficial, but thought that drilling down into one case study would be more effective than two, as time was definitely an issue.

ENT Marketing – Real, practical stuff

I know nothing about entrepreneurship and start-ups. I joined this class with one thing in my mind – learn as much as possible about the start-ups and how to market your business/product/service. I am glad that I learned most of these aspects through this class. Worth to mention, not only through sessions, but actually going out and working with other start-ups. Though I consider myself tech savvy, I figured out that I know almost nothing when it comes to social media, digital marketing etc. This is the key thing I learned from this class, which I believe I would not have been able to in other classes. Attending guest speakers’ sessions was another delightful experience. Their experience, focus on customers, tips were great learning experience.

I specifically liked Jeremy Luby and Richard Tait’s sessions. They explained very nicely about using social media for marketing and their impact on the consumers. It was nice to see how passionate they were about what they are doing and how much focused they are on their customers, what they need etc. I also liked working with the companies, specifically PortfolioGen. It was totally new and unknown territory to me – e-portfolio for teachers. I learned a lot about how to analyze tons of data and make sense out of it and recommend the strategy which would be feasible and practical for the client company.

Overall, it was a great earning experience!

Refining Refining Refining

I had intended to drop this class before I even arrived, but from day one, I knew I had to stay. The frenzy of the first day, the start-up attitude of the class, and the creative atmosphere provided by coming up with and taking your project with you, made me want to hold on. The ride was worthwhile, and I feel like I got more out of this class than many other classes I’ve had in the MBA program. Most importantly, I learned that you have to refine, refine, refine (so long as it is on strategy). I loved that we had the chance to shift and change our project throughout the quarter, and feel that it has made me more open to the idea of starting my own business – something I felt hesitant about before. The feedback of various entrepreneurs throughout the quarter also helped to realize what areas we needed to improve, and was extremely valuable.

I also have to give a shout out to the two companies I worked with this quarter. I felt both were pretty fantastic and will continue to follow them post-class, and hopefully when I have a job, shop at them! Better Bilt Furniture is an awesome Seattle furniture shop, and working with them provided great insight to the amazing customer service they provide. I know that when I start to decorate my first home, I will be paying them a visit. Their prices are also unreal! Ward & Co. is doing it differently with men’s grooming. I am psyched to be able to snag gifts for the gentlemen in my life, and hope they continue to win the Seattle community over with their customer service and quality products.

Get out of the building!

One of the key things that I learnt from this course is to gather data about our customer base with a crazy amount of passion. Whether it was Andy talking to us about using the numerous analytical tools (Followerwonk, Trendsmap, etc), or Richard Tait talking about how he went on the ground to know more about their core customer – it all pointed to one thing. Knowing the customer and grabbing them closer to your heart is important for the entrepreneur. To me, focusing on the customer or working from their needs should be the primary motto of every startup. All else follows suit.

The numerous examples of companies and speakers that came to our class all had one thing in common. They were always on the constant quest of figuring out who their customer was. And where this was not evident, we saw the disconnect between the customer and the company’s products and posed several questions about their business model. Another aspect that really caught my eye and is something I’ve started believing in, is establishing your business model on the principles of democracy, along the lines of what Rand Fishkin did with SEO Moz.

Knowing your customer, and being outright honest with them are highly linked phenomena. And together they constitute a virtuous cycle. The more they trust you, the more they buy from you or at least honestly tell you why your product sucks. I’ll take both these aspects and go forth hence!

for REAL

Over the course of the quarter, our class learned about many affordable, effective marketing tactics– many of them applicable to the paid search and social media channels. The importance of a comprehensive, sophisticated digital marketing strategy cannot be understated– indeed, most entrepreneurial ventures would end up dead on arrival (or at least badly hindered) without one.

Although the logic behind online marketing makes sense, I came into EntreMktg 555 with a personal bias against it. This bias was based on my prior experiences in social media– situations where business owners had asked me to build their online presence because they knew it was important, but not how or why. Since I didn’t know either, the blogging, tweeting, and FB posting about things I didn’t really care about quickly became a tedious, formulaic chore. It left me wondering how much other empty, emotionless content businesses put out on the web (not including the millions of banal ads).

It seems intuitive now, but the most valuable thing I learned in EntreMktg 555 is that online marketing and genuine engagement are not mutually exclusive. In fact, online marketing is best when it’s real– the way Richard Tait of Golazo is real about Facebook, and Jeremy Luby, co-founder of Talk To The Manager, is real about his twitter feed. Turns out (duh) that people support and encourage businesses who have an authentic voice on the web, and immediately shut down or abandon the ones that pretend to. I’ll continue to follow both of these companies because they bring Eric Ries’ “get out of the building and talk to your customers” approach to life every day– they just do it online.

I knew that businesses need to authentically connect with customers in order to be successful going into EntreMktg 555. I’ve since learned that the connection can be as authentic in a “Yelp” forum as it is in person.

Passion, Detail, and Microryza

I came up with the idea that I really desired to take a class in entrepreneurial marketing when I worked as a summer intern at a real estate start-up company. At that time, the company just started with its fundraising and marketing process. For me, Marketing 555 provides all the knowledge in this field that I want and need to know- a basic knowledge of marketing theories, a systematic method of marketing for startups and a full package of entrepreneurial marketing tools. Actually, after the study, I started to pay attention to the marketing tactics used everywhere in the daily life.

The takeaways of this class include not only lots of new concepts, analytic tools and an in-depth understanding of entrepreneurial marketing elements, but also a taste of the real world experience. The speakers/panels brought about their marketing insights and startup stories to the classroom. At the beginning of this quarter, our first startup speaker Richard Tait, the CEO of Golazo, talked about a bunch of marketing strategies such as positioning, pricing, PR, social media, events marketing, etc. As one of the most impressive startups to me during this quarter, Golazo showed a strong passion here, which was the first thing I obtained from this class. Another lesson from this class is to care about details. It is about everything at marketing: tracking the web traffics, build the pricing model, blogging, and more likely, retention and referral. Kate Matsudaira, CTO of Decide.com, mentioned the difference of sending emails to your clients using a real name instead of “support@company”. It might be not a big deal to you but is a lot more important to your customers.

As probably the only student who is not from MBA Program, I have to say that I’ve never done with a complete marketing plan before.  With Marketing 555, I kept studying how to write a marketing plan, the essential sections, structures and terms during the group task and two case studies.  Microryza.com, one of the two case study companies that I worked with, is a crowdfunding platform for academic research which launched in April 2012.  I will continue to follow Microryza after class ends, meanwhile, several similar websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. I also plan to follow Seth Godin’s blog in order to keep up with his insights regarding entrepreneurial marketing and his latest company, Squidoo.com, which is ranked among the top 125 sites in the US (by traffic) by Quantcast.  Microryza, Kickstarter, Squidoo, Quora: these “gathering great ideas” websites are gathering more and more customers. We will see it in the near future.

A NO is just as helpful as a YES

Every week team (SNAGZ) has had the opportunity to pitch our start-up idea to multiple panels about pricing, distribution, campaign strategy, retention and on and on…. not only did it force us to continue to work on our project as the weeks of the quarter ticked by (tricky professor) but also provided real-time, objective feedback about the quality, feasibility, and not to mention fund-ability of SNAGZ – a web app that puts you in front of the sale For the size you want at the price you name.

Two things I’ve learned am reminded every week:

1. A NO is just as helpful as YES: Team SNAGZ had about a 50/50 like/dislike success rate when pitching to panels.  And the reasons people would not fund SNAGZ have turned out to be just as helpful – refining our target customer, understanding reach,  defining the challenge of being B2B but with the end-user being the consumer who will drive success with our B2B relationships.

2. The product will change from beginning to end: perhaps this goes along with the first learning but if I were truly going to attempt to find funding what I would pitch to VC would be drastically different from what I first pitched to my marketing class in early October.  My pain point may not be the target customer’s pain point and hearing panelists feedback helps team SNAGZ define that.

New to start-ups nad websites like geekwire and mashable and even following blogs I have found myself returning to Kate Matsudaira’s Blog: Articles and Musings on Technology Leadership Management and Careers.  For a non-techie, myself,  I appreciate her view on careers, work, and managment.

You Think Marketing for a Startup is No Different?? You’re wrong!!

3 months, several panels, lectures and team meetings and I am only just realizing how different marketing for a startup is than for a large company. You have scarce resources in a startup and every dollar you spend on marketing better not be wasted or its lights out, doors shut. So how is startup marketing different? First off you’re using different channels and you’re hoping to engage your customers more. Twitter and other social media are cheap forms of communication methods that have proven to be effective for startups. Marketing efforts for a startup need to be simple, decipherable and give rise to action. Followerwonk is something new that I was introduced too and is a great tool for startups looking to beef up their twitter presence.

We got introduced to Rand Fishkin and SEOmoz this quarter and I am a huge fan of him of his company. SEO is an important factor for startups and the honesty and transparency that SEOmoz operates with is refreshing. I’ve started to read their blogs and will continue to do so. All the topics on their blog are relevant and applicable to anybody with entrepreneurial aspirations. Keep up the good work SEOmoz!

As easy as 1, 2, 3…

Marketing 555 has covered A to Z of marketing for new ventures, with lively class discussions and presentations from thought-leaders from each topic. For someone with limited marketing exposure, I have learned a lot! I have exhausted the practice of pitching our company in 30-seconds or less and learned to look within a market to identify specific target consumers and how to reach them. Numerous speakers emphasized the importance of being familiar with your product and also being familiar with your consumers. Conducting surveys and research are key because asking is the only way you’ll know if you’re doing it right. Similarly, knowing more about your customers helps you to position yourself to meet their needs and to be where they are (exposure!).

I have learned about numerous tools critical to successful entrepreneurial offerings – product-testing methods such as LaunchRock and Kickstarter, social media analysis with SimplyMeasured and Followerwonk and search optimization through SEOmoz to name just a few. One company that I will continue to follow is GeekWire in order to stay informed of companies and innovations in the Pacific Northwest. I will also continue to learn more about SEO and Google AdWords as I believe that a strategic online presence can be the difference for a new company.

The most valuable lesson I will take away from this course is the importance of telling your story and creating a brand – and then promoting that brand with an effective campaign strategy. Important promotion considerations include:

Audience – know who are you trying to reach (mentioned above)

Goal – what do you want them to do once you’ve gotten their attention?

Why should they listen – what is your one compelling reason?

PR strategies include inbound and outbound campaigns to paid and earned media and social media. A campaign strategy should build awareness that your product or service is available, make the consumer interested in learning more and then act on it and lastly tell their friends about it (referral). It isn’t easy but a thorough and strategic approach is the best approach.

Takeaways from MKTG 555

Of the many lessons I will take away with me from this class, possibly the most useful is to focus on Customer #1 as a source of consumer data and marketing direction.

I now understand the value of knowing and finding your potential customer, even before your product is created, and reaching out to them for insight. I love the idea of testing multiple messaging strategies with real potential customers and monitoring their response. I also love the idea of finding these customers on sites like Quora, where they are expressing their questions and needs, and answering with your product.

Customer #1 also served as a conceptual North Star for our many ideas throughout the course. This class naturally fosters a lot of brainstorming, and Customer #1 helped us identify the best, most relevant and realistic ideas.

After this class, I plan to follow two companies that I came to know (or came to know better) during the class – SEOmoz for its tools and tricks, and Photobucket for its new product and user experience, which address my unmet needs for online photo storage and sharing. In fact, I have already liked them both on Facebook!

When people stop being polite, and start getting real!

Except for possibly doing it yourself (and succeeding or failing), there is no substitute for hearing it straight from the mouths of those that are doing something. From understanding the ins-and-outs of SEM with Brian Rauschenbach or SEO with Rand Fishkin, to understanding how different start-ups learned to listen to, react to, and love their customers with Maggie Boyer Finch, John Scrofano, and Ruchit Garg, the speakers in this course showed us how well (or poorly) classroom concepts can translate to the real world.

I specifically have loved the chance to play with Google AdWords for our possible start-up: FlashPick Flash Mobs. From understanding the basics of the running a test ad, to how to knowing what to look for to maximize my impressions while minimizing my CPC (if that’s what I want to do), the mystique of the process has turned into curiosity. And from curiosity, I have turned to experimentation. As a Tech lover, this will help me immensely in my future work.

I specifically plan on following SEOMoz after this course, because it is universally applicable for any business. From knowing that 82% of clicks come from organic search, to understanding how to build your page to get that organic search, knowing how to sell yourself on the internet is incredibly important. I may have to wait until I have the time to do this for my own pages, but I am sure SEOMoz will be applicable no matter what enterprise I seek out.

Moonshiners

We hear a lot about tech companies in this class, which is great, but I really enjoyed the dedication to craftsmanship and heritage displayed by Nathan Kaiser, the founder of 2 Bar Spirits.  Nathan stood out from all the other guest speakers due to his focus on producing a consumable good, as well as his “unstructured” entrepreneurial style.  When talking about his business plan and strategies, he essentially said the product comes first and the rest of it will follow.  Now, this obviously goes against every core concept we learn as MBA’s, but I think it illustrates a valid point, namely that most people starting companies do not have formal MBA pedigrees and do not follow precisely mapped and calibrated strategies.  Nathan is flying by the seat of his pants and seems to be loving every minute of it.  I find this to be the most compelling company to date, one I will watch with interest over the next few years.  Craft brewing and distilling is a booming sector right now and the Northwest is leading the way.  Nathan may not know what his distribution scalability looks like, but he knows how to make a fine bottle of moonshine and the customers are enthralled with it. Will the business eventually suffer due to lack of strategic planning, or will the product be strong enough to carry them through the tough growth phase?  I’ll be watching with a drink in my hand, hoping he pulls through.

Getting your pitch just right – a mission impossible?

The marketing class this fall has been quite an experience. We have had so many great speakers share their experiences, opinions, and ideas. We have built our own “startup”, pitched the ideas, and tried tweaking the pitch to get it just right. We have been knocked down, criticized, and encourage over and over again by entrepreneurs, business angels, and venture capitalists who kept seeing room for improvement in our pitches or business ideas. I think we have all discovered, that getting your pitch right is harder than you think. The key learning is really, that it is crucial that you are able to explain in clear terms what you are doing, so investors, employees, and customers can easily decide if you are the right fit for them.

Here are some of my favourite key learnings and quotes in relation to formulating the perfect pitch.

“Maximum 30 seconds”
– (the famous elevator pitch)

“If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position”
– Seth Godin

“If you don’t have a story you won’t succeed”
– Richard Tait, Golazo

“Entrepreneurs need to be storytellers”
– Julie Sandler, Madrona Venture Group

“The story needs a villain and a hero”
– Andy Boyer, (after attending the Seattle Interactive conference)

“Decide what you are NOT going to be”
– John Scrofano, Founder, Nearlyweds.com

“Be able to explain the business to your mom or a ninth grader”
– Rebecca Lowell, CBO, Geekwire

It seems simple, right? It is not, believe me. It isn’t a mission impossible, but it takes some work. A good way to learn is to look at the companies who have done it right. A company I am impressed with in having a clear pitch and positioning, is Dropbox. Use their positioning as a benchmark to get an indication of how well you are doing. Dropbox does in general just do a lot of things right when it comes to marketing, and I suggest you keep and eye out for what Dropbox is up to, I know I will.