startups Archives - Page 55 of 57

Critics & creators

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Steve Sammartino

At some point in your career as an entrepreneur (and entrepreneurship is a career, it’s just there’s no jobs available!), you’ll be told how why it’s a bad idea, an average launch…or just not quite right.

A simple response is this: It’s easier to critique than create.

I do it on this blog. I critique poorly executed marketing activities. We do this to learn and converse – which is part of the whole process. It’s what this blog is about. It’s a conversation on marketing.

But in the journey as an entrepreneur you’ll meet many who provide advice, but have never had the courage to pursue the path. In this situation it’s better to remember those who encourage, and forget about those who critique

And this is why, in any city in the world there are no monuments of critics.

Long term planning

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Steve Sammartino

Political preferences aside Arnold Schwarzenegger is reasonable at long term planning.

Arnold wanted to be an actor, more than he wanted to be a body builder. He wanted to move to California to pursue his dreams. His father and others told him it wasn’t possible. He was told that an Austrian who spoke German and broken English couldn’t get into the movies. Arnold knew that the most muscular man in the world would surely get a role in a movie somewhere – and he planned in his teens to become so. The rest is history.

Think long – act now.

Overnight success

Posted on August 10, 2007 by Steve Sammartino

It’s seems facebook has taken the title as the latest overnight success. It’s a choice whether or not entrepreneurs become jealous or inspired. We ought to take the inspired route.

The thing about most overnight success stories is that they’re usually a few years in the making. And so it is for Facebook. Facebook actually launched in early 2004 and has been almost 4 years in the making. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t whip it together a few months ago. You can get a little history here.

What this means, is that you might be working on the next overnight success -now, it’s just that no one knows it yet. If so, you’ll be all the rage in 2010.

Stay the course. Be patient.

Clustering

Posted on August 9, 2007 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s a live example of niche marketing in action.

At rentoid we are currently implementing a niche strategy by ‘clustering’.

As blogged about, rentoid is the place to rent anything. To make this true, we need people to have a great user experience. Therefore we are focusing our global website on one town. The town rentoid was founded in.

We think it makes sense for these reasons:

We have many items for rent in this town
We can implement old school awareness campaigns like letter box drops, and hand outs at the local train station
We can leverage local contacts & friends
When people first visit the rentoid, they’ll see many items in ‘their’ suburb
People want to rent things locally where possible
We can rent items off new members and provide a great user experience
It leverages a growing sense of ‘community’ in small suburbs
It has a higher chance of users telling their friends – who also live there
Membership will grow geographically to the next suburb, and so on – virally
We can test what works on a micro level before investing on a larger scale

You get the picture.

So our niche plan is to cluster geographically, and grow from their. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Motivation

Posted on August 4, 2007 by Steve Sammartino

If you’re like me, every now and again it gets tempting to goof off.

In times like these, 2 minutes of youtube can be our best friend. A little bit of a motivational pump up session can be just what we need to regain focus. A simple youtube search should find most of the revered movie scenes, speeches from thinkers like Steve Jobs or Seth Godin, or maybe a simple sporting montage of victorious moments – whatever you prefer.

A few suggestions:

Rocky running up the steps

Al Pacino – Any Given Sunday

Wall St – Gordon Gecco – Greed is Good

Ben Aflec – The Boiler Room

Go on, get psyched!

Quirky fact 4.0

Posted on August 1, 2007 by Steve Sammartino

Warren Buffet’s first money making venture was selling Coca Cola he bought from a grocery store. Under the age of 10, he bought a 6 pack, broke them up and sold them at a profit, other kids in his neighborhood were playing jacks and hopscotch.