startups Archives - Page 113 of 117

Digital Mentors

Posted on March 18, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

It’s never been easier to be mentored on a specific subject, from experts, for free. There are even live feedback mechanisms from other interested experts. It’s called blogging and you may think this is a ridiculous entry giving you’re reading one right now.

It’s only ridiculous if we fail to leverage the blogosphere to it’s full potential. Many of us don’t. We’ve got to get involved. Not be passive, ask questions, link, re-post and share with our crew.

The real power of such social media is dialogue. My favourite blog has 25,000+ readers a day. The publisher has his email address listed on it. When I email him a question he gets back to me within a day or two with an answer, a link, a blog entry or if I’m really lucky a free PDF copy of his latest book.

In fact some of my most valued mentors are colleagues I know in a similar space, or mind frame who write excellent blogs in their own right. I trust and value their opinion and so they are mentors to me also – even though – better that, they are half my age. Like Ross, Steve and Ben. Who are all as good or better than any celebrity business blogger you follow.

Go on, ask me a question!

No 1 reason being an employee sucks

Posted on March 17, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

The number one reason being an employee sucks is this:

You can’t sell your job.

No matter how good you are at what you do,

–   you don’t own your output
–   you are building other peoples brands and empire
–   you are at the risk of hierarchy
–   you are not servant to customers, but wage earners (the fundamental issue)

What this means is that as an employee you are not serving those who actually pay your wages – your consumers. Instead you become servant to people who are best at ‘internal politics’. So for you to succeed in this environment, you too must excel at internal politics. Which takes you always for important real world skills entrepreneurs develop. And then the final reality is that at some point in your ’employee career’ someone will not like you, and dispose of you. At this point you instantly lose any good will or employee equity which was built. Even if you are a stock holder, you still have no decision making authority.

employee-silhouette

The point is, if you want to build assets, being an employee makes it difficult because you lack control. If you want control, then you must have the courage to build something independently, like entrepreneurs do.

Zero Cost Advertising & Social Media

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

I’ve blogged before many times about how to generate brand awareness with limited or zero budget. The list of tools available is pretty long actually. No need to list them here – you know what they are. But to use them effectively takes two important ingredients:

Ingredient No 1: Frequency
If we think are are going to start a brand blog, a youtube channel, twitter account and all our communication problems will be solved over night, then we have really not understood what has happened with social media. If I was to summarize it it succinctly. I’d say – we’ve gone from a ‘produced’ world to an ‘organic’ world. The produced world took large capital investments. The organic world is free, but not everything grows, and those that do take time. It’s a lot like nature, free but time & frequency of events is the asset.

The more often we return to our crop and nurture it, the healthier the return we’ll get. Occasionally something will just click. We only have to do something ‘once’ and it will grow astoundingly with little input other than the raw ingredients. The market will take get hold of the communication and we’ll crack it – it’ll go viral. This is the anomaly – it happens so rarely, that we know about it every time. Best advice is to assume it wont happen to us.

Ingredient No 2: Patience
We don’t have to buy the communication asset. They’re here, we have been given them, but we have to work them. We need to allow time for our compound effort to accumulate. Be patient and trust that our continual effort and focus on frequency, will work in the long run.

Patience has something on its side that the old media world didn’t – digital foot prints. Our stuff stays on line forever. So when a passionate web surfer finds one of our things they like – they can do a back catalog on our stuff. This is when things can work, even months after launch date. A TV ad on the other hand has one shot at the eyeballs. If it’s missed by the target market, it’s all too late.

No doubt, we need to build great stuff for people to care, but in the new world of zero cost communications, Startups can can get it wrong and learn as we go.

How to advertise for free

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

The next post on startup blog will talk more about this whole ‘free advertising’ on the internet stuff: In the interim, here’s the latest episode in rentoid.com free advertising. Which is pretty funny.

By the way, it took 15 minutes and zero dollars and was a great deal of fun after lunch. (and yes, I am on the bike)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J9EIhCV-k]

Great work from Craig

Posted on March 7, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Here’s an example of why creativity beats a big budget every time. A very well executed ‘idea’ – I wont say campaign, or viral marketing ‘yet’. Sure, it’s gone viral, but I’m not yet convinced it is marketing…..which we’ll have a little chat about after you read the attached visuals:

picture-17

picture-18

picture-19

picture-20

picture-21

Clearly, this is some very clever and funny work. Engaging, entertaining and creates strong curiosity.

Yep, it’s gone viral, but is it marketing? I’d say not yet. Simply because effective marketing has to create a change in behavior, a call to some form of action, which this hasn’t done yet.

I can’t help but think that any added brand addendum in part 2 of the campaign will make it lose credibility almost instantaneously. To me it could work if it was Craig’s list – which would make sense, or maybe ‘Craig’ the local comedian doing some nice street level brand awareness bootstrapping. It will be interesting to see what this thing ends up being. It comes from this webpage: http://users.tpg.com.au/morepats/Craig/ – If any one knows be sure to share it with us.

So what’s in it for startups?

This campaign, proves that we can do really cool, engaging stuff for less than $1. in printing costs. It proves that media is ‘free’ for cool stuff. We just need to unlock our imagination.

New York Series: Magnolia Bakery – In content is rad.

Posted on March 4, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

Still got a few New York stories up my sleeve.

If anyone had any doubt that mainstream media is ‘still’ the most powerful communication tool, here’s some proof. While in New York we just had to check out the famous ‘Magnolia Bakery’.

The only way I had ever heard of this infamous business was via the TV show ‘Sex in the city’. It wasn’t advertised during the program, but in content. That is, discussed during the show, part of the story. This only ever happens when we have a ‘worthy business’, something worth talking about because it is so cool.On many occasions during my stay the line to get in was all the way down the street. And the cupcakes were tremendously yummy.

And so it proves a few things:

Mainstream media ain’t dead yet.
In content is way more powerful than paid for advertising
Only ‘cool’ stuff ever gets talked about.

Startups, go make some cool stuff.

New York Series: Contingency Plans

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

It’s no secret I’ve spent some time abroad recently – the tile of recent entries has been a total giveaway.

One of the areas I reckon all entrepreneurs should cut their teeth in is a bit of gardening. The skills required for successful gardening happen to be highly transferable for entrepreneurs. I always keep my my garden in good nick. But this is the condition is was in upon my return.

My beloved box hedges are not very healthy to say the least.

Sure we had some hot weather. But I knew it was the middle of a Melbourne summer which regularly gets temperatures above 40c / 100f . So why didn’t I prepare for the resources to cater for the ‘potential challenges’ the hot weather could present to my garden? It’s pretty simple really. I assumed it would be OK for a few weeks. I assumed that things would progress as normal and we wouldn’t have the hottest temperatures on record – which we did.

I failed to prepare for the worst case scenario. Actually I failed to have an infrastructure set up so things would not only continue in my absence, but have the ability to respond to extraneous circumstances. The net result is business failure. Dead garden. Which means that my garden business is still a sole trader, a side interest or maybe just a hobby.

We only have a business when we can be absent and;

things get done anyway
emergencies get attended to
our customers are unaware of our absence
we return with no ‘noticeable’ difference

So the questions we must ask ourselves as entrepreneurs, is how we are building an infrastructure which doesn’t rely on us? It’s only once this is in place, that we actually have a business.