Tag: web 2.0

Your phone number

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I have my personal mobile number published on the rentoid.com contact page. Crazy? Maybe. Yes I do get the occasional phone call from overseas at 3am – and I answer it bleary eyed, and turn on my laptop to help the rentoid member.

Here’s why I do it:

– I get instant feedback on what we need to do to improve rentoid

– I ask them how they found us

– I tell them things they not not know about rentoid to improve their experience

Importantly, I surprise them with some personal service, from an actual fully fledged web business, which is beyond expectations.

Sometime in business we need to be prepared to be ‘annoyed’ in order to ‘delight’

Startup blog says: Make yourself available.

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How to generate media for your startup

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Here’s a recent Article I wrote for Anthill Magazine:

When aiming to generate media coverage for our start-up or business, we often get one thing wrong. It relates to our training as marketers. We are too targeted.

In fact, we need to do the reverse and cast the media net wide – as wide as possible. What needs to be targeted is ‘the message’, not the media organisations we aim at. The message needs to be written for the forum. But, in truth, most of us have way more messages in our business than we have bothered to think about, or even invent. Yes, we can invent messages.

The message or pitch needs to be all about them, their readers and their viewers. Never us or our start-up. So before you pitch, work out how many angles you’ve got and you’ll be surprised what you can dig up. In fact, you’ve got to give a bit before you get anything – especially for start-ups, who can exchange a few learnings from the battlefield.

Here’s an idea-jam for potential examples of media angles for Start-up X.

  • Altruistic – helping people
  • Business methods you’ve used
  • Helping people make money
  • Saving money by using your products
  • Productivity improvements of staff
  • Web news – first of its type
  • Start-up stories
  • Technology used
  • Ecologically sound (no, we don’t mean carbon offset)
  • Green message
  • Making the web-physical connect – going beyond virtual
  • Helping the financially challenged
  • Help people connect with customers
  • It’s über new
  • It’s the old world reinvented
  • Vicarious living….

There’s more, but you’re bored already. I’m just showing what’s possible. Stuff like this equals free media. Pages/slots have to be filled.

Frequency vs Depth

While we know we need advertising or media exposure, the thing we need most is frequency. Advertisers talk about depth and frequency. (Depth being how many people we reach on each occasion. Frequency being how often we reach them.) It’s great to let zillions of people know about our start-up as quickly as we can. We may even be lucky enough to get some kind of viral campaign working for our start-up – we may be featured in the newspaper, on TechCrunch or we might even be lucky enough get a TV spot.

After the event, here’s what happens: people cook dinner, pick up the kids from school, pay the bills, kick the dog and get on with life. Our start up doesn’t really matter to them… straight away.

Consumer awareness goes something like this:

Exposure 1: “That’s a cool idea/product/concept.”

Exposure 2: “Oh, yeah, I must remember to check that out.”

Exposure 3: “There it is again. Might be worth having a look.”

Exposure 4: “Hmm, Ok – I’ll check it out when I’m shopping/online next.”

Exposure 5: They finally act and go look at / investigate / touch / feel / try….

After many exposures we have “a chance” of selling to them. Sure some people check it out first time, some buy straight away, but the large majority need to be reminded, over and over again. This doesn’t mean you need to spam them or do terrible interruption marketing. It means you need to send frequent and relevant marketing communications to the people who might care.

It’s a lot like us never noticing an advertisement for a car until you are in the market to buy one. They’re always there, we just have selective perception.

This is why advertising frequency is king. No point having a big launch campaign if your prospective new customers aren’t looking on that occasion. For entrepreneurs, the big launch concept is a hoax. It’s unsustainable. We’re far better off being there all the time, in some way – then we don’t have to predict when people will buy.

And before you waste a shipload of money on a PR agency, the truth is the media aren’t listening anymore. Well, listening to PR firms…. Once upon a time, a PR agency had the secret access keys to journalists. That made them powerful. But things have changed. Now we can access anyone with a few Twitter messages and some Google magic. And the PR agency messages are very 1993. In an age of authenticity, we are far better off going direct. Developing a relationship with media contacts is far more valuable than wasting money on outsourcing PR. People want to talk to the person, and that person is you.

Want proof ?– check out the rentoid.com about page and scroll down to see the media we have generated – none of which has been paid for.

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The web is Punk.

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

What is Punk – what is Punk rock?

Here’s a definition I shamelessly lifted from wikipedia:

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock, punk rock bands eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. They created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY (do it yourself) ethic, with many bands self-producing their recordings and distributing them through informal channels.

When I read the above definition – I loved it so much I decided to highlight the key words and talk about them in our new world of the web and why the punk ethic is what we are embracing.

Garage Rock – Many of us start in our garage, or spare room – we start our projects simply because we have a vision of doing it our way, or because it’s just worth doing. We are doing it for us. We start without any support. We pull together the minimum requirements to get started.

Eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream – Large corporations have been taking advantage of us consumers, no – ‘people’ for far too long. Mainstream business has been churning out average stuff for average people and making large profits doing so. The excess has sickened us to the point where we have shown we can get our startups off the ground on a shoe string, with the software and tools we built for ourselves. We provide something better – and our fans prove it. Importantly success has not driven us to become corpulent pigs simultaneously. We beleive in egalitarianism and we are utilitarian.

Fast, hard-edged – We focus on speed. Before the large corporations have even turned around – we have a following a passionate fan group, and they wonder what happened.

Stripped-down instrumentation – We don’t need every tool in the business to make stuff happen. There is no research department, there is no prototype or an excess of departments involved – just us. We just make great stuff with a minimum of inputs. It’s made with passion so it just works.

Political, anti establishment –Yes, we want to do it different, we want to bust down the old paradigm, and have some fun doing it. The establishment does annoy us, and we want to show them we can do it better. We treat our customers like people, and engage on a personal level. We engage in conversation, and listen. We hate the arrogance of large corporations, so quite simply we don’t behave like them. We embrace the crowd and let things evolve.

Embraces a DIY –We don’t ask for permission. We don’t need to work within the existing infrastructure.  We don’t need authoritative figures lining our pockets to get started. They usually do that after they discover  the cool stuff we’ve already made.

Distributing them through informal channels – The channels didn’t even exist when we got started. So we made our own. The web is our channel, independent, large and evolving. No one owns it or controls it, it’s organic and we love it.

Web people and startups – thanks for starting Punk 2.0


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Quit your job

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

You should really quit your job on Monday. Yes tomorrow today . If you are working for a salary or wages  and have no equity in the business that is.

And here’s why:

You are living someone else’s dream.

You are exchanging the days of your life to build the vision of someone else. You are not doing what you dreamed about as a child.

The reality is this: once you have a place to live and food to eat, the rest is ego. Chances are you are working in a job just to feed your ego. I know because I was this person for more than 10 years. I had jobs I didn’t like – high paying ones, to buy things I didn’t need, to impress people I didn’t care for. It’s a pointless treadmill which the government encourages to maximise consumption, generate higher tax rates and PAYE deductions and enforce control through a passive education process which says consumption equals success. We must remove this idea of the power structure from our minds and remind ourselves that real wealth is defined by the cool stuff we are doing, rather than the stuff we buy.

Quite your job, de-gear your life and do something  of value. To further encourage this process I’ll leave you with one final thought I tweeted a while ago:

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Cheers, Steve

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[digg=http://startupblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/quit-your-job/]

Great advice for web startups

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Pieter Peach sent me this email yesterday. He’s just a great bloke who thinks about others. In doing so he shared some valuable insights he took from a web 2.0 conference. It was such a succinct and insightful email that I thought I’d share it here verbatim. Enjoy & digest. Steve Sammartino

Just came across an email I sent to myself from a session in W2.0NY last year.  Straightforward stuff, but a good reminder for me, thought I’d pass it along.

“Sitting here listening to a great speaker on developing next gen web 2.0 apps, will email stuff as I I hear it.

Just quickly

Requisites for successful 2.0 service
1.    Network effect
2.    Collective intelligence
3.    Lightweight business models
4.    Longtail (maybe)
5.    Encourage unintended uses
6.    Platform vs application
7.    End of the software release cycle
8.    Rich user experiences
9.    Innovation in assembly

Race to dominate remaining data classes.
Its hard to compete with those who have a head start in developing the network effect in a particular data class. “

Pieter

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Set up costs

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

When starting out in business the first thing we often do is set up the relevant legal structures:

  • Partnership agreement
  • Logo design
  • Business name registration
  • Operating company
  • Holding company
  • Non disclosure agreement
  • Holding company trust
  • Member terms & conditions of product / web usage
  • Specific bank account
  • Small business book keeping software
  • insert other legalese business recommendation here

Startup blog advice is this: Don’t waste your time or money. Get revenue first, register later.

With the only possible exception being a .com registration – which if you’re in the on line world may be an actual requirement to simply operate. No doubt this is contrary to all you’ve read in business guides. Sure, keep accurate cash flow books, run things professionally and stick to project deadlines. The reason for the recommendation is pretty simple. Most startups never get to revenue. If you’re like me you have a hard drive full of business ideas, half written business plans, and a spare room full of product prototypes. Until we have revenue (which doesn’t mean a couple of orders, it means thousands of dollars) we have nothing to protect. It also adds a strong reporting and administration burden which startups could well do without.

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So why waste time and money building a fence around nothing? Build the castle first, or at least get the foundations in place. If we follow the lawyers advice, they may be the only people who ever make money from the venture.

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Why speed wins

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

In start up land the most important thing we can do is do things fast. It’s the opposite of the perfectionism we learn in graduate school and large corporations especially as it pertains to marketing.

Here’s why:


So the startup blog explanation of my above chart goes something like this:

No project, task or strategy is ever perfect. Even if we spend a large amount of time developing it. At best it will be around 90% of what we need or imagine. If we cut the available amount of time in half (which is this example is 6 weeks) we may be able to achieve 70% of the desired outcome. But what option 2 presents for us is the ability to learn and revise quickly. In fact we can launch another version (version 2.0) of said project for another 70% progression.

The net result is pretty simple – we’ll be a progression of 140 vs 90. Pretty simple. And in startup land the reality is we often don’t know how effective something will be until it is implemented, and from here the lessons will emerge. In addition it moves us up the learning curve and in all probability the next implementation will be far more effective than the first.

The other fact we have to consider is that speed is important for our customers. They like to see progression, even if it is less than perfect. They know things are improving and that we are making stuff better for them. It’s also far less confusing to deal with incremental consistent change than it is a total re-design. We also remove the risk of better ideas and methods putting a kibosh on doing anything at all and creating inertia.

And this is why in startup land, speed wins.

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