Spend any time on HackerNews and you’ll hear one piece of advice repeated ad nauseam : “Find a great co-founder”.
For Kyle Vogt, this was a no-brainer. Kyle has had great success following this advice in the past (he’s the former co-founder of Justin.TV and Twitch.tv).
👉 Read Article.
Humans by nature are selfish and self-centered. We only care about ourselves. To be a top level sales dude you need to focus on the customer. Every email, phone call, and skype session needs to focus on the prospect’s needs and how you can help them. When writing emails avoid saying “I” or “we” and instead say “you”. Focus on helping your customers and building relationships with them. Show them you truly care and the sales will flow.
Hey The Startup Foundry Reader,
You are awesome!
Please keep your emails to 5 sentences or less.
It also helps to space out each sentence.
Does this make sense?
Cheers,
Matt
You need to keep emails short and to the point out of respect for the recipient. Be clear about how you can help them, who you are, and what you are offering. Also remember emails today are read on all types of devices so spacing out each sentence improves readability. Your recipient may only scan your email so keeping it short and spaced out increases the probability that your message will actually be read.
Gmail’s Canned Responses is an unbelievable tool. It allows you to setup templates and fire off proven tested emails quickly. Here is an email sales video I created that talks about Canned Responses and other email sales topics.
Here are a few email headline tips:
Tell the person you are emailing what you want and by when. For example say “If you are interested please email me by November 29th”. Don’t be a wimp. Ask for the sale. You will never get what you want if you do not ask for it.
Selling via email is the perfect way to get your first few customers. If you learn to type fast and leverage Canned Responses you can fire off hundreds of personally tailored emails everyday. Don’t be scared to hit people via other channels like LinkedIn, Skype or Twitter as well. Make sure to test and track all your email sales activities so you can constantly improve your skills.
Email sales is a massive topic and I am still learning. Please comment below and share your tips with other email sellers.
This is a guest post written by Matt A. Smith (@MattASmitty co-founder of VideoLark.com)
For more startup news, follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry or on Facebook.
Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in startups that I’ve been covering: menial work. Put another way, procrastination by being focused on things that don’t matter. I’ve identified several ways I’ve seen it manifest in startups. I’ve also discovered why it’s such a common problem for startups.
Here are the two most frequent forms of menial work I’ve seen in recent weeks:
Every startup likes to think that on day one they’ll be mentioned in TechCrunch, and the onslaught of high volume traffic and subsequent millions of users will bring their server to its knees. I’ve heard of startups that delay launching for a month or two to pre-optimize everything. Sure, it’s important to have a server that won’t fall over, but it is far more important that people want your service (which you won’t know for sure until you launch).
Solution: Launch sooner. What you’ve initially built and what people actually want are almost always different things.
The most common reason I’ve discovered is…
Talking to your customers can be scary. The technical founders (that inspired this article) love to hack away at their codebase but hated talking to their customers. “That’s a job for my (nontechnical) cofounder” he said. He then spent a week developing a feature that their customers didn’t want and never used.
Although nontechnical founders should spend more time with customers, technical founders are missing out on huge learning opportunities if they only sit in their house and code.
Solution: Realize your customers don’t care about your code (assuming it works and is secure).
Menial work feels really good. It feels like you’re making huge strides forward but all you’re really doing is procrastinating. Don’t fall into this trap. Answer to your customers.
For more startup news, follow on Twitter @startupfoundry or on Facebook.
Recently, I’ve been asked to give a talk to new and/or aspiring entrepreneurs.
The truth is, I almost resent talking to them, as I hate being the bearer of bad news.
And boy, there are many. I usually start with: “It’s going to be harder than you think, it will take longer than you think, you will lose health, friends and money in the process, and you probably won’t succeed in the end.”
But there is a good news. Especially valuable in the startup community, but not only.
This good news makes the conversation worth having, because so few people are aware of it:
You don’t need to have more features than your competitors to successfully launch your product.
Steve Ballmer, January 2007, on the newly announced iPhone: “You can get a Motorolla Q phone now, for $99; it is a very capable machine, it will do music, it will do internet, it will do email, it will do instant messaging. So I kinda look at that and I say, I like our strategy, I like it a lot.”
Ballmer obviously failed to understand that users actually do care about the way they use their device, not just that it “does it”.
Yes, you couldn’t install apps on the original iPhone (can you believe it?). Yes, you couldn’t use the 3G network. And there was no camera. And on top of that, it was crazy expensive.
So why did it prevail? Where was Ballmer wrong?
He just made the common mistake of many entrepreneurs, upcoming and experienced alike: Users actually do care about the way they use their device, not just that it “does it”.
The iPhone then went on to become the gold standard in the smartphone industry.
Three years later, difference device, same story.
Remember how the iPad was decried for being pricey, while having way less features than its competitors? No USB ports, no camera, no multitasking, no Flash…
Phil Schiller (Senior VP of Worldwide product marketing at Apple) dismissed these criticisms in a very simple way:  “It’s not about the features — it’s about the experience. You just have to try it to see what I mean.” (source).
This approach works especially well for young startups, and you still don’t have to be first. Just more focused than your competitors.
Google didn’t invent search engines when they released Google search.
37signals didn’t invent web based project managment softwares with Basecamp.
Dropbox surely didn’t invent concept of online backup services.
Being focused on the core of your product is a big part of the “Lean Startup” methodology.
You can watch the case studies of startups like Dropbox or IMVU here.
There is still room for innovation everywhere. It will always be hard, but never impossible.
Always remember, to not just work harder, work smarter.
This is a guest post written by Christophe Maximin (@christophe971 creator of 72hDeals.com)
For more startup news follow us on Twitter @startupfoundry or on Facebook.
This is a guest post by Jason Lorimer. Jason is an entrepreneur @CulturaHQ, advocating on behalf of those with the ambition to do more than just entertain ideas.
The Motor City has all the moving parts to be a Midwest start-up hub. Creating jobs, tax revenue and adding to the culture of entrepreneurship born on the backs of your blue collar blood line. What you need is entrepreneurs, more than you have and the kind that see building the next soup of the day mobile application as a waste of their ambition. These passionate, persistent folks are out there looking to be intrigued by a problem and supported in a way that makes solving it possible. You can attract and retain these entrepreneurs, thousands of them from across the country. Around the world. And you can do it without relying on tax payer subsidy or other market negative solutions. I will show you how.
Cities tend to make the mistake of trying to replicate the tech mecca that is Palo Alto, and the surrounding towns collectively known as “The Valley”, as it exists today. More than a few times I have read and overheard officials in different cities say “What we need is an anchor company. If only we had a Facebook, investment and talent would follow.” This is true to the extent that any company growing as fast as the worlds largest social network is always looking to hire but Mark Zuckerberg did not move from his Harvard dorm room out to California simply because you can trip and fall over a computer programmer on your way to lunch. It is safe to say he traveled across country in pursuit of what Silicon Valley represents. The smartest people tackling problems side by side and sharing in the sense of community that comes from succeeding and supporting in the same.
A vibrant entrepreneurial community is an evolution. It is where the void that is commonly experienced  problems intersect with the oxygen of ideas, entering into the bloodstream that is a supportive network of entrepreneur advocates. In addition to supporting your existing start-up community, you must import these solution-minded people from other parts of the country to spark your movement and to do that you have to market the problems your city faces and not just the assets you sustain. Entrepreneurs are a special breed. They look at the things most people discard as annoyances and say: I can fix that. You need entrepreneurs and they need you.
The problems your citizens face are not unique to Detroit. They are relevant to any urban environment in the US or abroad and as such are what one engaged in such things would refer to as market viable problems. That is that the prospective solutions for those problems have application in a mass market. In my work I communicate with dozens of entrepreneurs each month about their ventures. I find that most of the problems being addressed by these upstarts are a slight variation on something the market has already proven out. Another wards, a niche vertical of a business model made widely popular by a company you know.
A Groupon for this or a You Tube for that. It is as if the inspiration for these models are coming solely from Tech Crunch. Some would argue that this is actually a function of the early stage capital infrastructure but for the purposes of this article, let’s just focus on the opportunity that exists in packaging and presenting the problems encountered by your citizenry to attract those hungry for unique problems to solve.
Pick a Problem. Any Problem.
First, you must look to your citizens for intriguing problems to solve and there are any number of ways to do that. I prefer to enable people to participate in a mostly passive manner. Here is one way. I am working on another here in Philly as I write this. The key is interaction points where people in your community can tell you about the problems, big or small, they encounter. Ideally as they are affected by them as this is where insights are most valuable. Now, after reviewing and cleaning up the way these problems are presented, aggregate them into a live feed on a website and broadcast them to entrepreneurs around the world.
When these ambitious folk come about your website linked from one of the hundreds of large tech start-up sites online who will follow and report on a city-fueled platform such as this (especially coming out of Detroit where the National press have found a disaster darling six years post-Katrina), they will see information about your city side by side with your problems listed. You should surely highlight those assets you have touted for years but now, in addition to the tax incentives, low cost of home ownership and beautiful waterfront, you will list your problems or more specifically those problems your citizens see in the course of their daily lives. Remember entrepreneurs like problems and with the click of their mouse, they can open a particular problem and create a crowd funding profile. Something similar to what you might find on Kickstarter. My suggestion would be to integrate this into what you are already doing with Kiva Detroit but it can surely done stand alone. By leveraging your existing network of advocates, giving citizens and expatriated business folk, you can raise say ten thousand dollars to relocate a potential founder to Detroit for an incubation period of 90-120 days. It will be easier than you might think. You also have supportive institutions to look to like that of the Knight and the Kauffman Foundation. In addition to capital it is important to support the incoming entrepreneur with the personal logistics of temporary to permanent relocation. Jack Miner at Tech Town made me aware of the Detroit Orientation Institute, an organization that might be perfectly equipped to lend a hand in this part of the process.
Now that the entrepreneurs you look to support are incoming with solutions on the brain. Full of ambition and feeling supported in their personal efforts, you must also incubate their professional venture. I will leave you to determine what you consider incubation but for me, as I know these folks that would line up to be part of a platform such as this, you need only house them, preferably with fellow entrepreneurs, while connecting them to your existing network of entrepreneur advocates. Open office space in Detroit at the moment is a commodity I imagine and as for facilitating interaction between the new and existing entrepreneurs and mentors, you need do little if any more than create a directory where people can profile themselves and integrate their Twitter profiles and email addresses for communication. Set it up and get out of the way. My City of Brotherly Love has a great example of what I am talking about in something called We Work In Philly.
The entrepreneurs will work for those first months along side their fellows, sometimes splitting off into teams no doubt and iterating concepts in hopes of arriving at what they deem a minimum viable product. That is the bare bones version of the solution they wish to eventually scale into the market. You could if wanted have a demo day every few months where entrepreneurs could pitch early stage investors but I don’t see it necessary. If they are building something that solves a real problem in a usable way, finding investment need not be a dog and pony show.
Looking to local early stage venture capital funds and angel groups, those ventures deemed market viable by each individual investment entity will receive enough capital to incubate the start-up out in Detroit for 6-12 months. In most cases, these are going to be relatively nominal investments in the 100 – 200k range.
If an investment fund were focused on investing locally and so inclined, they could model an investment vehicle after the Start Fund. A mechanism first established by uber-angel investor Yuri Milner in where 150K convertible notes were and continue to be given to each accepted start-up into the Y-Combinator accelerator program. Mr. Milner wisely sees that particular start-up shop a filter for his investments. Your city is of course not an incubator so this arrangement with an investment firm, should there be one, would be specific to those companies they deem viable. If you wanted to do it, I would pitch it as a “First Look” deal like television studios have with independent producers. The twist here, and as it happens it is already being done in your own cities start-up accelerator, is adding a residency clause to those companies you seed.
In returning for being the first investors, along with all the other standard fare like right of first refusal and discount share options, your seed round will require the new company to stay and build in Detroit.
Regional economic and workforce development right on your doorstep.
If it seems as though I am overly simplifying the process, you have likely been too long mired in bureaucracy or are accustom to building industrial age businesses. Three hundred page reports and exploratory committees a thriving economy does not build. As it stands, I fear that Detroit flush with tax breaks and subsidies sits mostly in the cross hairs of those that tinker with the boom and bust economy the average Joe now knows all too well. If nothing else, Detroit, rooted in the can-do spirit of factory workers and fisherman, steel workers and small business owners, has the perfect sort of ethic in place to drive the next generation of start-ups out into the world.
If you want to reach out, email me here and follow me here. A big thank you to @HayleyBierkle for first showing me around Detroit and for helping me with drafts of this article. Your city would hard pressed to find a more brilliant and fervent advocate so be sure to say hello to her on Twitter and should you run into her down at Cliff Bells.
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My first big shock in my journey into the startup world came after my roommate and I built our first product together. We pasted the link all over Facebook, tweeted it out, and told our friends and family about it. I even spent a week hand-drawing three hundred pictures to make a traditional animation commercial for our website and put it on Youtube. And after all that effort, my roommate and I were still the only ones using it a month later. That’s when it hit me –
Nobody on the Internet cares or knows about what I’m doing.
And that’s how it will always be at the onset of anything, because ours is the generation of noise. There is an incredible amount of noise on the Internet, even in a subject as specific as ‘startup.’ So how do you cut through the noise and reach your target audience? These 7 tips should help you get started.
There are a slew of blogs out there about how NOT to suck at Public Relations. http://proprtips.com/ is a great one, as the author is a journalist for CNET and hears pitches all the time. http://dearprflack.com/ is another blog where contributors share their PR horror stories. http://badpitch.blogspot.com/ has great general advice about Public Relations.
You can’t just cold call or email people and expect to siphon value from them without building a relationship and offering them value first. Before asking someone to write about you, your product, or your service, read their ‘About Me’ and find out what kinds of stories they cover. They might write about tech, but do they write about mobile apps? Do they do product reviews or write an advice column? If they can tell that you’ve read their recent work and you can spell or pronounce their name correctly, you’ll already stick out from the flack.
You need to think like your target market. Imagine, or better yet, ask what their problems are. Use their keywords to search for a solution, and see what blogs or news sites come up. Ideally, this is where you’d like your product or service to be talked about. Find out who writes about the topic relevant to your market and start building that relationship with them.
Coming from a philosophy background, it pains me to say “less is more.” But when it comes to PR, lesser known blogs or news sites may be more likely to listen to you. You could spend a month trying to get one email response from a Lifestyles columnist at the New York Times, or you could be building relationships with all the mommy-bloggers that your target market reads and trusts.
You won’t remember everything about every relationship you try to build. Use some sort of CRM tool or note-taking tool to give you that superhuman memory about everyone that you interact with. Take notes after every point of interaction, whether it be an email or a phone call. The more details you remember about your interaction with people, the more trust you can develop.
Don’t waste anyone’s time with fluff; the language you use talking to writers should be completely different from that which you use to market your product. Let them know what your product or service does in exactly as many words as necessary and no more. Thank them for their time and definitely don’t harass them if they don’t respond in five minutes.
This is something I struggle with all the time – I love reading about how to do things so much that I never do them! You can’t learn skills by reading facts; procedural knowledge and propositional knowledge are handled by different parts of your brain. So stop reading and start practicing. Experiment with different ideas and measure what works and what doesn’t work.
Bonus tip: Write your own publicity. Look for a blog or news source that is taking guest authored articles and see how you can help… This was a guest post written by Austin Ball.
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“Will I be able to keep food on the table? Does my startup even have a chance at succeeding? How am I going to increase sales? Does what I’m working on actually matter?”
You encounter these sort of questions when you’re in the “Trough of Sorrows” (as Paul Graham so eloquently stated).
These sort of questions often stand between entrepreneurs and a full night of sleep. The questions build an uneasy tension that resides just below the surface, often concealed by a fragile ego.
There seems to be pressure in the startup community to keep a stiff upper-lip and not admit any weakness. These questions mixed with slowing sales or other obstacles can lead you right into a feeling of helplessness. You can very easily get stuck in the “Trough of Sorrows” where nothing quite seems to be working the way that it should be. It can be a ridiculously hard thing to break out of, but most entrepreneurs have had to go through it at one point or another.
The first time I experienced the trough of sorrows, I dreaded every second of it. It’s not a fun position to be in. The second time I had to go through it, I had a change of heart.
My Moment of Clarity came to me when I was at my lowest point. Sales were drying up and growth was becoming stagnant. I looked at my bank account and wrote out the tiny balance on a piece of paper. I figured out that we were going to run out of money in 6 weeks. The trough forced me to take a step back and take an objective look at our strategy. I realized I could either be depressed about the number, or let it fuel me.
You see, the trough of sorrows is a metaphorical fork in the road. You can either fold up shop or you can persevere. There is no middle ground. It’s almost refreshing to have a black and white outcome for once. If you can make it through the trough, you’ll be able to conquer any other situation. When you’re in the trough your instincts will tell you to fold, but if you’re sure of your business (after taking an honest look at it), that’s your cue to and double down. Do whatever it takes to make things work.
Since I knew exactly where we stood, I became fierce. I was determined to not let my company die. I went into overdrive and kept hustling until that tiny bank account doubled. Then it doubled again. And again. All of this happened because of my moment of clarity. I was no longer hostage to those poisonous questions and could see things clearly.
Whenever you go through your trough of sorrows, know you’re not alone (almost everyone has gone through it). Search for your moment of clarity.
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I had the privilege of sitting down with my friend Sanjay Parekh (from Startup Riot) to discuss how to get the most of startup events. In this interview we talk about how Sanjay went from being an introvert, to a networking machine. Sanjay discusses how he was able to get his first customer (because of an event for entrepreneurs), how he got press for his startup, and built connections with investors. You can read the highlights below the video.
If you see someone at all the events, chances are they don’t have anything of value.
1. Know what people are working on. This lets you figure out how you might be able to help them…
👉 Read Article.
Before starting Digital Intent, my two partners and I were trying to build an “e-Harmony for jobs” at a startup in town. We put a beta put together in six weeks which allowed candidates to complete a profile and be matched with employers using an algorithm combining education, experience and skills, as well as a proprietary competency and culture model.
In our customer development interviews, employers told us that culture fit was at least as important, if not more important, than someone’s skillset and experience. This went against our initial hypotheses and our gut was screaming that this was wrong, but the feedback was consistent and overwhelming.
The following is heavily inspired by Charlie Munger’s talk, Turning $2 Million into $2 Trillion, he is undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers of our time.
It is early 1999 in Palo Alto and your two friends Larry and Sergey are complaining to you how they want to go back to conducting academic research but this new project of theirs, Google, is taking up a lot of their time. They sound enthusiastic that they might be able to make half a million dollars each and improve the search results for the potential acquirer but more than anything, they don’t want to be bothered with having to run a company.
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I'm a YC alumn and I love startups. I created TSF to highlight companies I find interesting. You can learn more about me here.
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