Marketing, Startups, and Venture Capital
Drew is a data-driven marketer with a passion for crafting exceptional brand experiences. He currently runs marketing at High Alpha, an Indianapolis-based venture studio, and previously held roles in content marketing and product marketing at ExactTarget and Salesforce. At High Alpha, Drew advises and runs marketing in the early days for the High Alpha Studio portfolio companies, helping them scale to their first $1M in revenue and build world-class marketing teams.
If there are two things always on a salesperson’s mind, it’s closing more deals and closing them faster. Sales reps are always looking to be more effective and get to “yes” faster.
Here are some quick tips to help accelerate your sales cycle and close deals faster.
Read MoreAs I've written before, social media can be a great place to generate new leads. Your organic social reach, though, typically will reach people who have already heard of your brand and products. Social ads can be a perfect solution to augment your social strategy and bring in more new leads, brand awareness, and engagement with a unique audience.
Read MoreBusinesses are always looking for more customers and to generate new leads. Social media is a great place to build a community and engage with audiences for small businesses and startups. Not only can social media help you raise brand awareness, but it can also be used to acquire new leads and ultimately new customers.
Below are nine ways to acquire new leads and customers using social media.
Read MoreFace it — founding, running, or working for a startup is hard and can be extremely stressful. The only constant is change, priorities are always shifting, and productivity is the key to success.
As an entrepreneur or employee at a startup, it’s vital for you to be as productive and efficient as you can. Not only will this help you be more effective and efficient at your job, but it will also help reduce the stress that comes with running and working at a startup.
Read MoreFrom What if you stopped? by Seth Godin:
What would happen to your audience if you shut the doors tomorrow? (I know what would happen to you, that's not my question... what would happen to them?)
What would happen to your customers and to your prospects if you stopped doing your work?
If you stopped showing up, if you stopped selling them something, would they miss you if you were gone?
Read MoreFrom Average is just another word for mediocre by Seth Godin
If you think your organization needs a bigger marketing budget, maybe you just need to be less average instead.
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From The First Law Of Internet Physics by Fred Wilson:
many users * low arpu >>>> few users * high arpu
I’ve seen so many people try paid content on the Internet and the result is less users, a lot less. You can extract a higher average revenue per user (arpu) from a paid model, but you get so many less users that is it better to extract a lower arpu with a free model and get many more users.
Read MoreAs a follow-up to my recent post on reasons to take and not to take venture capital money, I found Jason's advice on when not to sell a business extremely pertinent.
From Jason Lemkin:
Read MoreWhen not to sell. My learnings:
1. Do not sell if you are at scale and have a committed team. This is pretty much it for me. E.g., in SaaS, if you are at $10m+ ARR, and growing nicely, and the team is killing it — just don’t sell. Once you are at Scale in SaaS, you can’t be killed. Why sell? Really.
From Ten Realities of Taking Venture Capital Money by Charlie O'Donnell:
If you take venture capital money...
1) You increase the chances that you may not be CEO of your own company one day--and that also might be the best thing for its long term success.
2) You are signing up to sell the company one day--to another company or to the public market, but definitely to someone.
3) You will almost certainly take more venture capital money after that.
4) You will almost certainly go cashflow negative, increasing the risk that your company will fail.
Read MoreThe mobile app world is maturing and starting to unbundle itself. We've seen this recently with the Foursquare's introduction of Swarm, Facebook's unbundling of Messenger, and many more. Major tech companies are starting to build their own ecosystem of apps. Just look at the apps companies like Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Twitter, and even Salesforce are building—these companies are building entire ecosystems of specialized apps.
Read MoreI was waiting to see someone much smarter than me write their opinion on Ello's move to become a public benefit corporation and the implications that has for startups and VCs, but I have yet to see any good posts on the news. So I thought I would share my thoughts and reaction to hearing this.
In case you haven't seen the news yet, a couple weeks ago Ello—the latest social media sensation to hit shelves—converted to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
Read MoreThis deck is required reading to me for anyone in the tech industry—especially anyone working with startups.
I'm going to be reading Eric and Jonathan's coinciding book as well, but if you don't have time for the full book, I would highly recommend reading through his Slideshare.
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