A Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Technology & Locative Dynamics

The video below is just insane. It is the Diggnation Live from London! episode at the Future of Web Apps conference. Digg.com founder Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht are talking in their video cast about tech and web culture. The integration of the latest news and musings from the social bookmarking site Digg makes it an interesting format for young and tech savvy people.

I cannot imagine someone in Germany getting this popular with such a show, this is really where you see the American tech culture is way ahead of us. Kevin Rose is definitely a leader in this technology culture with a lot of influence. Created Digg and co-founded the Revision3 video platform and the Pownce micro blogging site, great work.

“Revision3 is the first media company that gets it, born from the Internet, on-demand generation. Unlike aggregators, mash-ups, and user-generated video sites, Revision3 is an actual TV network for the web, creating and producing its own original, broadcast quality shows.” from Revision3.com

Martin Oetting from trnd (the real network dialog) is asking in a blog post how his marketing and trend agency can help startups with their marketing strategy. The goal of their efforts shall be an improved, more effective and viral marketing for your own startup.

I am not sure if startups that are working on a shoestring budget, shall involve third-party marketing agencies. It always depends on the situation but let’s do a short brainstorming to give them some input.

1. Guy Kawasaki said during one presentation that the next slide will explain everything in marketing you ever need. It is, create a value for your customers and be unique! So this should be the marketing strategy, make clear that you provide a value and that your company or better your product is unique. If trnd can support startups with this, their service is useful.
2. Name instruments how to create virality and passionated users. For example, perfect industry design (Apple), addictive features (Facebook’s activity stream), news people love to speak about (newspaper reports about weddings and born babies through eHarmony or other success stories for PR), quality content (MySpace announcing new partnerships with famous bands), founder blogs that provide new perspectives,… There are many instruments and I am still looking for some frameworks that support you in creating virality.
3. Show and explain marketing campaigns that worked with similar products.
4. Find the right marketing instruments with a broad reach. You can invest your money in hundreds of different marketing instruments but which ones have been proven more successful than others. e.g. Avoid expensive TV campaigns but look for highly specific Google Adwords.
5. Be creative. Don’t do what everyone else is doing and avoid being a follower instead of a leader. An easy and cheap way to get some professional feedback about new creative and maybe risky marketing efforts would be helpful.
6. Consulting about the different marketing channels and how you can leverage them best for your startup. e.g. Facebook Social Ads, founder/company blogs, press releases, TV, radio, newspapers,…
7. Create and test a strategy how your product development goes hand in hand with a feature marketing, so that you produce regular attention and press releases.
8. What are current trends and how do they affect your startup? As a startup it is difficult to get access to expensive trend reports, help on this topic is appreciated.
9. Finding the connectors for your product, the persons that will spread the news out of an intrinsic motivation.
10. Get access to marketing research material that effects your sector. e.g. how to do technology marketing, international marketing or marketing for health related sites,…

Any additions? Just post a comment.

What a great weekend, I attended the Entrepreneurs Garage (German: Unternehmerwerkstatt) which was organized by the Aachen Found.AC project team which are the members of the Aachen Entrepreneurship Team (AC.E). AC.E is a student initiative supporting entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking at the RWTH Aachen. I am member of Thinc! a similar initiative for the University of Mannheim so it was good to see what kind of events they organize to support students getting an entrepreneurial mindset. The whole theme of the event was “The Next Big Thing in the Internet”, so I could listen to many interesting and inspiring presentations.

Long story short, what are the key learnings?

• It is always the best thing to speak about your interests and intentions, especially if you are starting a company and you need more feedback and ideas.
• Team matters. With a motivated and passionated team you can always create a successful venture. Maybe not with the first try, but then with the second or third. Good teams can handle failures but still thrive for progress and continuation.
• There are tools and instruments out there to evaluate ideas and markets. Use them to figure out the potential of your idea and your startup.
• Discussion is important, the questions and answers after the presentations have been great and valuable. The interaction between the participants made the difference in comparison to regular one-way presentations.
• No outsourcing of core competences. If you are an Internet startup, you are a technology company and a core competence is often the in-house development of the application. Without outsourcing or offshoring you have less dependencies and a higher flexibility.
• Speed of execution matters. Do it better and faster than your competition. Don’t follow or swim with the market, lead it.
• Often you must find or need the luck for the right timing of your startup. Social Networks in the year 2000? No, but portals. Pure mobile social networks in 2007? Not in Germany or the US, maybe in some years. Sometimes ideas are too early for the current markets and often just too late.

To give you an impression about the participants and the presenters, here are some links. Note: They are all in German.

• ConnectedMarketing blog by Martin Oetting
• Lummaland blog by Nico Lumma
• Everything a Startup Needs blog by Andreas Gerads
• Exciting Commerce blog by Jochen Krisch
• Imedo Health Community
• edelight social shopping
• Rudi Rockt event concept

A lot of diversity and inspiration and at least one more good idea for a small software development project that can be a profitable business. No big business, but good business. Maybe there will be a startup with the roots in this event. I met so many persons with whom I want to stay in contact with for many reasons, exciting times.

Thanks to the organizers for such an event and hopefully more events like this will spread over Germany.