Tag Archives: marketing

The Ultimate Guide To Resources You Will Need To Startup

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It’s crazy starting up, isn’t it? There are a number of things that require your attention and almost all of them at the same time. Bogs you down completely, making you go helter-skelter looking for resources to help you in your tasks.

Well, the good thing is that I’ve been there, done that. I’ve gone through this myself and totally identify with your current mental state.

And that made me put together this ultimate guide for awesome resources you will need for each aspect of your startup. Right from getting you started to helping you manage your operations and down to helping you grow.

So let’s get started.

STARTING UP

Idea validation: you have plenty of ideas, but do not know how viable they are and whether there is a market big enough for it. You also need to make sure you choose the right path. And this is where you need a startup coach who can not only validate your ideas, but also give you the answers to all your problems. That’s where I step in. Email me to have your ideas validated or if you’re looking for answers to a specific problem.

Company Name: you need to have a company name that is sticky and catchy, short, is functional and tells a story. There are many ways to generate names – core function of your company, benefit that it offers, mash-up of the founders’ names or simply through crowdsourcing. If you really must pay to get it done, one such service is Namella.

Domain Name: you really must get creative in selecting the right domain name. Unless your company name is really unique and is not really something from the dictionary, it may work. But if it doesn’t, take a look at some creative ways of using domain name within your company name. Example? Launch.it. Here’s a fantastic online tool (free) that can suggest short creative domain names for your company: Domainr. And then you can go over to GoDaddy or HostGator to register your domain name.

Hosting: you don’t know where to go looking for hosting service providers? Most of the domain name registration companies also provide hosting services, such as GoDaddy and HostGator. There are bigger players also in the market but they also come at a cost. Take a look at Rackspace’s cloud hosting pricing plans to give you an idea.

BUSINESS PLANNING

Business Plan: Planning to write a business plan and not sure how to or where to get started? Well, then here’s a fantastic tool to help you do just that.

The U.S. Small Business Administration has launched this nifty online tool to help you build a business plan, step by step. You need to register (free) to be able to use this tool. Once registered, the tool offers a tab-based step-by-step guide that lets you enter information into a template for each section of the business plan.

Pitch Deck For Funding: congratulations if you’ve made it this far. I haven’t come across anyone who has written a business plan to secure funding. What many of them did was to create a presentation and some worked additionally on executive summaries. Here’s a fantastic resource for just that, a complete deck for creating an early stage pitch.

Raising Money: if you’re done bootstrapping your startup or want to raise more seed fund for your startup, you’ve got to approach angel investors. These investors are typically individuals with a lot of cash who provide business capital to startups. Look for business incubators in your area and apply to them. Some examples of the popular ones are 500 Startups, Startup Bootcamp, Y Combinator and TechStars. There is also an online platform that matches investors with startups: Angel.co.

Crowd funding is also a great option to raise funding. It is the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their resources, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowd funding has increasingly becoming popular with the likes of Kickstarter, RocketHub, Indiegogo launching their platforms on the Internet that bring together startups and individuals who are interested in contributing towards an idea or a product.

Legal Help: when starting up, you’ve got to take care of a number of things that are required from the legal stand-point. Things such as routine legal needs, business incorporation, trademarks, patents and copyrights, business compliance, corporate changes and filings, etc. Go to LegalZoom for help, which is the leading legal brand (and immensely affordable) for small businesses and consumers.

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Wireframing or Prototyping: if you’re a technology entrepreneur, you need to create a wireframe for your product as a starting point. Not only does it help to get you clarity on your idea but also helps when interacting with developers, investors or users for idea validation. Here are some neat tools for creating wireframes or prototyping – Pidoco, Creately, MockFlow and Balsamiq.

Website and App Development: if you’re a startup entrepreneur, focus on your getting your product out to the customer. You must outsource the development of your website and apps to a provider who best understands your challenges. Arkenea Technologies, for example, partners entrepreneurs in launching their mobile apps and website businesses. The company is run by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs and therefore best understands what it takes to get a fantastic product out to the customers. (Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of the company)

A/B Testing: a lot of marketers are using A/B testing to gain insight into visitor behavior and to increase conversion rate. Here, two versions (A and B) are compared, which are identical except for one variation that might impact the user’s behavior. In the end, you select the version that performs best. You can test call to action’s wording, size, color and placement; headline or product description; form’s length and fields; product pricing and offers, etc. Here are some nifty tools to help you with A/B Testing – Google Content Experiments, Monetate, Optimizely, Unbounce and Visual Website Optimizer.

MARKETING

Landing pages: these are your best friends when you don’t have a product, yet want customer buy-ins, or when you have a product, get them to buy-in. Here’s a great example of a landing page that showcases how you can get buy-ins before a product is launched. There are a number of online tools that help you create landing pages – LaunchRock, KickoffLabs and Unbounce.

Content Marketing: if you want to learn about this bit, Neil Patel is your best pal. Read his blog in and out and you will learn a lot of tricks of the trade, which you can actually implement on your own. Content marketing is a fantastic (and free) way to market your startup. He’s got fantastic resources on getting retweets for your content, converting blog readers into customers, and a whole lot more. And yes, if you’re looking for a resource on writing content, here’s a fantastic resource to help any novice person write powerful content.

Social Media: there are a multitude of resources available on the Internet that harness the power of the social media to help in effective and targeted marketing. Here are a few that will help turn your social media campaign into a fantastic one – IceRocket for keeping tabs on who is saying what about you and your brand; Board Tracker to follow customers who are more likely to spend time on message boards; social media best practices; Buffer for posting links multiple times on social networks; OnlyWire to send your blog posts to 47 high-traffic sites; and finally, here are 75 tips to manage your social media efforts.

Originally published on Under30CEO.

photo credit: Junjan via photopin cc

The Ultimate Guide To Marketing Your Mobile Startup

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In one of my previous articles, I had written about Launching A Successful Mobile Startup and provided four rock-star tips on how you can do so. I had also promised a detailed article in that on how you can market your mobile startup to success.

And here it is, as promised.

Getting down to business, if you’re looking at launching a successful mobile startup, then reaching out to your customers is as important as having a great app.

Marketing begins the day you put your mobile app idea into production. The activities are divided into two phases: Pre-launch and Post-launch marketing.

Most of the ideas here require no money at all to market. All it requires is time and commitment to get you the much-needed visibility.

Pre-Launch
The day you have firmed up your product idea and put into development, start with these activities immediately for unbelievable results.

Blog: create a blog where you write regularly about the issues that your product touches up on. Remember to keep this generic; no one likes to be pushed updates only about your product. Content marketing is a huge traffic driver and helps in monetizing. Read this awesome post by Neil Patel on his Quicksprout blog on how to write a powerful blog post/article in two hours.

Microsite: create a microsite, typically a one-three page website that is an advertising tool for your app. Even though a lot of downloads will come through app stores directly, a huge amount of traffic is driven through the web. Here are some such examples of great app microsites: Piictu, Instagram, Path, Sonar and Assistant App.

Social Media Profiles: create a profile across social media and bookmarking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. This will help you spread the word about your blog posts and also write much more about the category and related content of your product idea. Always include a link to the microsite. Here are 10 ways to get more traffic, attention and higher rankings through social sharing.

Teaser or Giveaway: what good is a microsite and linking that to posts when the product is not available in the app stores yet? My suggestion is to build a teaser campaign or a giveaway into your microsite and invite people to share their email address to stay updated on when the app launches. Now you’ve got your own database from people who have shown interest in your product. These are the people that are more likely to convert as customers. Here’s an excellent example of such a page: Turnplay.

SEO: begin search engine optimization or SEO immediately for your microsite. SEO takes anywhere between 3-6 months to start showing good results. By the time the traffic starts building up, you would have had a version of your product ready for launch. Even if not, you still have your teaser campaign running and getting more opt-ins for when your app launches. Works both ways and is very crucial to begin with at this stage.

Tech Blogs: when you’re about a month away from launch, prepare a fantastic press release or write up about your product idea and why you think it will change the world. Here’s an article on writing a brilliant pitch for blogs. Start getting in touch with blogs such as Mashable, TechCrunch, TheNextWeb, FastCoDesign, Ars Technica, etc who are likely to write about your product even before it launches if they feel that it truly is a path-breaking idea or execution.

Take for instance Clear. This iPhone app started to get tech blog coverage based on demos, previews and teaser videos. It sold 350,000 copies within nine days of its launch thanks to the pre-launch coverage!

Post-Launch
This phase covers activities that you need to do when you’re ready to launch and what to do after your mobile application is approved in the app store. All the activities in the pre-launch phase have to be continued through the launch and much after if you want to keep driving greater downloads.

App Store Marketing: this one’s a less-hyped activity, but gives fantastic results. A lot of people simply browse through the app stores in categories looking for new and attractive apps. This caters to that huge audience who goes to an app store looking for new apps to maximize downloads.

Make sure you have a fantastic name for your app. It should connect with the audience instantly and should be very catchy. Similarly, your app icon should grab attention, as these are two things that people see when browsing through the app store categories.

Select your keywords wisely. App stores require you to mention keywords that you feel your customers will use to search for your application. Look at successful apps in your category and learn from them.

Your app description should catch the fancy of your customer. The first paragraph should be your selling pitch. Don’t make it too long or boring, as the online audience doesn’t have much patience to read through. Also include your keywords in the description content.

The application screenshots that you are required to upload shouldn’t be just screenshots of your application. These should be customized to attract your customer. Again, think of this as your advertisement. Here’s a great article on how to design app store screenshots that sell.

Here’s an App Store Optimization Cheat Sheet for your ready reference. (click on the image to view it in full screen)

app store optimization cheat sheet

App Review Websites: there is a large audience that reads online reviews and recommendations before downloading an app. Once your app is launched and available on the app store, draft a press release and send it to a list of app review websites. Look at generic websites (here’s a good list) and also look at app review blogs specific to your category.

If yours is a paid app, Apple gives 50 promotional codes that lets that many number of people download your application for free. Send these to the app review websites along with a link to your application, as most of them will not bother paying to download for an app. If yours is a free app, simply include a link where they can download it.

Tech Blog Redux: don’t forget the tech blogs you wrote to earlier for after you have launched your app. If they did not cover your idea or product initially, you have another reason to write to them, informing of the launch. If your app does well, that’s another reason to write to them informing of the statistics and how well it has been received in the market. Include customer testimonials and case studies.

Ratings and Reviews: you need to find ways to encourage your customers to review and rate your application. The more the ratings, the more chances of it being downloaded from the app store. One of the more obvious (albeit fantastic) ones is to build a code in your application asking your users to rate. Another great idea is to gamify the rating itself. Reward customers who rate or review your app.

All of these activities, if executed well with fantastic content and a great product, will fetch you unbelievable results.

And if you’re ready with your product idea and want it to be designed and developed, I can help you with that. Just drop me an email.

photo credit: Haags Uitburo via photopin cc

Outsourcing Can Save Your Startup! Read How

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So you’ve decided to start up, and that’s good. Very soon though, you will have to go through idea validation, market research, creating a business projection plan, marketing plan, creating prototype, user testing and feedback, secure funding, launch your product or service, and much more. This is just a fraction of what you must do as an entrepreneur who’s starting up.

What’s more you ask? You have to build a team; then there are finances and infrastructure and setup and then the general administration.

Your life isn’t easy. Don’t make it harder on yourself. You need to be focused on your core offering. Rather than focusing on each of the functions (time consuming and attention dividing) or hiring someone to do that as an employee, which is most often more expensive as you may not be able to do with just one employee in that function, there’s a much better way to relieve you of unwanted stress. Outsource. This can save your startup!

What is important though are the areas of your business that you must outsource.

Outsource Function #1: Finance

Finance can take a considerable time out of your schedule, as this requires weekly attention. And you don’t want that. There’s management of billing, calculation of taxes, statutory filings and payments, maintaining your books of account, etcetera. Outsource this to a vendor that will allocate a team to handle this for you month on month. Look for a partner that will send a person to your office weekly, fortnightly or monthly depending on your business volume to sort out the accounting.

Outsource Function #2: Human Resources

You’ve got to hire, haven’t you? And once you have your employees on board, you have to manage appointment letters, salary processing, salary slips, employee taxation, compliance with government bodies, big etcetera. Most people will have you believe that you need a HR professional in your company. That’s an easy mistake to make when you’re starting up. You may not have enough volume to justify the salary of that one person. Or you may not find enough skills in one person to handle all the areas or HR.

Understanding that this is a crucial need, many a Payroll outsourcing companies have mushroomed in the last few years. If you feel this is something you are uncomfortable with, don’t worry, there are a lot of entrepreneurs who have adapted this and so have a lot of mid-sized companies.

Outsource Function #3: Marketing

You must surely think this is crazy. How can you outsource something so intrinsic? Well, unless you’re prepared to hire a digital marketing professional, an SEO professional, a content writer and public relations professional, outsource! Marketing isn’t about a one-way communication anymore. You have to do much more than spread the word about your offerings. You need to create communities, create engagements, create conversations, create content. And this is the new marketing.

Hire an agency that will do all of this for you. All you will need to do is to oversee versus managing a team and giving them constant direction. Not only is it time consuming to do it in-house, but much more expensive as well.

So this takes care of what you ought to do. But, I have also known people who have gotten a little too carried away and made some terrible mistakes in outsourcing some crucial areas that shouldn’t have been outsourced. Pay heed to the below list and it will help you in the long run.

  • Do not outsource graphic design
  • Do not outsource research and development
  • Do not outsource customer support

So now that you are aware of the areas that you can and must outsource, I must warn you. Outsourcing does not mean that you are completely let off. At best, it will rid you of the daily headaches, but surely you need to be in tune and oversee every function.

And what makes this management easier? Choosing the right partner. Look for one that shares a similar vision; that values your business as much as it does its own. And importantly, one that is located closer to you, preferably in the same city.

What functions or areas do you outsource that has worked for you apart from this list? Comment below with your views.

And if you have an idea that requires validation, email me for a one-to-one coaching.