Tag Archives: PR

Product Testing & Validation

22 Jun


If I got really down I would listen to Frank Sinatra’s song ‘That’s Life.’ You know, the lyrics that go ‘as funny as it may seem, some people get their kicks stompin’ on a dream.’

- Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint.com on how he dealt with self-doubt and the skepticism he encountered from almost every investor he pitched to

28. Validation and Outreach (March)

With our Beta starting to shape up for launch, I really wanted to get the product into the market and start getting feedback. I spent most of March validating/testing my product.

Outreach to entrepreneurs

Before the product was ready to test, I reached out to people who’s opinions I respected, i.e. start-up entrepreneurs who’s blogs I read and followed on twitter. Here are a few of the people I reached out to – Andrew Chen, Amir Khella, Ben Yoskowitz, Jason Baptiste, among others. To be honest, I never expected a response from a single one of them. I sent them a personal email telling them how their blogs helped me be a better entrepreneur, talked briefly about what I was working on and attached screen-shots of the product. Being the class acts they were, they all responded. Every one of their reviews was positive and mentioned that they would be interested in checking out the product. Can’t wait to get the final product in their hands.

In addition, I also reached out to do a few guest blog posts. Here’s an article I wrote on Bill Mullins’ Weblog, a Technorati Top 150 blog.

User-Testing

The day finally came when I felt the product was in decent enough shape for users to test. I decided to use UserTesting to get user feedback. This is an awesome service – would recommend it to anyone wanting to get feedback on their product. I can’t explain how big of a step this is. Getting the product into actual users hands…even testers is a big deal! You hold your breath when you ship it out… and exhale of relief when it’s received well.

The overall reactions to the product were very positive, both from a UI & product standpoint. Small (but big) win! They brought up some issues that we hadn’t thought of, so it was great that we did this. We ended up making some critical UI changes based on their feedback.

Lessons Learned: Your product isn’t as bad as you think. Get it out there. As a founder you’re paranoid about your product, but in all likely hood you’ve done a good job and users won’t hate it. You’ll only learn how to make your product better.

Startup Riot & Lean Startup Circle Atlanta

21 Jun

“Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”  -Mark Twain

This post I wrote a while ago but it never ended up seeing the light of day. I think it needs to get back into the story. The terrible picture is me with Andrew Warner @ Start-up riot 2011.

27. Evangelizing my startup

Lean Start-up Circle Atlanta

Last week (mid-January) I talked to my buddy Pete about starting up a Lean Startup Circle here in Atlanta. I guess I was a little surprised that a city this big didn’t have a LSC already. But then again, I think that the biggest participants and drivers in LSCs are consumer internet companies so… guess its not that surprising after all (see my comments later in this post) .

I won’t bore you with the details, but we put it together pretty quickly – here’s the official meetup group, and I’m pretty happy to report that the first meet-up we had on Feb 7th was very productive. I think we had around 15 people attend. Not bad for the first meetup. My personal goal is to at least bring everyone in the consumer internet space in Atlanta together. I won’t talk too much about the LSC stuff here as isn’t the forum for it, unless some crazy shit happens :-)

Start-up Riot

Yesterday (February 16th) I went to Start-up Riot. Arguably Atlanta’s largest and best early stage tech start-up event. I’ve also been told that LessConf is just as great, if not better. Either ways, if you’re an early stage tech start-up, then these are the two premier events in Atlanta that you can’t miss.

Since I moved here, I’ve realized Atlanta isn’t a “consumer internet” town. This was initially just a feeling I had, but later re-enforced by my interactions with various entrepreneurs/investors in the start-up community here. But something that has also been acknowledged by successful Atlanta entrepreneurs like Dave Wright, Dave Payne & Michael Tavani, Dave Cummings (hmm… lot of Dave’s, just realized) etc… On the other hand, Atlanta is a great place for companies in the Enterprise, FinTech, Healthcare & Security sectors.

Anyways, onto the event. The event was awesome. A must go for every entrepreneur. I regretted not pitching though. I will definitely present next year. My original impression was that companies at this event had to be launched and have some validation. Turns out that this wasn’t the case, there were plenty of companies at a similar stage as me. Met a lot of interesting start-ups and heard a lot of great pitches. TripLingo ended up winning the audience choice award… I was happy for them. Always happy to support fellow consumer internet start-ups :-)

The highlights of the event were getting to talk to Andrew Warner, David Houser & Charlie O’Donnel. All of whom I followed on Twitter, so I was able to recognize them and had plenty to talk about. If you don’t know who they are, read up, you should. They were awesome – very approachable & down to earth.

I gotta tell you, its also a weird feeling meeting people whom you read about and follow. It was an important step for me, personally. When you meet them in person, you in a way feel that becoming a successful entrepreneur is a lot more “tangible”.  Meeting and talking to them like any other normal person makes you feel that you can do it too… that they’re not on some distant universe that you can never be part of. Maybe this wouldn’t be a big moment for other entrepreneurs, but for me, in a way, it helped break a glass ceiling.

When I talked to Charlie, one of the first things he said to me was “change your name”, Mokabla will not stick. This re-iterated what was starting to become a pattern. I’m going to be giving this whole name change thing some more serious thought.

Another highlight was getting randomly interviewed by the Start-up Riot video crew. Being my first ever live interview, I’m sure it’ll be a lesson in how not to be in front of the camera.

Lessons learned: Go to as many networking events as you can. You are doing yourself a dis-service by not talking to people at every opportunity possible.  There’s no such thing as you aren’t “ready”. That’s BS. The positives that come out of networking far far outweigh any negatives. I can go into a whole post on how networking has been critical to my start-up move forward.

21 Must Read Resources for Startup Marketing

20 Jun

“Pressure is what you live for…if you are going to be successful in life, you’re going to have pressure.”                                            - Jack Nicklaus to Rory McIlroy

I haven’t updated this blog in a while. That’s partly because we’ve had a lot going on, and partly because I wanted to first get the big fucking monkey off my back. i.e. I wanted to wait until I started to get new users and content onto Get Comparisons. Which I’m happy to say… we’ve been successful at doing! So with a big sigh of relief I return to blogging.

It’s hard to explain the feelings one goes through when one puts one’s baby/product out into the market. You wonder whether its going to be accepted… or whether all those negative thoughts were right and you really just had a crazy idea. Now that Get Comparisons is well beyond that point, I’m happy to get back to blogging. I guess the next step is just worrying about growth :-) . In my next few posts I’ll summarize all the advances we made since my last blog, and there have been a lot: Startup Riot, user-testing, re-branding, new team members, blogger outreach campaign, new users etc.

I first want to publish a list of resources that helped me think about the “launch” process. These articles helped me think about how to get the first users, how to build initial content, how to reach out to bloggers etc… basically what to do if you’re starting from zero. Hope you guys find these resources helpful as well!

Startup Marketing 101 (in no particular order):

  1. How to create a [good] blogger pitch Stephanie Schwab
  2. How to start with 0 members Rich Millington, thought leader in community building
  3. Preparing for launch Peldi, Balsamiq Founder
  4. Startup marketing advice from balsamiq studios Peldi, Balsamiq Founder
  5. Thoughts on product launch promotion Marshall Kirkpatrick, editor & writer RWW
  6. Traction Verticals Gabriel Weinberg, Founder Duck Duck Go
  7. Startup marketing: Getting your startup noticed and covered by blogs Zferral Blog
  8. How PR professionals should pitch bloggers Jeremiah Owyang, Social Media Guru
  9. Three keys to laying out a strong PR foundation Shonali Burke, PR/social media consultant
  10. Find customers and fund your startup – before you even have a product Shonali Burke, PR/social media consultant
  11. How to pitch a tech blogger Mark Hendrickson
  12. How to pitch your startup to the media Nick Saint
  13. PR for your startup: How a bunch of Silicon Valley rookies out-launch the veterans Gagan Biyani, uDemy founder
  14. Hollywood launch 37Signals – nuf said
  15. Pitch blogging resources Marshall Kirkpatrick, editor & writer RWW
  16. Five wrong ways to pitch Read Write Web and one great way Marshall Kirkpatrick, , editor & writer RWW
  17. Mint.com: A fresh example of startup-up Web marketing Brian Jackson
  18. Fab 5 product marketing blogs Bertrand Hazard
  19. How to pitch tech journalists Ciara Byrne
  20. How to get your first 1,000 users Vinicius Vicanti, Yipit Co-Founder
  21. Find a Growth Hacker for your Startup Sean Ellis, The best “start-up growth” guy on the planet
Update – This subject of Start-up Marketing really started to intrigue me. In the interest of learning more, and profiting from others’ past experiences, I decided to start a video blog on the subject – StartupMarketing.tv. Hopefully this is of some help as well!

Live

25 Feb

“Ideas that most people derided as ridiculous have produced the best outcomes. Don’t do the obvious thing.” - Fred Wilson,  Union Square Ventures

26. First public pitch & presentation

Yesterday was a big day for us – Mokabla went live! We didn’t give out membership access yet though, we unveiled it so that people could start checking the site out. Access will probably take a few more days as we complete building out the site and features.
Our so called “launch” occurred at an event hosted by Entrepreneur Society. Michael Tavani, the co-founder of ScoutMob was the main speaker. I was pretty happy to be launching at this event. ScoutMob is one of the few successful B2C consumer internet startups from Atlanta, and I am a huge fan of their product. As such it was great to be sharing the launch platform with their founder. Hopefully their success will rub off on us!
This is how this event came to be. I know the guys who run Entrepreneur society. A week or so before the event, they floated the idea of Mokabla getting a shout-out during the event – as an up and coming consumer internet company from Atlanta. Less than a week before the event, this vague idea morphed into a “30 second presentation” on the stage. Now, I was expecting to launch Mokabla around this time but hadn’t yet locked down a deadline to do so. With the confirmation of the presentation, we now had a de facto deadline, so we started to work towards going live on that day. Seemed pointless to unveil a product and not have a teaser at least for people to look at. Since Mokabla wasn’t ready for launch, I spent most of the week racing with my team to to get the site up. I figured to deal with the presentation later. A couple of days before the event, the 30 seconds got extended 2 min. And on the day of the event, I found out that I was actually getting 3 min on stage. Thankfully, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to present and what I wanted in my slide-deck.

This is what the day of the event was like -

6 am – noon: Work on product and intermittently edit slides
12 pm: Finalized slide-deck!
2:30 pm: Site goes live. Told some close friends to check it out
2:45 pm: Site stopped loading. Minor crisis. Realized this is because our server capacity was still at 512kb (since that was all we had needed for our internal testing purposes). Luckily our RackSpace hosting allowed us to increase capacity almost immediately.
3 pm: Went offline to force myself to stop getting sucked into product development and started finalizing script for presentation
3:15 pm: Finalized presentation. Number of times I managed to read the presentation from start to end – 2
3:15 – 3:45pm: Showered and got ready for event. Realized our home printer didn’t work and would need to stop off at Fedex to print
3:45pm: Left for event. Was supposed to have been at the venue by now for dry run
4pm: Got to Fedex. Find out that their printers weren’t working either. Begged the cashier to let me use their system to print. He grudgingly agrees and I get my presentation.
4:15: Get to venue, present once in front of friend
5pm: On stage
5:02:45 pm: Done. End of a hell of a stressful day! First ever presentation in front of around 200 people.

Apparently everyone enjoyed the presentation – got great feedback from everyone I spoke with. More importantly, they really liked the product. Especially Michael; and the other founder of Scoutmob - Dave Payne who wasn’t at the event but had been keeping track of us on Twitter . It was great to talk to Michael, awesome guy, very open, down to earth and encouraging, which was really refreshing. Unfortunately its not what I can say about a lot of people I’ve met in the startup circles here. Given the fact that they haven’t even had a fraction of Scoutmob’s success, it begs the question, where does all that ego and pretentiousness comes from? End of rant.

The most nerve racking thing about this ins’t the actual presentation, or the fact that you’re presenting on stage in front of such a big audience for the first time, but the fact that you’re presenting a completely new concept – a (you’re) wild idea basically (and at this stage, without any user adoption that’s all it still is). So for all you know, people could think you’re daft. If I was making this presentation after we had a ton of users, this presentation would have been cake. But things went well for us, and we went out to celebrate later. Coverage of late night shenanigans is outside the scope of this blog.

Oh yeah, the image is of one of the awesome t-shirt designs we had printed for the event.

To Hire Or Not To Hire

3 Dec

Good ideas and innovations must be driven into existence by courageous patience.”

-Hyman Rickover, Former Admiral of the U.S. Navy

22. Contemplating hiring a marketing firm to help with PR

In my last post I talked about the different avenues I am exploring to build a community/market around Mokabla. One of the ways I listed was by hiring a PR person/agency to help with the outreach efforts. I’ve been really torn about this, for two reasons. First, I’ve gotten this far primarily on my own resourcefulness, so hiring someone else’s expertise to help launch Mokabla feels like a foreign object being inserted into my baby. I know I’ve hired developers to build the product but that to me is analogous to a contractor executing the project designed by the architect. They’re following orders and implementing what you want. Getting help with the marketing though has a completely different feel. This is something that I feel I should be doing myself.

Secondly. Hiring a PR will cost me, somewhere in $5K range, give or take. It’s cost me approx $10K in total to build this product . This is exactly what I expected to spend when I started this venture back in May. Not that I knew what was going to happen but adding a marketing agency will increase my costs by 50%.

Ultimately though I think I am looking at a marketing agency a poor man’s substitute for a co-founder. I think its proving detrimental to the project that I don’t have someone (like a co-founder) to brainstorm with. I’m justifying the additional cost by telling myself that hiring a marketing agency is going to be cheaper than having a co-founder and owning only 50% equity.

Having said that, these are some of the resources/agencies I have explored:

As of now I am almost certain I will go ahead with social media superstar Chris Brogan’s New Marketing Labs.

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