Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 27, 2013

I’ve started a recent series on PR at startups since I get asked for advice on this topic so often. 6 or 7 years ago when TechCrunch was at its peak market share (they are still strong but many more tech blogs have also popped up) there was a term for getting covered there called “the TechCrunch bounce.”

PR 309

PR Campaign Vertical B2B 309

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 26, 2016

In an eCommerce or Internet Services business it is often the marketing costs (if purchased online) and in an enterprise software company it is often marketing plus enterprise sales reps. The first mistake that mostly only rookies make is to measure the CAC by looking at the attributable marketing costs of acquiring a user.

Metrics 150

Metrics Cost Acquisition Startup 150

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 30, 2011

The part of the movement that resonates the most with me (in my words) is that entrepreneurs should keep their capital expenditures really low while they’re experimenting with their product and determining whether there is a large market for what they do. Nascent startup markets are like fine wine, they take time to develop.

Development Team Review 374

Development Team Review Technical Review Bulgaria Lean 374

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2015

I need to give credit for the topic to PR Malloy who Tweeted me this question. PR Malloy (@diddly_do_indy) June 13, 2015. As the desk-based Internet emerged it was initially sold through telecom carriers (after players like AOL and EarthLink innovated the market).

PR 150

PR Early Stage Software Naming 150

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 6, 2013

My rationale is simple: everything goes wrong and only great teams can respond to competitors, markets, funding environments, staff departures, PR disasters and the like. I am fond of quoting that about 70% of my investment decision of an early-stage company is the team. Final startup grind from msuster.

Cofounder 388

Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 388

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 30, 2016

It is a truism that with more capital you will hire people more quickly and spend more liberally whether it’s on external contractors, PR firms, attending events, doing legal work (trademarks, patents) or whatever. You will build out features or expend to platforms — often before you have enough market feedback to warrant it.

Pre-Money Valuation 292

Pre-Money Valuation Valuation Early Stage Startup 292

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 19, 2011

o Huge on PR, “Be Everywhere” is his motto – fly to NY, proactively everywhere he could get press. To make PR big you need to find a way to “make news”. To make PR big you need to find a way to “make news”. o CPM model gave him control over the information in the acquisition cycle so he focused on that. -

Acquisition 304

Acquisition Warrant Customer Term Sheet 304

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 28, 2009

Buzzsaw (owned by Autodesk) raised $90 million and was making weekly noise in the market. Our biggest problem was market traction not each other. If you don’t address it they’re minds are shaped by competitor PR. Don’t underestimate the impact of good PR on your competitors. Having a conversation.

PR 331

PR Software Review Ireland Germany 331

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2010

We’re here for Greycroft’s CEO Summit – a gathering of the CEO’s of their portfolio companies with guest speakers covering topics including how to build your team, PR, customer development, etc. Get your product/market fit working before you ramp up your costs (or raise too much money). And market your brand, not your personality.

PR 279

PR Technical Review Portfolio Customer Development 279

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 24, 2014

It turns out it actually takes time to build a high-growth business with differentiated intellectual property and roll out large, enterprise-class marketing solutions. I remain a huge supporter and am very proud of our accomplishments and hugely optimistic about our future. 5 years ago.

Los Angeles 387

Los Angeles Intellectual Property LP Venture Capital 387

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 14, 2013

Mostly it’s because your marketing campaigns suck. Or more directly – they are likely narcissistic resuscitations of your newest features or bragging points that nobody but your marketing team and your mom care about. Plus they run conferences with the top people (which is another form of POV marketing by the way).

Campaign 389

Campaign Marketing Widget Analytics 389

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 11, 2014

I actually really enjoyed many of the points Muhammad made about marketing in general and I found myself nodding through the entirety of the article except for it’s core premise. It’s about looking out for and catching the next major marketing wave before others have grokked it. I laughed as I did at much of his rant.

Technical Review 384

Technical Review Hockey Stick SEM Channel 384

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 25, 2016

Lately I’ve been having to say things I thought I’d never have to remind people, like, “getting to positive gross margin in several territories is a very low bar to claim success” or “profitable excluding marketing costs” is not actually a real thing. Market Size. MakeSpace provides physical storage.

Startup 150

Startup Seed Money DC Software Review 150

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

Letting our customers and the market know that we were a real organization with real people rather than a pre-packaged, pre-processed marketing machine. Customers, press and the market responded positively. ‘ Here are some steps in the Inside Out organization. I rarely see the tech team do this.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 21, 2014

Since 2009 we’ve been in an unequivocal bull market. You’d imagine that companies selling tons of shelfware would quickly meet their deserved fate in the market, yet the spin around a category of software can fool buyers into thinking they “must have this product to compete.”

Marketing 354

Marketing Incubator Turkey Metrics 354

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 22, 2011

He founded the company, raised a bunch of money, built the product and established a good reputation and market position. They are great at their respective fields whether they be marketing, sales, programming, PR, whatever. That initial product became a market leader in its area. Dissent is fine.

Leadership 418

Leadership Technical Review Software Review PR 418

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 3, 2014

Features don’t win or lose sales – especially in nascent markets. If it wasn’t you, I guarantee you they were influenced by your competitor – either through their sales efforts or through marketing. The marketing guys blame the sales guys who can’t close their leads. People are buying YOU.

Sales 382

Sales Startup Technical Review Matching 382

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 10, 2011

Each with its own head, its own financial reporting and its own content strategy, pricing strategy and marketing strategy. Netflix needs to borrow the marketing prowess of Salesforce.com. Given how badly the announcement of the splitting went and their inability to control the PR cycle (or their stock price!) No, probably not.

Customer 287

Customer Technical Review Caching PR 287

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

So he would allocate say – 20% to sales, 15% to marketing, 20% to eng priorities, 10% to customer support, 10% to ops, 20% to ‘platinum customers’ and maybe 5% directly to me as the CEO. ” PR. So I would get ANYTHING I wanted within the confines of my budget.

Startup 150

Startup CTO Hire Sales Leadership 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 18, 2015

There’s too much PR and too many tech blogs and too many newsletters and aggregators and Twitter summarizers to even try to catch everything that’s going on and equally there’s so much noise that it becomes harder to be heard. I often tell people that in some ways it’s easier to build great companies in down markets.

Software Review 150

Software Review Turkey Portfolio Syndicate 150

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 22, 2011

They have seen one side of a market where many of us have seen the ebb and flow multiple times. Still, market amnesia by ordinarily rational actors always surprises me. I believe a bubble occurs when a market is willing to pay greater than intrinsic value for an asset class. I spoke about a lot of things during the keynote.

Saudi Arabia 309

Saudi Arabia Valuation IPO Technical Review 309

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 23, 2013

I have published many of these PR Tips before. It is simply the most important way to proactively control your career development and how the market perceives you. That was fine with me – the market is the market. That was the market. I knew that if I didn’t define myself the market would.

Marketing 385

Marketing Europe Engineer Networking 385

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 5, 2011

I’ve started writing up some of those sales & marketing lessons and I plan to continue to build that section out over time. Features don’t win or lose sales – especially in nascent markets. The marketing guys blame the sales guys who can’t close their leads. People are buying YOU.

Sales 316

Sales Technical Review Matching Hiring 316

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 22, 2014

SEO marketing vs. social marketing. Of course it is super helpful if a VC can drop you in to important people for business development, recruiting, PR, sales and eventually M&A. Think of web vs. mobile. Traditional software vs. SaaS. Connections?

Portfolio 364

Portfolio Chicago Sales Incubator 364

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 1, 2010

You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. When you hire a VP of Marketing who has three direct reports and then tell the people reporting to your VP Marketing what to do, you usurp the power and authority of your VP.

CTO Hire 308

CTO Hire Management Technical Review Part-Time VPE 308

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 11, 2011

Are you cynical about their chances in the market just because they seem to be hot in the press and that bugs you? If you think it’s all a marketing gimmick [I don't] then let’s discuss how we could be better at marketing in the way that they have. Do we have the wrong PR firm? “It will never work.

Startup 313

Startup Guerilla Silicon Valley Portfolio 313

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2010

One of the large parts of the burn was PR, Marketing and attending conferences. Isn’t it a confusing title?&# My vote is that co-founders should pick one lead as the CEO and the other should have a functional role & title like Head of Sales & Marketing, CTO, VP marketing or whatever.

Entrepreneur 286

Entrepreneur CTO Hire Cofounder Early Stage 286

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

you also need to update your marketing documents including your website. new features need to be rolled into PR strategies and competitor analyses. - Examples: - every time you release new features you need to update your technical documentation. -

Fractional CTO 400

Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 25, 2014

I’ve been having this PR discussion with three separate portfolio companies at once so I thought I’d just publish my thoughts more broadly. I have written many times about PR so if you want a deep dive on the “how” of PR you may enjoy reading some of these posts. PR pays dividends in Biz Dev.

PR 415

PR Early Stage Dividend Acquisition 415

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 26, 2013

Understanding “The Funding Angle” I sit at enough board meetings to hear conflicting advice given to entrepreneurs about how to handle PR and announcements at startups. In stead of doing my typical big long post with 10 PR tips (like I did there), I’m going to break them up into individual (I hope more digestible) chunks.

Startup 355

Startup PR Dividend Merger 355

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 10, 2014

What they do with the money is add more engineers and maybe hiring a marketing person. The best ones bring in more executive leadership so you can appropriate allocate resources across sales, marketing, product, engineering and support. I’d say 20% of startups I see level-up early after their A round. Objection Handling training.

Startup 381

Startup PR Finance Hiring 381

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2013

They want the perfect feature set, the PR company lined up to do the perfect press release, they want maximum coverage, rave reviews, viral adoption and they want to sit back and then wait for the signups to come roaring in. I think this is particularly true because every startup entrepreneur is trying to catch lightning in a bottle.

Viral 371

Viral PR Lean Founder 371

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 3, 2016

Examples of VC platform services include: recruiting, marketing, design support, inside sales reps, consulting, accounting services and so forth. Side Note : Upfront has hired Kerry Bennett as a member of our executive management team to run marketing – please follow her on Twitter here ].

Portfolio 150

Portfolio PR Partner Early Stage 150

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 4, 2011

Usually you have a catch-all bucket for “direct” or similar that often came through PR or word-of-mouth. If so, make sure you can track which leads come from this. Measuring viral adoption is obviously important. If you have multiple versions of your product, how many are web vs. mobile? How do the mobile customers break down by device type?

Metrics 346

Metrics Startup Acquisition SEM 346

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 20, 2017

They are tasked with “getting deals done” so they race around talking to tons of potential partners inking anything from channel sale deals , product integration, international distribution agreements, co-marketing arrangements, M&A discussions, etc. You have a marketing department with three people.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Retention PR SEO 164

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 12, 2013

It’s why long before you ever want press coverage you need to spend time actually helping journalists, respecting their profession, taking their calls (not having your PR department screen them) and knowing what interests them. Todd Gitlin is one of the best executive recruiters the technology & startup market in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles 407

Los Angeles PR Networking Partner 407

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 22, 2011

Well marketed. It’s a market commentary, not a company commentary. I’ve spoken positively about their design simplicity, their UX flow and their marketing prowess. I have always been equally impressed with Brew PR who represented them and would hire them for any company in which I had invested.

Silicon Valley 295

Silicon Valley Non-Compete PR Social Network 295