Posts filed under 'Life as a Start Up'
Expo CEO Daphne Kwon has shared on her blog, NYC Founder, a three ingredient recipe on how to guarantee positive word of mouth buzz.
These three key ingredients are:
1. Start with a great product from a reputable brand.
2. Know your community and target the social network appropriately (aka, don’t ask the bald guy about shampoo).
3. Reward an honest relationship (disclosure, disclosure, disclosure!)
To get the full scoop from Daphne on guaranteeing positive word of mouth buzz, click here.
Stick to these guidelines and you’ll keep the FTC off your back.
June 30th, 2009
YoungStartup Ventures held the 2009 New York Venture Summit here in Manhattan last week to connect entrepreneurs with investors - venture capitalists, angel investors, and more. The summit featured the following:
- over 25 Venture Capital Speakers
- 3 Venture Capital Panels
- 50 of the Hottest Emerging Companies Seeking Funding
- Emerging Company Presentations
- High Level Networking Opportunities
Expo attended the conference — we are pleased to share that we have been honored with a YoungStartup Ventures Top Innovator Award.
It’s always exciting to be recognized and we sincerely thank the organization for our award.
June 23rd, 2009
We just discovered a site called D.I.Y. Startup News that allows for Twitter-esque posts about cool startup companies. How did we find them? They posted about ExpoTV as a destination to see products on video before you buy. Basically you can submit a post about any site and their editors will review for spam. Seems like a good way to spread the word, and the posts have a 240 character limit (like Twitter) so that they are easily viewed on-the-go with your phone/PDA/etc. We’ll be keeping our eye on D.I.Y.
July 30th, 2008
So I was at a small gathering yesterday…that I probably had no business being at. It was hosted by a leading business periodical who partnered with an innovative think tank. There were about 15 CMO/CIO execs from Fortune 500 companies there who were hoping to ‘unpack’ social media on the net, and define tangible ways on how their companies could participate. Scattered among these execs were a couple net entrepreneurs, writers and smart industry pundits. Overall, it was a very thought provoking day.
It was ‘off the record’, so I can’t really give you a record of the day (as if you wanted one). But I’ll just tell you what I observed:
– There’s a lot of desire and creativity on the part of the manufacturers/marketers to do…SOMETHING
– Their motivator seemed to be more driven by fear than opportunity
– Loss of control is something they think they can still *decide* if they want to do with their brand
They are denying that they have already lost control. That netizens now have a mouthpiece for themselves that amplifies and accelerates their own individual messages…sometimes faster and more effectively than that $10,000,000 marketing budget.
The execs’ fear of these uncontrollable individual messages getting out seems to paralyze them. They draw a blank on what to do.
The execs I met yesterday are so smart…so passionate about their brands. They’re experts at human nature and how to win people over. Yet, for some reason they think social networks defy human nature – that somehow all the rules they know have just flown out the window.
Human nature has not been eliminated by the net. On the contrary, social networking has finally injected a healthy dose of human nature *into* the net. Your knowledge, expertise as marketers is actually dead-on relevant to properly participating in social networks. Don’t try to STOP people’s messaging. When has that ever worked in life? In marketing? Win them over instead. Invest in reaching out to them. There’s no one in the world who’s passionate about a movement, product, brand, cause, whatever, who wouldn’t want to know they’ve made an impact on a big company. Knowing they’ve been heard by you is a powerful way to create an enthusiast. It’s human nature. And human nature is now alive and well on the net.
June 21st, 2007
Welcome to the newest area of the Expo blog! This section is going to be much more about Expo’s business and the space that we’re operating in. The point, simply put, is that media and commerce are colliding in unforeseen – and faster – ways than I think anyone would have thought possible. Editorial standards are shifting or crumbling but no one cares because the assumption is that not only are consumers smart enough to determine the bias of the speaker, but the consumer is now controlling and even creating the media itself. At the same time, commerce oriented entities (manufacturers, retailers and others) are flooding into media initiatives with both feet as a way to create, “new brand experiences.” It’s a fascinating, wide open time and we’re going to try to chronicle it right here.
April 27th, 2007
There is a new blog called Found+Read that is a great resource for entrepreneurs. I’m going to try to make our sub-blog “Life of A Start-up” synergistic with theirs since they are building off an existing community and have a dedicated team working on on it. It will also allow me to focus more on writing about Expo’s business vs. some of the general blogs of late. Hope you like it
April 23rd, 2007
This is largely stolen from a buddy of mine who led me out of the entrepreneurial gate by several years. It’s the touch stone I’ve used at each step and it was very clarifying and calming. You owe your investors:
1. 100% of your effort. Your absolute everything to make the business work within the boundaries of legality and business ethics.
2. Honesty about the situation and your prospects (this is why you should absolutely put an angel investor representative on your Board of Directors).
From these two cardinal rules, there are a couple of things that I think follow pretty directly, namely that you should hear them out on pretty much any topic and, finally, even more than worrying about making them a billion dollars in the first year (which turns out to be surprisingly hard), you should worry first about protecting their capital by trying to make sure that there is more capital to keep fighting and by building something – a piece of code, a contract – that someone else would want even if they don’t want your company.
April 17th, 2007
I’d be remiss if I didn’t close out this section on angels and initial board members by talking about importance of finding “the guy”. I’m sure I’ll talk more about this later, but when I was a VC, the CEOs I worked with talked about what a lonely job it was because ultimately you’re responsible for payroll, for hiring and firing and for generating revenues. Remember, these were VC-backed companies, so you can only imagine how hard it is for an angel-backed company.
In our case, we lucked into a solution which was that we had a “guy” who was with us every step of the way. We didn’t know him before the initial round of funding, but he came in through one of the people networks that formed and he became the Board member representing the angels (always give your angels a board representative…see also “What You Owe Your Angel Investors”). He was a great board member. But much more than that, he owned our situation in his bones. Death was not an option and that internal fortitude on his part was critical in getting us over many rough spots early in the business. How do you find ‘the guy’? Great question. But I think you’ll know him when you seen him. If you’re not sure, ask him to read this post and see what he says. Maybe he’ll identify himself as the “anti-guy” (see below) and you can decide it’s better if he’s just a passive investor.
I think some people end up with the “anti-guy” (sees himself as adding value by being a tough on management & trying to make very rational decisions each step along), and that’s pretty much a terminal disease.
April 15th, 2007
I’m sure there will be disagreement on this, but I think the function of an early stage Board member is uni-dimensional: to help raise more capital, including writing checks themselves. Really smart people, people with great industry experience, people with ‘name recognition’ – frankly, they are all a dime a dozen. When I read about a potential partner getting a new Board member with tremendous name recognition, I raise my eyebrows…and go to the next story. Don’t be seduced into the idea that a Board member can open doors just by their presence. And if you let your Board members think that you value you them merely for their Board participation, then they will be excellent Board members and nothing else. In an early stage company, the only thing that matters is keeping the capital spigot open and that has to be an ‘all-hands’ activity.
April 10th, 2007
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