Founder Spotlight: Steph Beer, Co-Founder NSight2 Day

Using our consumer-facing platform, 4MeNU, nsight2day helps individuals and organizations truly engage with one another. Using innovative tags, users can share information with their network in context. We call these messages Gems. Follow her @stephbeer.

Who is your hero?

My grandfather, who is Swiss (this makes sense if you know me).

What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?

Don’t be low-end. This means low margin, but it also means don’t behave badly. The other piece of advice I love is don’t “trade up” when it comes to who you spend your time with. Your friends matter more than ever when you’re starting a business, and just because you meet flashy people doesn’t mean that the originals aren’t worth their weight in gold for you as a person and an entrepreneur.

What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?

We were a B2B team that tried to build a B2C platform. Stick to your strengths. Also, build a few similar offerings for several different types of client/customer groups and then see how hard it is to sell to each. There are big differences between selling to an individual, a university, and a Fortune 500 company. Each is a unique challenge; you may be better or, um, less well-positioned to sell to them.

What do you do during the first hour of your business day and why?

Yoga. Setting your mind straight can make or break your morning.

What’s your best financial or cash-flow related tip for entrepreneurs just getting started?

Always try to pay based on performance and limit all your fixed costs. Try not to sign a lease (that goes for yourself and for your business).

Quick: What’s ONE thing you recommend ALL aspiring or current entrepreneurs do right now to take their biz to the next level?

Stop going to tech meetups (unless you’re recruiting) and start talking to more senior people who have decades of business experience. More pointedly, stop listening to people who have launched successful businesses by “asking my friends from my financial services days to invest.”

There are a lot of people who are professionally/socially well-positioned to win in the startup environment, and their stories aren’t that interesting or helpful to most entrepreneurs. Actually, just avoid the whole “founders cult” to the greatest extent possible (this gets back to staying close with old friends).

What’s your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve finally “succeeded” in your business?

When we have consistent revenue that covers our costs and lets our original investor make his money back (and returns that are greater than or equal to the returns he would have gotten had he put his money into an index fund) — that’s it.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

How To Avoid Hiring The Wrong Person For Your Startup

“He sounded so capable in the interview!”

“I just don’t know what happened. It seemed like she had exactly the right experience we were looking for!”

“The whole team loved him, so we just went with it.”

Perhaps you’ve uttered these words yourself, or heard them from a hiring manager who is experiencing frustration and buyer’s remorse when a new hire turns out to be a dud. Hiring someone who fails to meet expectations is a huge headache, especially when it was your job to vet them in the first place.

But there are ways of making sure that you don’t get snowed by someone who is good at making a first impression, but bad at delivering results. Here are the key things to do when hiring that’ll guarantee you never hire a dud again:

1. Make them show, not tell.

After your initial screen of incoming candidates, you should have everyone that you are seriously considering do a trial task that is representative of the work that they’ll be doing if hired. The point here isn’t to get free work done from candidates, it’s to see what they will actually do when presented with certain goals and constraints.

Choose something that takes two to three hours, requires a familiarity with relevant skills, networks, or industry knowledge, and will force them to draw upon resources that they’ll have at their disposal while working for you. Simulate a mini version of their work as closely as possible.

If I were hiring a director of development, I may ask them to a) identify a likely funder of my organization, and b) outline a proposal to see how they organized their approach. If I were hiring a manager of partnerships, I would have them a) identify three new organizations that they think would make good partners for me, and b) ask them to show me how they’d make first contact with these organizations.

Tell the candidates they can ask you questions as they are working on the trial. Good people will nail the project, but great people will hit it out of the park after clarifying a few things with you and asking for guidance on key points.

Have all of the candidates do the same task, so that you’re comparing apples to apples. You’ll find that only the most motivated candidates do the task, and you’ll immediately see who is more thorough and puts time into it. You’ll also see whose judgment is most aligned with your actual work. You can teach skills, but judgment is hard. Design the task to show how good their judgment is.

2. Be painfully thorough.

Everyone likes to ask things like, “What would you do in this situation?” or “How do you think we should face this challenge?” These questions show insight into how a candidate thinks and reacts to your organization’s realities.

Far less popular are the simple, boring, background questions—the grungy details of their past work—that actually illustrate what they’ve been able to accomplish. By the time someone is a finalist under consideration, you should be able to answer each of the following questions for, at the very least, their last three jobs:

What were they hired to do?
What resources were they given to work with?
What challenges did they face?
What outcomes did they create, or what accomplishments did they achieve?
Why did they leave that role?

If you ask these questions to your top two or three finalists, you will get a much better sense of which of them has actually accomplished more relevant things.

Yes, this takes time. Yes, it can get boring. But until you have a clear sense of these things, you don’t really know what you’re dealing with in their history. It’s easy to assume things about someone’s past; it’s harder to take the time to uncover those details. This is critical information.

3. Be consistent.

Whatever your interview process, make sure it is consistent across all incoming candidates. Choose your interview questions wisely, and seek help on this if you aren’t sure what to ask. Once you have the questions, you should develop a basic rubric—even if it is qualitative—so that scores are at least mostly consistent across interviewers and across candidates.

When you are narrowing in on finalists, you should have them interview with your entire team (if it’s small enough), or at least everyone they will be working with closely. Make sure you give your team members specific, unique questions and rubrics to use, otherwise they’ll likely ask repetitive questions and re-run the same conversations with the candidate over and over—which limits your ability to get new insights and further evaluate how good of a fit that candidate would be.

4. Resist optimism.

The biggest mistake the hiring managers make is being optimistic, hoping that this candidate is “the one” and not objectively trying to determine if they really have the skills and background required to do the job. Making idle small talk, using favorite “oddball” questions (e.g. “If you were a kitchen appliance, which one would you be?”), and spending too much time selling them on the opportunity are all unhelpful things that hiring managers do when they are clouded by optimism and eagerness to hire.

And the opposite isn’t smart, either. Using hardball questions, intimidation tactics, and giving trick questions or tests are equally unhelpful.

The best approach is to be calm, measured, balanced, and consistent. Your gut reaction to people is relevant, but is not substitute for measured due diligence. Take your time and be thorough—you’ll thank yourself later!

Nathaniel Koloc is co-founder and CEO at ReWork, a Colorado-based start-up that connectes talented professionals to hiring managers at for-impact companies. Nathaniel is an 2011 Unreasonable Fellow and a member of the YEC.

This huge startup conference is all about startups everywhere else, do you have your early bird tickets?

image: YEC

How To Measure The Potential Of Your Startup Idea

You have a business idea that you feel has tremendous potential. You probably got the insight by solving a problem that you had. Brilliant. Most successful companies today were created because of this very insight.

To give you an example, YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. According to an oft-cited story, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party.

When you’re solving your own problem or one that you feel is the pain point of a certain target audience, how do you know whether there is a large enough pool of people that face the same problems or challenges that you are trying to solve? If you’re just selling a product, you’re better off creating it and getting it to the market. But if you want to build a business out of it, you need to have a sizeable market for scalability.

So the question is, how do you determine the market demand for your startup idea? Read on for several ways to get the answers you need.

Google

Yes, it can be as simple as looking it up on Google. Haven’t you heard that Google is God? It has most of the answers that you are looking for. So how do you get Google to help you? Use the Google Adwords keyword tool to look for the number of people seeking out what you’re trying to do.

Put the keyword(s) in the search box, select the target country or countries and Google will show you the number of average local and global monthly searches. This is a good indicator of demand.

Minimum Viable Product

“Market research and business planning are overrated. The best market research is putting a product out and seeing if people will buy it. The best business plan is to create something great and sell it fast,” says Guy Kawasaki.

Writing a business plan with projections through market research is a sure-shot way to a startup doomsday. Nothing beats an actual customer using your product or service. So how do you get to the customer when you’re at the idea stage and don’t want to spend a huge sum building something they might not want?

Build a minimum viable product or a prototype. The idea is to put out something that offers the core value or your startup or that solves the core problem of your customers.

The MVP could be a PowerPoint slide, a dialogue box or just a landing page. This is something that you can often build it in a day or a week. A prototype can be an actual functioning product with the core features offered.

Share this with your network and see the response. Are people excited to use it? Do they actually feel their needs or problems are resolved by using your product? Is it easy to use?

Landing Page

You don’t have a product yet but still want to get customer buy-ins? Then landing pages are your best friend. Create a teaser or promotional landing page, which highlights the core proposition of your startup.

Ask for their email addresses in return for an offer or simply to be updated about when the startup is launched. Here’s a great example of a landing page that does just that. The number of email subscribers will determine how many people are interested in your startup. Try using Launchrock to create your landing page. Or use KickoffLabs.

To increase traffic, one method is to create a Google Adwords and a Facebook marketing campaign. Point the adverts to this landing page to drive traffic. Use Google Search and Network Partners to spread the campaign among a huge number of people.

You would much rather spend a little money to be sure than spend fortunes building a product that customers don’t want.

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is an excellent means to get actual buy-in for your product. This concept has increasingly becoming popular with the likes of Kickstarter, RocketHub, Indiegogo launching their platforms on the Internet that bring together startups looking for funding and individuals who are interested in contributing towards an idea or a product.

Apart from securing funding for your startup, you also get to know how many people are actually interested in your product or service. Interested enough to pledge their money. Here’s a list that showcases the most funded projects.

Whatever be your path, make sure you build on something that your customers want. As Kawasaki puts it, “This isn’t rocket science. It’s mostly hard work and luck.”

This post originally appeared on the author’s blog.

Rahul Varshneya is a startup coach and the co-founder of Arkenea, an enterprise mobility and cloud solutions provider. He writes on starting up and mobile strategy at http://rahulvarshneya.com/blog.

When it comes to communications, startups need the whole package.

idea image: earlmcadoo.com

Startups: How Youth Can Be Your Biggest Asset Of All

Being a young entrepreneur in business today is exciting. Youth is your biggest asset; you should rock it to your advantage. But how do you overcome the preconceived notions that come with being a younger contender — like assumptions that you’re inexperienced, naive and in for a rude awakening by the industry?

The answer is simple — you turn them into strengths. Everyone always talks about how retaining youthful characteristics like curiosity and optimism is a great way to succeed. Why can’t those who truly embody those characteristics also reap the rewards?

Why Your Age Is Actually an Asset

As a twenty-something Canadian entrepreneur with a funded startup and past experience at a well-known social news company — who was literally thrown into a pit of extremely successful American entrepreneurs — I’ve had my share of challenges and benefits as the new (and incredibly young-looking) kid on the block. People sometimes view the fact that I’m “too young” or “don’t know enough about life” as a flaw, but I actually believe it’s helped me succeed. When you have no knowledge of the boundaries that exist, you’re able to think bigger; you’re able to be truly and genuinely audacious. That kind of bold, optimistic creativity doesn’t come from being jaded or experienced; it comes from being completely unaware of what lies ahead of you.

Even more so, young people have the fresh ability to learn new skills quickly and retain a ton of information at a time. You can learn a language in a month while you’re younger, but when you’re older, it’s much harder to pick these things up. I try to take full advantage of that, and I’ve seen it happen right in front of me in the tech space. Young people are changing the world through their combination of youth and entrepreneurship. They’re able to establish multi-billion dollar companies because they just don’t see any boundaries, and they can adapt to an evolving landscape quickly.

Young entrepreneurs sometimes tell themselves, “I’m young. No one is going to take me seriously. I don’t have enough money. No one is going to let me do this. I don’t have enough knowledge.” You can solve all those things yourself, without doing anything absurd or fake, like growing facial hair, putting on more makeup or trying to “sound older.” No one ever gets very far by pretending to be something or someone they’re not. The older folks in the room will see right through that, and that’s far worse than being young. Here are three ways to get others to take you seriously — despite your age — while still staying true to yourself:

1. Trust your instincts

Entrepreneurship is inherently instinctual – you’re devoting your life to something unknown and ambiguous. Your decisions and “strategy” are most often a culmination of your basic instincts and parallel, but not directly relevant, data. It’s a very subtle feeling that can be mistaken for many other things – but once you can focus on it, you’ll find your decisions not only for the best, but consistent and wired to your thinking. That intuition, in turn, shapes the vision and culture of the organization you are trying to build. Deviating from your instincts brings unrest not only for you, but among your stakeholders as well.

2. Use your youth

Being young isn’t all about age. It’s about curiosity, capacity, and ultimately, your limits. Test them. There might never be a time in your life where you can stretch your mind and your physical capabilities to their maximum without consequence. As a result, you can leapfrog your success, build amazing products, and live life to its fullest while bringing others along with you.

People often ask me, “How has your youth prevented you from achieving certain things?” I almost always view my youth as an enabler rather than a barrier. Many will assume the latter simply because business/experience/age has gone hand in hand in the last decade. But with the Internet, we are no longer operating on a linear curve of growth of knowledge and numerical age. We are now living in the era of exponential knowledge.

In fact, the younger you are, the more likely you will be viewed as innovative. Don’t conceal or hide your ideas – let them flow and mingle with others, especially during the conception stage. Being young is finally a good thing in the consumer web space. Let’s all make sure that we continue to honor the stage that has been set for us, and continue to innovate incessantly.

3. Generate serendipity

If you create your own luck, there is no sense of reliance. I really, truly, believe in people who understand how to build the right relationships, thrive in the right environments, and believe in their own capacity and propensity to create. The last few years of my life contain a string of events that came from taking a few extra forks along the path of my life — forks where I could have chosen to simply stay still. The doors that open for you may be just the serendipity you need.

For me, being a young entrepreneur is all about asking how I can make things happen by actually executing on my word. Many young entrepreneurs like to talk. I like talking too, but I’d rather show and prove my abilities. The challenges really aren’t challenges at all unless you view them as such. It’s all about perspective.

Brian Wong is the CEO and co-founder of kiip (pronounced “keep”), a category-creating mobile rewards network backed by Relay Ventures, Interpublic Group, Hummer Winblad and others. Kiip has raised over $15.4 million in funding to date and was named one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company in 2013.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

5 Tips For Succeeding In An Emerging Industry

Wouldn’t it be great if someone would hand you a road map when you decide to launch your own business in an emerging or unproven industry? Of course, that doesn’t happen, but I have found, as many entrepreneurs have, that with a lot of hard work and determination, an emerging industry can become a profitable one. Here are five keys to success I’ve learned along the way while building my digital agency, The1stMovement, in the emerging digital marketing/advertising industry and having the honor of leading it to become one of Inc. 500 “fastest growing companies in America”:

“Fish where the fish are.” Focus on meeting an existing demand instead of creating one. This is one of the most important lessons I learned from going through the dot-com bust while working in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. It’s far better to address an existing need in the marketplace than it is to create a product or service that you think people need and then try to generate demand for it. I started at a time when I felt like the advertising industry was “craving” technology excellence. So my decision to move from Silicon Valley, with my “geeky” technical background, to Los Angeles, known for its creativity but not so much for technical execution, proved to be a perfect springboard for me to start my business.
Improvise and innovate. Find new ways of doing the same old things. Instead of trying to reinvent our competitors’ products and services, we believe in observing their successes and mistakes, then come up with innovative new ways do it better and more efficiently. In a time when Los Angeles advertising agencies were competing for the attention of big Hollywood Studios by pitching their best “ideas,” we focused our efforts on getting the attention of well-funded Fortune 50 clients like Adobe and Cisco with our technical expertise and track record for getting things done. That “sales pitch” proved to work and we continue to lead with technology, but complement it with ROI-driven strategies and sexy creative for all of our clients.
Adopt the mindset of a bootstrapper. Even if you have millions in funding from outside investors, run your business as though every dime is coming from your own pocket. You’ll quickly find that you’ll be forced to be more creative and innovative in your decision making. Not only will you avoid wasteful spending (another dot-com lesson), but your funds will go much, much further toward meeting your business objectives. Challenges will arise, as they have for us. Right before the recession, we were forced to let go of some staff because I opted not to go for investment. It was one of the most painful professional experiences I’ve ever had to personally go through, but it forced us to re-look at our structure and be nimble and flexible in a tough, unknown economy.
Never forget that execution is everything. Even the best idea in the world is worthless if it just stays on the drawing board. As Thomas Edison once said, “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” Yes, putting an idea into action takes a lot of hard work, research and testing, and there are obvious risks. But if you execute your ideas with a “bootstrapper” mindset, you will be able to minimize your risks and the payoff could be significantly larger in the long run.
Keep moving forward. Indecision is far worse than making the wrong decision. Fear of failure can be a paralyzing influence when it comes to making business decisions. Yet an entrepreneur and a strong leader can never move a business forward by being indecisive. I have made my fair share of mistakes in my business decision making, but keeping my business nimble, flexible, and most importantly, independent, has allowed us to correct our mistakes quickly and move on.

Entrepreneurs who are starting a business in an emerging industry are like pioneers who are navigating a new landscape where not many people or firms know what they’re doing. But the good news is that the greatest rewards will go to those who are willing to work the hardest, take calculated risks, and believe in their ability to succeed. As the Zen saying states, “Leap and the net will appear.”

This post originally appeared on the author’s blog.

As CEO of The1stMovement, Ming Chan was named as one of the “Top 10 Asian Entrepreneurs in America” by Inc. Magazine and has led the agency to numerous accolades including 3-time Inc. 500 “Fastest Growing Private Companies in America”, 3-time “Best Places to work” in Los Angeles, “Top 20 agencies” in LA & Denver, and 5000% growth in 5 years with his passion for innovation and company culture.

We’re using Chicago startup Centup here’s why.

5 Tips For Growing Your Startup At The Right Pace

Startups are often in a rush: bigger, better, faster. I see it all the time: businesses striving to scale, to accelerate the growth of their business as quickly as possible — consequences be damned! Scaling is certainly a goal for businesses at some point, but scaling as soon as possible isn’t the answer. Scaling will require your company to use more resources. If you’re not prepared, scaling too quickly can be dangerous — leading to failure instead of success.

If you haven’t yet found a viable business model that will allow you to acquire customers at a lower cost than the lifetime value of that customer, you simply are not ready to scale. But you can ready your company by focusing on your finances first. Consider the following suggestions to help you to refocus your company development in a thoughtful and calculated way:

Understand how growth will impact your cash burn. Your burn rate is simply how much capital you go through every month. Staying on top of your burn rate is essential all the time, and, perhaps, even more so when you’re considering scaling. When you scale, your cash burn will be amplified. Any issues you have with your working capital requirements will be magnified exponentially. So keep a close watch on your cash-flow statement and a tight rein on your expenses. Bootstrap as much as possible to keep your business lean.
Hire only as needed. When you scale, you will need to expand your staff to support your acceleration. But before you scale, it’s a good practice to get into the habit of only hiring when absolutely necessary. Hiring is a significant cost — not only payroll, but the costs of recruiting, training, retention, etc. To cut costs, outsource as much as possible, especially non-core functions like accounting, finance, and human resources.
Create milestones for your company. Identify target milestones, create a realistic timeline, and then manage your cash to those milestones. In some cases, this may mean that you need to raise the cash to match and support these milestones. If you’ve already raised cash or are bootstrapping, you’ll need to reduce your burn rate so you can achieve the milestone before your cash is gone. Once your milestones are set, don’t let them slip. Your main focus must be executing to these milestones.
Get systems in place. Before scaling, make sure you have a solid infrastructure for managing financial processes. How will you manage billing and invoicing on a larger scale? Or, the bigger potential headache of payment collection? If your customer base and earned revenue are still small, that’s when you need to find and establish successful systems and processes.
Plan for cash-flow positive. If you have revenue, create a plan to help you understand how and when you’ll be able to get cash-flow positive. Scaling requires an increase in cash flow. You need to be prepared to match this with earned revenue.

If you think you’re ready to scale, you may be right. But before you press on that gas pedal, ask yourself: are you sure you have a viable business model, your processes are repeatable, and the market is ready? Once you scale, you’ll be entrenched much more deeply in your processes and making changes will be much more difficult. So take these early days to establish your company model and processes, and gain an understanding of — and control over — your finances, before rushing to scale.

David Ehrenberg is the founder and CEO of Early Growth Financial Services, a financial services firm providing a complete suite of financial services to companies at every stage of the development process. He’s a financial expert and startup mentor, whose passion is helping businesses focus on what they do best. Follow David @EarlyGrowthFS.

Now check out “The Case For Remote Work”

Image: YEC

Creative Marketing in the Ubiquitous World of Advertising For Startups

Sometimes companies get ideas; good ideas. They discover ideas about who they are, what they want to accomplish in the world, and how they can solve some problem that no one has found the answer to just yet. The issue is, they aren’t the only ones. That’s where advertising comes in.

Advertising takes on many forms and uses many media. But, it always has the simple objective to communicate, capture, compel, and move audiences to action. In the past, this translated to the purchase of a product/service. Today, marketing specialists extend that definition to an ongoing engagement with their brand through social media, subscriptions, or online sharing.

Each of us knows the plethora of advertisements that plague our home pages, browsers and selected blogs, and how agencies spend insurmountable funds to market to users everywhere. With this onslaught of advertisements, companies must carefully decide how they are going to meet audiences in memorable and lasting ways that make them stand apart from their competitors. Retention and engagement have always been the major goals of advertising; but with the persistence of ads into every level of the lives of consumers via television, social media, and innumerable web pages, companies now find themselves in a world in which they must consistently re-evaluate how to accomplish those objectives. One way that organizations solve this problem is through the incorporation of creative and non-traditional mediums into their marketing, like animation.

Jon Collins of the VFX studio Framestore recently said in an interview: “If you can keep a viewer in a world and stimulate those senses, they will not only engage more deeply with your brand, but their recollection of that positive experience will sustain for far longer.”

However, there is a danger in creating a world that is overly stimulating to the viewer, because they end up rejecting that vibrancy in an effort to maintain a kind of visual homeostasis. Advertisements must also be tempered with a strong and carefully crafted design that appeals to people’s sense of balance, color schemes, character associations, etc, without turning them off to your brand.

While there is no scientific formula for accomplishing this task, creative specialists use techniques like focusing on one subject while blurring out the background, using particular color patterns, or utilizing symmetry to balance out an environment. The reason for this meticulous approach to curating content for viewers is the same reason that athletes train for months on end for a brief moment in the spotlight. Sometimes a brand has only one opportunity to interact with an audience member and communicate what it is and why it is worthy of their attention. And audiences are a fickle sort. With the accessibility to perhaps hundreds of alternative products or services, brands must make that one interaction a meaningful one that the viewer will remember long after the video has ended.

Part of why we gravitate towards animation as a medium is because you have the ability to communicate something as complex as sustainable business practices or a commitment to ethical animal treatment (as FedEx and Chipotle both did this past year) through imagined worlds and characters that take the viewer into a beautifully crafted narrative. While you can control things like lighting, environment, and subjects while shooting in video to a certain degree, animation can create worlds and characters beyond what is only in front of us. This allows us to control things like lighting, texture, movement, and time that we would not have as much control over if we filmed subjects through a camera. All in all, video and animation are not in competition with one another, for both are tools to be utilized for the creative dissemination of messages.

At the core of who we are as human beings is the desire for meaning and significance. Advertisers try to cultivate that kind of experience in a brief interaction that connects audiences with a brand that will last long after the meeting has ended. While the time and effort that companies spend towards this endeavor is great, the hard sought after relationship with the customer is truly the golden egg.

Check out Prodigi Arts at prodigiarts.com

If you’re serious about email ditch Mailbox for this Austin startup today.

Where Do You Go Offline To Connect With Other Entrepreneurs & Startups

YEC, Guest Post, Startup Tips, CoWorking, Entrepreneurs

Donna Harris, co-founder of 1776dc chatting with an entrepreneur (photo: NMI 2013)

Where do you go in your city/region (or online) to connect with other entrepreneurs and learn from them?

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) (http://theyec.org), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab (http://mystartuplab.com/), a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

1. Co-working Spaces and Meetups

In Phoenix, we have an awesome coworking space downtown. Co+Hoots is full of entrepreneurs and creatives; they all are welcoming. Find a coworking or collaborative workspace, and entrepreneurs will be there! In my city, we also have startup incubators and local organizations that host events or meetups. Find these events via social media in your town. Ask around and join in!

– Kyle Clayton ( http://twitter.com/KyleClaytonGore ), Jackrabbit Janitorial ( http://www.JackrabbitJanitorial.com )

2. Mixergy

My investment in Mixergy’s premium membership has paid itself back 1 million times over. I have learned so much from the interviews, the classes and the discussions. I’ve gained an MBA-type network without the $200K tag. Andrew Warner, the owner of Mixergy, is great at getting guests who can contribute tangible advice to other entrepreneurs, regardless of what industry they are in.

– Derek Capo ( ), Next Step China ( http://www.nextstepchina.org )

3. Philly Startup Leaders

Philly Startup Leaders is a strong local organization that connects Philadelphia’s most successful tech innovators with aspiring entrepreneurs. PSL’s regular events allow for an environment that fosters collaboration and community education.

– Robert J. Moore ( https://twitter.com/robertjmoore ), RJMetrics ( http://www.rjmetrics.com )

4. User Groups

I prefer to attend user groups for different technology, rather than straight-up entrepreneurship meetings. You’re more likely to encounter different types of entrepreneurs when you’re looking at a purely technological point of view. You can also avoid some of the super-charged networkers who aren’t quite as useful to connect with.

– Thursday Bram ( http://www.twitter.com/thursdayb ), Hyper Modern Consulting ( http://www.hypermodernconsulting.com )

5. Meetup.com

Meetup.com lists all local meetings for like-minded entrepreneurs, and it presents a great opportunity to learn more, expand your network and build potentially valuable business relationships.

– Andrew Schrage ( https://twitter.com/moneycrashers ), Money Crashers Personal Finance ( http://www.moneycrashers.com )

6. Self-Hosted Events

In today’s connected world, there’s no reason you can’t show up in a city and host your own event. When I was in Phoenix, a place I’d never been, I found a few connections from Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and threw an impromptu happy hour. I asked each of them to bring a few interesting people along. Before I knew it, I was fully immersed in the Phoenix entrepreneurial community.

– Matt Wilson ( http://www.twitter.com/MattWilsontv ), Under30Experience

7. Local Organizations

Dyn is located in a great area. In Manchester, I can go to the ABI Innovation Hub, which hosts events, contests and a founders’ series. There are also groups like the NH High Tech Council, the Manchester Young Professionals Network and Stay Work Play that bring people together to share common experiences. We live in a global world, so it’s important to stay connected beyond your own backyard.

– Jeremy Hitchcock ( http://twitter.com/jhitchco ), Dyn ( http://dyn.com )

8. Our Young Entrepreneurs’ Group

I live in a small town, Roseburg, Ore., with 35K people, but we’re creating an entrepreneurial movement here from the ground up. Four years ago, the entrepreneurial culture was struggling. But a group of us are making things happen — one of them being the Young Entrepreneurs Society we started two years ago that’s 104 members strong. Our monthly meetups and book club are awesome.

– Trevor Mauch ( http://www.twitter.com/tmauch ), Automize, LLC ( http://www.automizeit.com )

9. Silicon Prairie News

Silicon Prairie News is all about promoting, connecting and perpetuating entrepreneurship in the Midwest. Its Big Series of conferences is a great starting point for getting involved. And, of course, Silicon Prairie News’ website is worthwhile.

– Jake Stutzman ( http://twitter.com/jstutzman ), Elevate ( http://www.elevate.co )

10. A Speakeasy for Geeks

In Indianapolis, we launched The Speak Easy — a place for Indy-based entrepreneurs, startups and the folks who support them to work, play and collaborate. It’s essentially a clubhouse for entrepreneurs, designers and geeks. Bringing these folks together in a fun, productive work environment is the surest way to accelerate the development of high-growth startups.

– Kristian Andersen ( http://www.twitter.com/kristianindy ), KA+A ( www.kaplusa.com )

DC Mayor Vince Gray praised the YEC on Friday night at 1776, DC’s coworking,startup and entrepreneurial epicenter.

The Case For Remote Work

Some of the best companies in the world, including Github, 37Signals, and Automattic, allow their employees to work from home. It’s pretty surprising to us that so few startups follow their lead. We’re a small organization ourselves (only two full-time employees), but we don’t require each other to be on site. We live in the same city, and we go to the office often enough, but there’s absolutely no obligation that we do so. It works for us. If Brad really needs to concentrate on something, he’ll stay home (or ask me to), put on the headphones, and get to work. I do the same thing. We’re actually sometimes more productive when we’re distributed.

We thought we’d share some early stats from our anonymous job matching service to help make the case for remote work as a viable and even potentially superior alternative to on site work. Since we’re not in Silicon Valley ourselves, perhaps we have a unique perspective that can be hard to see from the inside looking out. Either way, our hope is that our conclusions will convince your team to at least consider making remote work an option.

(Shameless Plug Warning) If, by chance, you do come to that conclusion, be sure to let us know. We’d be more than happy to help you fill out your team with amazing people. You can learn more about our service here. Oh, and developers can see the FAQ (and sign up) here.

Shocker No. 1: Not all great developers want to be in Silicon Valley (or other tech hubs).

There is a “talent war” in Silicon Valley right now. Have you heard about it? Some of the side effects have been quite amazing. Aqui-hire has become a word most of us understand, developer salaries are higher than they’ve ever been, and perks and benefits offered by Silicon Valley startups are unheard of elsewhere. Another side effect is that, increasingly, developers are being lured to the valley from elsewhere. Several of the best from our hometown of Memphis have moved to San Francisco over the last couple years, and the same can be said of just about every larger southern or mid-western city in the US.

Still, for some, Silicon Valley is a difficult place to be. There are a large number of individuals who, for family or other reasons, simply can’t make the move. There are even more who choose not to. This is especially true for families. According to Wolfram Alpha, you’d need to almost double (1.9x) your Memphis salary to live similarly in San Francisco (source). That may be possible for a developer moving to the area, but can the same be said for a spouse in a different field? Silicon Valley is an amazing place for a 20-something single person. Perhaps not so much for a 30-something with a young family.

Memphis to San Francisco Wage Comparison

Shocker No. 2: Not all great developers are IN Silicon Valley.

So far, nearly 200 developers have signed up for our anonymous job matching service. A fair number are in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs (primarily NY), but certainly not the majority. We use their Work for Pie scores as an approximate measure of coding chops. The score is primarily based on open source contributions and is far from perfect, but it’s better than most of the other options out there, so for now we’ll go with it.

When they sign up, we ask developers a series of questions in order to better understand what they care about and what kind of career options they’d like to entertain. We ask them if they’d prefer to work remotely, and we also ask how important their answer is, relative to their other preferences.

The average Work for Pie score for the entire community* (thousands of developers) is 38.2. Our community boasts some of the very best and most prolific open source contributors from all over the world. WFP scores in the mid-twenties and up represent significant meaningful participation in communities like Github, Bitbucket, Stack Overflow, and (to a much lesser extent) Hacker News.

Now, the average WFP score of the nearly 200 developers who have opted in to our job matching service is 37.4 with a range from 1 to 93. That’s a bit lower than the community as a whole, but probably statistically insignificant. The average WFP score of those individuals who highly prefer remote work is 37.3, so almost the same, with a range from 1 to 86. There are clearly quite a few highly skilled developers who prefer a distributed team. Finally, the average WFP score of those individuals not in Silicon Valley and to whom relocation is not an option is 41.8, with a range from 1 to 93. Clearly, there are some excellent developers who aren’t in Silicon Valley.

The whole point of this exercise isn’t to say that developers outside of Silicon Valley are better than developers who live there. That’s ridiculous and undoubtedly false. The point of this exercise is to say that there are a lot of really great developers who live outside the Valley and don’t have any desire to be there. If your goal is to build an amazing team, it might be worth your time to look elsewhere.

Shocker No. 3: The economics of remote work make it a huge win.

We ask our job seekers their desired salary, and the illogical but not surprising truth is that most list desired salary as some function of their current salary. If they’re in TN, where average salary tops out at maybe $100k, they’ll often list something in that range. If they’re in San Francisco, where average salary is considerably higher, the desired salary follows suit.

The point is this: most people know that locating from most any place to San Francisco is going to require a huge pay boost for the economics to make sense. Someone making $100k in Memphis would need to make $190k in SF to live the same way. That fact alone convinces many to remove SF from the list of cities to consider, no matter the salary. But, a Silicon Valley salary level is pretty unheard of here in Memphis. Offer that kind of money to almost anyone here, and the chances that you’ll lure them away from whatever they’re doing now are fairly high. Throw in the fact that you’ll save money on space and catered lunches and all the other Silicon Valley perks and the economics make even more sense. Money isn’t everything, but a pay boost of $20k or more is enough to make a majority of folks at least hear you out. We’ve seen it happen time and again with many an awesome developer who can’t or won’t relocate.

Github, from what I can tell, uses this exact strategy to great effect. Find the top Rails developer in nearly every small city in the US, and the chances that he or she works for Github are pretty darn high. There is a lot of talk about great developers being 10x more productive than just average ones. I’m not sure I buy all that, but it definitely helps to have a great team. Isn’t the chance at hiring someone great worth some of the inconveniences (of which there are few) of a distributed team? Github thinks so.

Remote work is not for everyone. There are several studies that show that on site teams are more productive than distributed teams. But, if you have the chance to hire an amazing developer in Kansas for the same price as an average one in Silicon Valley, doesn’t the extra productivity from that hire make up for the potential drop due to having a distributed team? Our argument is that yes, it does. It should be something your team considers. If you’re struggling to hire, or if you can’t pay market rates with your seed money, or if you care more about building an amazing team than about having them on site, then it’s something you should consider. It’s easier than ever these days.

What do you think? Leave your comments below and check out workforpie here.

Now read: No You’re Not Better Than Silicon Valley: How To Support Your Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

6 Innovative Technology Waves That Your Startup Can Ride to Success

The success of your startup is dependent on so many things — your employees, your investments, your business plan, and even the technology you use. That’s why you can’t neglect a single detail. So, take a look at these six innovative technology waves that your startup company needs to employ to drive success.

Geo-Positioning Technology to Target Customers by Location

Smartphones and tablets can pinpoint your location with accuracy of only a few feet away. This is because of the geo-positioning sensors in each device. The main reason people use this technology is to get real-time directions from one place to another, especially while driving. It is simple to use and so much easier to follow than a map. However, the GPS isn’t the only useful feature of geo-positioning technology. You can use this technology to your advantage in your business.

There are several things your business can do with geo-positioning technology. You can create an app that helps customers find your location and make appointments. For instance, Great Clips has an app to do this very thing. You can also register your business for the check-in games, like Gowalla and Foursquare, where customers can tell you when they visit your business and then you can reward them in various ways.

Ambitious mobile startups are always finding new and clever ways to take advantage of the smartphone GPS trend. Back in March, Apple paid a cool $20 million for WifiSlam’s indoor pinpoint location tech. There’s no question about it, geo-targeting is big business in the mobile space.

Contact Management Software to Stay Connected with Customers

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 50 percent of new businesses fail within the first five years, for various reasons. This could be because of a lack of experience, poor credit arrangements, bad location, competition, and a myriad of other issues. It could also be because the startup failed to grasp the demands of their target consumer and their expectations.

One example of this is when a new business doesn’t use contact management software or similar technology to track their customers’ data and stay organized with their customer service. Customers today expect a deeper and more intimate level of connection with their chosen brands. Social media, newsletters and notifications are a huge part of customer service. Even the startups with great products struggle if they fail to truly connect with their customers.

There are many great CRM platforms available for brand new or early stage companies. Industry giants like Microsoft CRM and SalesForce offer tiered pricing plans, cloud SaaS services and mobile apps, but they also can be very pricey and overpowered for some startups. The CRM extension Streak provides a free alternative in consumer management by giving smaller startups the tools they need without the bells and whistles offered by larger platforms.

Targeted Advertisements to Reach Customers through Online Search

A Harris Interactive Poll shows that the average U.S. adult goes on the Internet for 13 hours per week. This time is distributed between social media, email, online search, and other online tasks. This gives startups a unique opportunity to use technology to reach customers in a way they couldn’t do in the past — targeted advertising.

Both social media and search engines sell advertising space that can target virtually any demographic a startup wants to reach. This is because users allow social media sites and search engines to collect user information as part of their terms of use. This means that when you place an advertisement, it is only seen by the people you want to see it. This saves you money and helps you reach a more targeted audience. Startups that don’t take advantage of this are losing out on hundreds to thousands in sales and will have a much tougher time breaking through the clutter of their competitive niche.

Mobile Devices to Connect with Customers Anytime and Anywhere

Businesses used to be tied down to one location because desktop computers and servers were not portable, and neither were phones. This meant only doing business during the day from a typical 9:00 to 5:00. However, businesses now have the flexibility to do business wherever they want thanks to cloud computing and always-on mobile devices. These technological advancements open up your startup to customers around the world and to people that want to contact you during off business hours.

Cloud computing basically replaces traditional business servers. This is because all your business information is stored online in one secure place that can be accessed from anywhere there is an internet connection. Cloud computing also reduces the amount of down time, meaning your business can run more efficiently at a lower cost.

Mobile devices also give businesses the portability they need to serve customers. This means your employees can answer phone calls and emails, and do business from home, the park, a restaurant, or anywhere else. Thanks to the BYOD phenomenon, startup business owners have also been able to keep in contact with their consumers using their best Android tablets, ultrabooks or smartphones anywhere and at any time.

Biometric Authentication Instead of Passwords

Information security has been a growing concern ever since the Internet was launched. However, new innovation in technology is changing that. Startup businesses can now use biometric data to accurately identify returning customers. And, this can be done instead of using passwords that people always forget.

One example of this technology is on the new iPhone 6. It has a fingerprint scanner that can unlock the phone. Plus, many smartphones and tablets already use facial-recognition software. Your business can start implementing this same technology to verify customer information, which will help your customers feel secure, and happy. Adapting cutting edge tech from the ground up can also help to define your startup as a company that understands the modern consumer and differentiate from the competition.

Increased Payment Options and Rewards for Customers

Startups can also reach more customers through the Internet because they are no longer tied down by physical locations. However, some customers are reluctant to buy things on the Internet for fear of being ripped off with no transparent accountability. Technology that guarantees security is changing the way that many users think about purchasing things on the internet. For instance, you can be more transparent with your consumers by offering trusted digital payment services like PayPal, Square or PayMill in addition to the traditional credit card option. Consumers love choice, especially when it comes to their wallet!

What other types of innovative technology do you think can help startups succeed? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Entrepreneur Magazine is pushing startup communities around.

15 Interview Questions To Ask Your Next Startup Hire

Question: What’s one must-ask interview question for your first few startup hires?

Will You Make Copies?

“At startups, everyone needs to pitch in, including doing the occasional administrative task. By asking prospective hires if they will make copies, you can identify those who have the “do whatever it takes” attitude that will help your startup succeed.”

– Bhavin Parikh | CEO, Magoosh Test Prep

Past Experience Takes Precedence

“I would want to know, first and foremost, that the hire has had success in the startup environment before. It’s a unique culture that requires a certain mindset and approach.”

– Alexandra Levit | President and Founder, Inspiration at Work

Where’s Your Initiative?

“”Can you give me an example of when you demonstrated high initiative?” As a startup, you need people that will go above and beyond their role and produce amazing value for the company.”

– Jun Loayza | President, Ecommerce Rules

Completion Is Key

“How have you worked around resourcing and staffing limitations to accomplish a project? Startups are always trying to juggle multiple priorities and there’s never enough manpower to get stuff done. Asking about times where someone was able to come up with a project, idea, or initiative, and then oversee it to completion — despite obstacles — allows you to discover a lot.”

– Matt Mickiewicz | Co-Founder, Flippa and 99designs

Find Out About the Formative Years

“I always ask candidates to tell me about a difficult or challenging event from their childhood that they feel has shaped them into who they are today. It gives me insight into who they think they are as a person, what motivates them, and how they deal with unexpected issues that may arise.”

– Vanessa Nornberg | President, Metal Mafia

One Word: Why?

“Why do you want to join a startup? Understanding one’s motivation for pursuing a job, particularly an entrepreneurial one, is critical. Make sure your first few hires are risk-tolerant entrepreneurs like yourself, and that your objectives are aligned. You want people who aren’t going to bail at the first bump in the road.”

– Michael Tolkin | CEO, Merchant Exchange

Stump Them With the Obvious

“Ask them if this a job or is it a career. The two are very different from each other, and can sum up the persons work mentality.”

– Jerry Piscitelli | Owner / Inventor, Portopong LLC

Do You Get Seasick?

“I would ask the following: “If we had news that the company may go belly up in two weeks, what would you do?” This question will test the person’s stomach for the swaying seas of a startup. If they respond by indicating an “increased” level commitment, then you have a winner. If they allude to retreating and “playing it safe” they may not have the necessary fervor.”

– Kent Healy | Founder and CEO, The Uncommon Lif

What’s Your Favorite Movie?

“Startup hires need to be almost as passionate as you are about your vision. By asking, “What is your favorite movie?” you can see how they can passionately express themselves. Don’t hire those who are as dead a a door knob when they answer this question.”

– Nancy T. Nguyen | President & CEO, Sweet T Salon

Identify Their Personality

“Ask simple questions to determine the character of the potential hire. Some startup hires cannot handle the startup mode, not because of education and past experience, but simply because their character does not fit the type of environment one would find in startups. One question to ask is, “Do you want to be in a startup, or do you want to appear to be a in a startup?” It’s an honest question.”

– George Mavromaras | Founder and President, Mavro Inc. | Praetor Global LLC.

Make It an RPG

“Ask plenty of role-playing questions — the interviewee will project their motivation for applying to the startup. You’ll also get a deeper understanding of them as an individual and what they can bring to the table.”

– Justin Beck | Co-Founder and CEO, PerBlue

What Happens When You’re Wrong?

“Ask for an instance of when they were dead wrong about something. How they respond is telling — do they have the ability to admit it, ask for help and move on, or do they try to fix it themselves? Are they willing to admit it happens often? That’s a sign of not being afraid to fail.”

– Susan Strayer LaMotte | Founder, exaqueo

All Roads Lead to Success

“The first few hires in a startup are crucial, so make sure they’re on-board with your company’s vision, first and foremost. Ask where they see themselves in relation to the company five years down the road. Make sure they envision the company’s destination the same way you do, even if they see the path a little differently.”

– Nick Friedman | President, College Hunks Hauling Junk and College Hunks Moving

Let’s Talk Numbers

“Ask them how much they want to earn. First, this question usually catches people off-guard, which helps you evaluate how quickly they can adapt. Second, it allows you to see how flexible they are, as well as how committed they are to the company’s growth.”

– Nicolas Gremion | CEO, Free-eBooks.net

Change Is Constant

“How comfortable are you with change, and how do you handle it? If you run a startup, you need people who are flexible enough to grow with you. If someone doesn’t handle transitions and change well, you need to know that before you invest in them.”

– Brent Beshore | Owner/CEO, AdVentures

7 Key Elements Of A Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

Crowdfunding can be an effective tool for accomplishing your startup goals. Whether you’re looking to jumpstart your marketing efforts, expand your customer base, or reach out to friends and family for funding, crowdfunding provides a platform to rally support around you and your company. Having worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs who have conducted successful fundraisers, we have distilled seven key strategies for launching a successful crowdfund:

Tell your story. As the old adage goes: facts tell, stories sell. When it comes to eliciting customer engagement, a campaign with a good story is an unparalleled strategy. Did you experience some kind of obstacle on your path to entrepreneurship? Did a major life event influence your career choice or business decisions? Tell your story in your crowdfunding pitch to make a connection with backers and encourage engagement.If you don’t have a personal story to share with your audience, share facts and highlights about your startup, product or vision instead. Describe the problem (and severity of the problem) your product will solve, or discuss the vision for your startup. Keep your tone and messaging personal to make backers feel closely connected to you and your project.
Provide value for value. Crowdfunding campaigns hinge on reciprocity. If your startup offers fantastic products, rewards or opportunities, you’ve created a huge incentive for backers to pledge to your campaign. When choosing your reward tiers, reflect on whether the incentives would appeal to you if you were the consumer; ask friends, family members and business acquaintances for their honest opinions as well.
Introduce scarcity. A basic law of economics dictates that scarce supply inherently creates greater demand. Create greater demand for your startup by limiting one or more of the higher level rewards to just a few — this will inflate demand for those rewards and result in higher pledge amounts for your crowdfunding campaign!
Create a marketing event. People love to feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. Try to build a feeling of excitement and rally others around your crowdfunding campaign by tying the launch to a large, well known event. You can connect your product to a holiday, sporting event, or season to increase the momentum surrounding your launch. You can leverage the emotional connection surrounding these events to get people excited about your product and engage them in discussions.This is especially useful for connecting with backers through social channels, capitalizing on trending topics and popular hashtags to get more eyes on your fundraise!
Highlight examples of social proof. Going back to the human desire to feel like a part of something bigger than themselves, most people don’t want to be the first or only supporter of a crowdfunding campaign — they want to see other influential advocates joining in. Do you have someone notable as an adviser, backer or endorser of your startup? Share your list of partners and patrons to give confidence to new backers and let them know that they won’t be the only one at your party.
Build credibility and legitimacy. Many backers will believe it when they see it. In other words, they require some kind of evidence that your startup is legitimate and picking up steam before deciding to back your crowdfunding campaign. Show your backers what they’ll be supporting in detail — how it works, how you came up with the idea, and even pictures or videos if you have a prototype. Remember that you will likely never meet your backers, so the more proof you can provide that your startup is legitimate the better.
Interact with your supporters. Don’t leave your backers in the dark for weeks after they’ve supported your project. Interact with your audience through frequent updates, thank-you emails or social media outreach, and responses to their questions and feedback.You can build anticipation and increase engagement in many ways. Post updates counting down to a big surprise regarding your project, conduct a product giveaway, or even host a contest involving your crowdfunding campaign. The opportunities here are endless and can be tailored for your specific startup.When interacting with your backers, always encourage an open dialogue and engagement. In general, people would rather talk than listen. Treat your updates and outreach as a conversation rather than a one-sided message.

Eric Corl is the Co-Founder and President of the crowdfunding site Fundable.com. Eric has been on the founding team of three successful startups including Fundable, IdeaBuyer and Startups.Co, all of which have focused on getting early-stage startups to market quickly and effectively. He is also a partner at Virtucon Ventures, an early stage incubator that brings new ideas to market.

Now that you’ve got that down check out 12 Tips For Crowdfunding Your New Startup

Start Up Superpowers: Offline Branding & Marketing

Online interactions may reign supreme in today’s marketplace, but it doesn’t hurt to unplug the digital umbilical cord to promote start-ups.

Customers may submerse themselves in social media, online videos and ecommerce, but they live beyond the computer screen. This means the poster in the storefront window or brochure in the local coffee shop hold exclusive opportunities for a captive audience to your brand.

Printed marketing materials remain a valuable asset to attract and promote a target audience. They extend the reach of your business, expand your creativity and generate interest from new areas.

An iProspect study revealed two-thirds of online users are motivated to search by offline messages. Before you rely solely on the web to keep your start-up afloat, consider how offline branding can take you to the next level.

Why Offline Marketing Can Excel

Offline branding opportunities include posters, brochures, flyers, newsletters, magazines and booklet printing. These methods can be a critical tier of visibility to your business that you can’t get online. They are a tangible and personal way to reach out to potential clients.

Casting a wide customer net can fall short on bottom-line impact when compared to fishing for the right customer. While you may not be guaranteed a search engine query will lead a customer to a first-page Google result of your business, a brochure or business card in the right location provides localized, high-quality traffic.

These mediums engage audiences in a way that boosts your start-up’s credibility. They give people something tangible, with a physical address and phone number rather than just another unknown page in an infinite cyberspace.

If you integrate your branding into the fabric of the community through local team sponsorships or exposure in other trusted, established businesses, you increase brand awareness beyond your website.

Creative Offline Inspiration

For offline branding to thrive, promote where and how other competing start-ups fall short, and how your company can do better. Printed marketing materials can be creative, multi-dimensional and interactive.

Guest posts, startups,startup tips, marketing for startups

Photo by Sashi Bellamkonda via Flickr

This unique business card distributed at South by South West adds a new element to the traditional format. The promotional material provides a sample of the product along with a quirky message. This business can stand out among other cards because it provides a memorable experience to associate with the brand. You won’t soon forget this marketing tactic— that is, unless you have too many of these “business cards.”

Photo by Alan Levine via Flickr

The actual business card can be multipurpose. This USB business card offers a tongue-in-cheek approach to technology expertise while doubling as a means of digital storage. A user has a subtle brand reminder every time it’s plugged into a computer, which benefits the business.

Takeaway Tips for Offline Branding

Before starting an offline branding campaign, consider these tips that are applicable to any print platform:

Consistency is key. Be sure that logos, typeface and colors match your website as well as the products and services offered.
Maximize space by keeping things simple. Don’t clutter offline branding with too much information to confuse the audience, since you have finite space to work with. Don’t let verbose copy or convoluted design get in the way of what you’re trying to sell and how you can be contacted.
Offer a discount. Nothing works better than an incentive to walk through your doors or visit your site. Discounts are also a great way to generate word-of-mouth.

Offline marketing may seem like the older, less cool sibling of online branding. But never dismiss a medium that still has the ability to reach people and create impact.

About the author:

Catherine Draper

Cath has been working in SEO and Social Media since before Twitter was invented, although she loves the great outdoors just as much as surfing the net. Writing is just one of her many passions.

Want more on communicating for startups? Check out: When it comes to communications, startups need the whole package.

When It Comes to Communications, Startups Need the Whole Package

These days, you can start a company sitting in your pajamas with a laptop. Buoyed by cutting edge technology, the wisdom of crowds, and cloud computing, there are more startups than ever before. Separating the heroes from the hype can be quite the challenge for investors, so it’s important that entrepreneurs have a clear and attractive startup communications package from the get-go.

Pitch with Clarity and Authenticity

To get up and running, startups have to sell their sizzle before there’s any meat near the table. They must communicate their dreams and talk about how they’re ushering in the future. But they’ve got to be smart about selling those dreams to investors. For example, I recently received an automated email to consider investing in a startup called Crave. At first glance, it looked promising. The email contained praise from a successful male venture capitalist, and the CEO is a Stanford man.

Then, I found out what the company’s product was: vibrators. For women. So I had two men telling me how superior their vibrators were. I don’t think I need to break out the “mechanic who doesn’t drive a car” analogy here; Crave wasn’t going to pass the sniff test.

Ironically, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll find that Crave actually has a female co-founder who fits the bill of authentically leading product development. Crave could benefit from using her when pitching investors. Being clear from the start about what the product is, as well as having an authentic spokesperson, is much more sensible.

Show off the Good Stuff

When pitching investors, it’s crucial to highlight business components savvy investors will be looking for. It starts with having the right team members, front and center, to communicate your idea. Startups capable of enticing investors typically have these qualities:

A seasoned entrepreneurial team — This doesn’t mean all the execs must have salt-and-pepper hair, but not everyone should be fresh off campus. Your money, sales, and operations people need to be experienced.
The best execution — You don’t necessarily need a new idea, but a high-quality startup will have the best way to execute a solution to a big problem and be able to explain to investors why your way will be profitable.
Clear commitment — Your team’s personal passion should be visible, with everyone committed to your dream.
A solid exit strategy — A viable startup has smart ideas about who could eventually acquire it.

Eliminate Red Flags

The things that turn off investors are the same things that hurt startups in the long run. If your company exhibits any of these characteristics, you may have a problem convincing investors it’s the real deal.

Part-timers — There are exceptions, but if an entrepreneur is working part-time for her dream and part-time for “The Man,” she probably doesn’t believe in it as much as she wants an investor to. If you’re not ready to take the leap as a full-time entrepreneur, you’re probably not ready to take your idea to investors.
Family on the team — There are some killer family combos out there, but more often than not, family members are hired out of convenience and not because of any super skills they possess. If your business partner is family, make sure there’s a compelling attribute she brings to the team, and be able to sell that to investors.
Perceptible lack of process — Anything can look slick and stunning with today’s racy design platforms. But is anything actually getting done? With the rapid pace of the tech world, delays tell investors your company isn’t serious about breaking into the space.
No dream — Elon Musk. Richard Branson. Steve Jobs. These are entrepreneurs whose names are synonymous with “dreams.” It’s not just a matter of having passion for your business — it’s being able to communicate your dream to investors and make your excitement contagious.

Have the Right Answers

So, what questions should you be prepared to answer to show investors your startup is worthwhile? These three help expose a startup’s entrepreneurial DNA:

If you were going to be acquired today, who should acquire you, for how much, and why? Your answer must be thoughtful, with a clear plan for execution.
What’s the biggest problem with executing your dream? You can — and should — admit that you wrestle with this question on a daily basis.
Why does the world need you? The perfect answer here should not include a financial spreadsheet.

Show the Startup’s Full Potential

Being passionate about dreams is vital, but for a startup to be taken seriously, it also needs to be functional. You must show confidence in these practical aspects of your startup when pitching to investors:

The Technical — Does your startup have capable, mature technology that’s easy to execute?
The Financial — Can your business be scaled from the running start investors might give you? Do you need $1 million, or several million, to get significant scale?
The Managerial — Are the right leaders in place? Will they help optimize and scale your technology?

The Basic Communications Toolkit

Additionally, a basic communications toolkit gives startups a strong foundation to draw in investors. Pack your toolkit with these tips:

Maintain a website with a compelling story that encapsulates your voice and vision.
Create an engaging tagline for your elevator pitch. Think Kabbage’s “Easy cash for online sellers.”
Memorize the key components of your pitch deck, from market size to customers of note.
Be able to give detailed financials upon requested.
Utilize websites like AngelList and LinkedIn to build your online presence and spread your mission.

At the end of the day, daring visions capture investors’ attention, and substance convinces them. If a communications package shows passion on the outside and holds up to the logistics within, investors will be confident of getting a substantial return, which equals success for the startup.

Because this article was published, a donation will be made to Reading Is Fundamental so a book can be given to a child.

Lisa Calhoun is the CEO of Write2Market, an industry leadership consultancy that changes the world by helping tech and energy companies gain the reputations they deserve. Write2Market helps its clients scale by nabbing headlines, speaking engagements, and key business development opportunities, all with an eye on creating the best possible exit for the founding and investment team. Connect with Lisa on Twitter or LinkedIn or at her personal blog.