am ventures Archives - Serious Startups

archer>malmo Submits Two Great Startup Branding Panels For SXSW

This week we will preview some of the best startup panels that are up for consideration at SXSW Interactive in March. SXSW gets thousands of possible panel, speakers, book reading and other content submissions for their “panel picker”. If you’re a startup founder, entrepreneur or influencer with a startup related panel please email us with a link to the panel information at startups@nibletz.com.

archer>malmo is a Memphis based PR and marketing firm that’s been around for 60 years. They have huge clients like Pfizer, Verizon and RJ Reynolds. But they also work with startups. Not only do they do work for startups but they have a a venture firm called a>m ventures that invests creative capital into new startups, for equity (*disclosure Nibletz Media Inc is an a>m ventures portfolio company).

With their vast experience in startups and working with all kinds of new and young companies, they’ve seen and learned some great (and not so great) things that are definitely worth sharing with other startup founders.

Last year, they held a well attended panel called “When Bad Names Happen To Good Startups”. The panel discussed the importance of naming and how sometimes that name that goes with that cleve URL may not be the best decision ever. They also discussed the ins and out and why’s of choosing a name. For most companies you’re stuck on it, or some version of it for life.

This year they are hoping to expand on that theme with an equally as important topic, branding. “When Bad Brands Happen To Good Startups” ” Gary Backaus, Chief Creative Officer/Director and Justin Dobbs Creative Director at archer>malmo, were the speakers for last years panel and will also be speaking on this panel as well (if selected).

We get it. Whether it’s an investor intro, an online listing, or your elevator pitch, there are times when capturing your startup concept in a few words is critical.

But talking to customers? It ain’t one of those times.

Yet for some reason many startups continue to court customers with the same robotic sound bites used in their pitch.

And while a digestible “My Unique Feature” formula is fine for accelerator applications, in the real world, you aren’t pitching a business model or market niche. You’re pitching a product. And even the simplest, fastest, shiniest, funnest product needs more than a value prop and a clever name.

It needs a personality.

We’ll examine brand personality types, marvel at great ones, laugh at bad ones, and share some tips for uncovering your brand voice—one that’s genuine, true, and that offers your customers something no positioning statement can. (they said on their panel picker page)

am>ventures Director and Everywhere Else Cincinnati speaker, Patrick Woods, has also submitted a panel for this years SXSWi panelpicker. Woods just got back from being one of the “mentors” for the new SXSW V2V festival in Las Vegas earlier this month.

Woods has a long background in PR and marketing with the past few years spent exclusively with startups. As the director of am>ventures he’s tasked with finding the startups that the firm wants to invest it’s creative capital in.

Woods also mentors through local accelerators, does office hours via Skype and Google hangouts and both writes and speaks on startup branding and marketing.

“Branding From Day Zero: Startup Brand Strategy” is the discussion Woods has submitted.

Branding. All startups have to do it, but no one really knows how. Punch “startup branding” into google and you’ll find checklists and 10-step plans that’ll tell you to “have a logo” and “be consistent.”

Thanks.

Startups don’t need tips and tricks. They need an understanding of brand strategy—what it means and why it matters. And ultimately, how to do it from the beginning.

Name, logo, t-shirts, stickers—these are all parts of brand, but what undergirds the whole system? Brand strategy. Startups usually skip this crucial phase. And it shows. I’m a hybrid ad man/startup guy who’s built brands for everything from an event discovery app to an AI system. I’ve seen tons of branding tools, but none specifically those starting from scratch.

This talk will explore a way forward specifically for startups. We’ll move past the tips & tricks and focus on a few actually helpful questions for building a great brand that resonates with your audience and build long-term loyalty.” Woods wrote on his panelpicker page.

You can vote here for “When bad brands happen to good startups”

and here for “Branding from day zero: Startup Brand Strategy”

Guest Post: Observations from a Demo Day Junkie

This guest post comes to us from Patrick Woods. Woods is a director at a>m ventures, the venture capital arm of archer>malmo a regional leader in advertising, pr and marketing. Disclosure: nibletz.com is one of a>m ventures portfolio companies.

I’ve been to five six demo days already this year in my travels for a>m ventures, and many more over the past 18 months. The following points are my observations on the good, bad, and nasty of startup accelerator demo days.

No one of these points will sink your demo day ship, but taken together, when done right, these elements will help to give your teams better odds of getting to that next step on and following the big day.

The idea is to reduce the variables involved in your event in order for you to craft a meaningful experience.

Caveats

These are my observations, not gospel.
If you’re YC or TechStars, these points apply less to you; these are for everyone else.
Yes, there are a lot of seemingly minute details here, but that’s the point.
We can all agree there’s no substitute for great companies, and none of these observations are meant as such a substitute.

In general, be mindful of your goals for demo day, and curate all experiences to achieve those goals. Some goals might include:

Connect investors to companies
Connect investors to investors
Strengthen your ecosystem’s network of founders, angels, VCs, services providers, and those on the periphery
Generate buzz at various levels by raising the visibility of early-stage activity in your region
There are plenty more; the point is that you should be aware of what the goals are, then align every facet of demo day to achieve each goal.

Your accelerator is a marathon, demo day is not

3 hours is pushing the upper limit of peoples’ attention span.
Limit team intros to something really short, like, 60 seconds or less.
Sorry sponsors, no one cares about you. At least not anyone in the audience.

Relatedly, more pitches, less bravado, fewer speeches

Yes, we all get it: your city is a great place for starting up. Being a mentor is an amazing experience, and you always need more. Okay. Now let’s get on with it.
Remember that running an accelerator isn’t an end to celebrate, but that it’s a means to an end that will produce celebration-worthy events.
Everyone’s got an accelerator these days, so let’s reduce the back-patting and celebrate the big wins.
That said, brief updates from alumni can be a great point of pride.
Also, no student “idea” pitches, please. Or anything else irrelevant to investors.

Pitch quality matters

Stage presence, pitch structure, and pitch content are all really important.
The companies shouldn’t be delivering bullet-point fact transfers, but rather telling a relatable, investable story.
Slides should be used as visual aids, not as core components of the presentation.
Long before demo day, require your teams to write a script for their pitch. They don’t necessarily have to recount it verbatim onstage, but the process of formalizing their thoughts will prove invaluable.
Coach your teams and enlist mentors who know how to pitch, like successful founders, folks who have been onstage before, and advertising people, many of whom pitch for a living.
Strongly consider bringing in a speaking coach a couple of times: first at an early point and later, closer to demo day to track improvements.

Continue reading at Patrick’s Tumbler here

Linkage:

Patrick Woods’ Tumbler

Here’s some of our own demo day coverage

Are you in?

When Bad Names Happen To Great Startups: Corpora And More NSFW

We were in Chattanooga Tennessee this past week covering GigTank’s demo day. GigTank is a three month accelerator that was centered around building startups that utilized Chattanooga’s 1gb city wide fiber optic network. Chattanooga’s 1gb fiber optic network launched a year before Kansas City’s, Google backed 1gb network.

The first team that presented was a startup from Asheville North Carolina called Corpora. Corpora is a platform that uses social media to aggregate and crowdsource things on a grand scale. For the purposes of the competition they showed off how the service could be used to track medical conditions like allergy clusters. Corpora could also be used to source clusters of other conditions like a food poisoning outbreak or conditions with widespread results.

One of the judges quickly shot the idea down by suggesting that they wouldn’t tweet about “a rash”. Aside from that, and if you can look past the medical vertical, there is a lot of data that could come out of something like Corpora. Although they didn’t win the grand prize of $100,000 they definitely have an idea worth continuing on now that the accelerator program is over.

So why is Corpora in the headline?

Well Thursday morning while sitting at the press table on the second row at the demo day presentations, I discovered something quite disturbing about Corpora. I had just finished video taping their pitch and began to compile this story about Corpora. After writing a short summary of their presentation, and uploading the video to YouTube, I began to hunt for a logo for the startup. Like most people the first thing I did was a Google images search.

I wholeheartedly apologize to anyone reading this who was seated behind me and had their eyes on my monitor instead of the actual presentations. You see Corpora yielded a search for Corpora Cavvernosa. The first page of Google images results yielded over 25 pictures of penises. Some of the penises were pierced, some cut open, some were just medical illustrations. You see Corpora Cavernosa is the tissue part that runs on top of the urethra and fills with blood and expands as a result of nitric oxide during arousal. Yes Corpora Cavernosa is the actual part of the penis that “gets hard” during an erection.

In a half joking manner and in a half “WTF why didn’t these entrepreneurs vet this out better” manner, I texted a few of my colleagues who were sitting a few rows back (sorry Eric and Patrick) and of course they too saw the disturbing pictures that undoubtedly you’ve gone and Googled now as well.

Some may say that this is a minor thing, on the contrary it’s something that’s minor but could have been dealt with early on. They don’t actually have any significant brand presence at the moment.

We’re not totally in the clear either, however we knew about our issue early on and decided not to worry about it. There is an Urban Dictionary definition of niblets (with an s) that means something that may be a bit on the NSFW side (I’m sure you’ve Googled it now as well).

Our situation is a bit different, that colleague of mine I mentioned above Patrick Woods is a director at archer>malmo’s a>m ventures group. They specialize in branding, brand identity, advertising, and PR. Woods would love for us to change our name. When he thinks nibletz he thinks snacks, and now of course the UD definition we told him about.

Our name came about because we actually came out with our original tag line before the name itself, which was: “Small crunchy bytes from the tech and startup scene”. As a compliment to our huge Android site (which was sold in April) we came up with Nibletz last year. Our original plan was to do a capsulated version of tech and startups similar to what you would find on TechCrunch. We pivoted in January to “the voice of startups everywhere else” and kept the name.

Unlike Corpora we have an established brand presence so for now the name is the same.

a>m ventures has submitted a suggestion for a SXSWi panel/talk in 2013 called “When Bad Names Happen To Great Startups”. If selected archer>malmo’s Chief Creative Officer Gary Backaus along with their Senior Copy Writer will host and moderate a discussion on the importance of naming and having a great name that you can build an even greater brand identity with.

They’ll highlight some of the companies that have changed their names under archer>malmo’s direction and done very well.

Name changes happen for many reasons, but it’s much easier and a lot less costly when little nuances like your name being part of the word for erection, come up early on in the startup process. Even major corporations sometimes go through name changes. Phillip Morris Companies, the manufacturers of Marlboro cigarettes and one time owner of Kraft foods recently went through a name change to Altria. Of course for Altria many will always refer to them as Phillip Morris.

The Haloid Company was the first name for Xerox. Lucky Goldstar, the Korean company that became LG, changed their name for better global adaption. Under the Lucky Goldstar name they released a number of very low end electronics, this may have had to do with the shift when they started shipping flat screens, and smartphones worldwide. Now with the shortened name they’ve adapted the slogan Life’s Good.

Many don’t realize that when they fly AirTran they are traveling on the same carrier once known as ValueJet Airlines. ValueJet quickly made a name for themselves in the early to mid 90’s until 1996 when a crash in the Everglades caused them to change their name permanently. Now, most people have forgotten (or didn’t know) that Airtran is ValueJet and just associate AirTran (a unit of Southwest) as a value carrier.

Our own word?

One thing we like about nibletz is that we’ve made it our own by swapping the S for the Z. Do we think we’re the next Google? No of course not but made up words can be fun. The downside to made up words is when you invert a letter like we did or use some other creative spelling that’s hard to articulate in speaking. We are forced to use some SEO ninja skills to help direct people who may be looking for us with an “s” and not a “z”.

We’ve also had a problem with good ole Heather who holds the Twitter name “nibletz” she used the name nibletz as her gamer name for many years and has tried to hold the Twitter handle hostage hoping we’ll pay her thousands of dollars to use it. Sorry we’re doing just fine wtih @startuptechguy my personal Twitter and @nibletztweets.

We’re hoping that the team behind Corpora will do something with the name (or flood the net with pictures to push down all those pictures of penises). We’re also hoping that archer>malmo will win a spot at SXSW for their valuable talk.

Linkage:

More great Chattanooga GigTank coverage here

Nibletz is the voice of startups “everywhere else” here are more startup stories from “everywhere else”

This may be our last crowdfunding campaign but we need it the most!