data Archives - Serious Startups

9 Ways to Measure Your Branding

Group of Multiethnic Busy People Working in an Office

Question: How do you measure whether your branding efforts are working or not? What do you look for?

Using Fresh Web Explorer

“I measure our branding efforts explicitly with Fresh Web Explorer. I use it to track every mention of our brand and branded terms across the Web, including tweets, comments, forums, blogs, etc. It helps me discover conversations I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed, and it enables me to keep a pulse on the broader reach of our marketing campaigns.”

MATT EHRLICHMAN
Porch

Seeing Strangers Recognize Your Logo

“Branding is an important part in marketing because it means you’ve made a personal connection with your audience and inspired some level of longevity for your brand. It’s not just about a number, but rather the feeling you invoke in your target audience. They say that if you capture their hearts, you have them forever. You know this when strangers recognize your logo or company during conversation.”

ANDY KARUZA
SpotSurvey

Using Google Analytics

“We use Google Analytics to check our branded keywords and how they grow weekly, monthly, etc. It’s a good way to measure branding efforts to see how many times people are typing your brand into the search engine.”

PABLO PALATNIK
ShadesDaddy.com

Being Recognized

“It sounds simple, but the best way of knowing if your branding efforts are working is to ask someone to say (or spell) the name of your company. If fellow business colleagues, industry insiders or consumers can say or spell your company name correctly, then half of your battle is already won. Recognition is key to recall efforts.”

KIM KAUPE
ZinePak

Talking to People

“If people are likely to get on the phone with you when you reach out — or better yet, if they are coming to you — then your branding efforts are working. We’ve seen a huge change in the last year of businesses coming to us instead of us reaching out because of the articles we’ve published that build credibility for our brand. “

KELSEY MEYER
Influence & Co.

Asking for Feedback

“We directly ask our potential business partners and customer leads how they heard about us. I’m always asking for feedback on our creative work like mailers and infographics in every business-related meeting. It helps me to keep thinking about how to improve and open the conversation to learn what branding efforts other businesses are pursuing. “

PHIL LABOON
Eyeflow Internet Marketing

Checking Your Conversion Rates

“If your conversion rates have increased, it can mean that the same visitors who have never purchased before are now excited to get to know your product or service. Branding helps soft sell to potential customers who weren’t ready to make a purchase initially but might give your business a chance after repeated exposure. If your conversion rates go up, your branding efforts are not in vain.”

DANNY WONG
Blank Label

Tracking Leads

“We keep a very close eye on our metrics — particularly lead gen. If our subscribers, opt-ins and sales are increasing, we know that we’re doing a good job promoting our brand. We are particularly interested in tracking referrals from clients because we are intensely focused on providing excellent customer service. If our clients are referring friends, we know that we’re doing a great job.”

PATRICK CONLEY
Automation Heroes

Seeing Company Growth

“We help our clients assess branding efforts through seeing increased leads, higher lead conversion rates, faster close rates, higher paying customers and overall company growth. If you aren’t hitting all four cylinders, get some outside expertise to help you!”

RAOUL DAVIS
Ascendant Group

Online Retailers Can Now Access Better Data With MineWhat

It wasn’t that long ago that people couldn’t conceive of buying anything over the computer. Besides the limited technology, we mostly used cash instead of debit cards and were often gun shy about giving our credit card numbers to strangers.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and it’s tough to find someone who doesn’t shop online. (Even my mother made her first online purchase this past Christmas.) It’s estimated by some that online retail sales will reach $370 billion by 2017.

Obviously, with such a large and growing market, entrepreneurs are rushing to cash in. Online retail is increasingly viable and, even with logistics and inventory, is cheaper than opening a brick and mortar location.

In our data-driven world, the growth of a market also means the need for better and better analytics.

Fayetteville, AR-based MineWhat is poised to provide specialized eCommerce analytics for online retailers..

With a quick install, e-tailers can access a wide array of data that goes far beyond pageviews. MineWhat allows merchants to see what products shoppers look at, what brands sell well together, what products should be showcased, and a ton more data-junkie goodness.

Check out our interview with MineWhat CEO Janakiram Ganesan below.

1) What does your company do?

Think of MineWhat as a platform that enables online retailers to ask questions of their data and get answers to them as well. We help online stores pick the right merchandise whether it’s for marketing campaigns, product strategy, landing pages and more.

2) Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?

MineWhat was founded by Pavan Kumar and Janakiram Ganesan.

Pavan spent some time writing code at various huge product firms before starting out as an entrepreneur. MineWhat is is his second startup venture. He likes scalability related problems, data management on the web and is an avid tech enthusiast.

MineWhat is my second startup as well. I’ve worked on machine learning related problems over the years. Of late I’ve been more interested in marketing, building businesses and tech evangelism

3) What’s the story behind your idea?

The initial idea behind MineWhat came out of the Indian eCommerce boom during 2010 – 2011.

eCommerce seemed like a really interesting thing to jump into. Friends of ours had started out building eCommerce stores of their own and we thought we’d rather do something that will help online stores instead of building another one.

4) How as being part of the ARK Challenge helpful for your startup?

The ARK Challenge really helped us refine the product idea. The mentors were awesome, getting to leverage their network and using their product feedback was of great help.

5) What milestones have you reached, and what are you working on next?

We’ve begun our sales push now, we are averaging over two signups a week. Most of what we will be focusing on from here on will be how to acquire and retain more customers.

6) Where can folks find out more?

They can head over to our website or onto any of our social media pages

https://minewhat.com

https://twitter.com/minewhat

https://www.facebook.com/minewhat?ref=hl

According to New Data, Women Make Up The Highest Number of “Mobile Addicts”

Flurry, a mobile metrics and advertising network, has released some very interesting data about the mobile landscape.

The rapid adoption of smartphones has correlated to a lot of predictions about human behavior, but Flurry has been able to tell a story based on data about what is really going on worldwide.

Flurry noticed that “mobile addicts” have increased and, the segment growing the fasts is very interesting. A “mobile addict” is classified as a smartphone user that checks apps 60 times or more a day, a group that has grown by 123% from 2012 from 79 million to 176 million.

Simon Khalaf, CEO of Flurry, during his keynote at Source14 stated this makes the smartphone a ‘wearable’ in regards to the phone being with us all the time like a wallet or watch.

The interesting thing is that Flurry also realized that females make up more of the mobile addicts” than males. Female and male users aged 18-24 and 35-54 have the highest concentration of “mobile addicts”.

There are plenty of more interesting statistics offered in the slides available here:

http://www.slideshare.net/FlurryMobile/source14-the-age-of

TL;DR: Things that I personally found interesting from the presentation.

Between 2012-2013 there has been a 316% growth in messaging apps. It’s creating overnight Telco companies without the cost.
Mobile commerce grew 60% in the US from $20.5mil in 2012 to $33mil in 2013.
Mobile travel and logistics revenue grew at 168% from 2011 to 2013.
Mobile has absorbed all users in social platforms. Example is 98% for Instagram.
Paid audio streaming hit $1 billion in revenue. Mobile has disrupted it’s own industry. Instead of downloading music to put on our phones like the past, we are now paying to stream it.
The web is definitely alive, but apps have taken control. The browser inside Facebook app is the most used browser.
China has 330mil unique active devices each month. The United States has 285mil. The US is losing its lead in software development. It is now 34% in the US and 66% for the rest of the world. Last year 0% of the time spent in apps made by China in the UK, now it is 16%.
Mobile has become addictive. People that launch apps more than 60 times a day are:
- 8% more female
- 18-24 and 35-54 (age) are the highest groups of addicts
- Sports fans, gamers, parenting & education , and moms are the typical female “mobile addicts”.
Mobile gaming is only 14% of the total gaming market. Console is still king at 47%.

There are plenty of more interesting statistics offered in the slides available here:

http://www.slideshare.net/FlurryMobile/source14-the-age-of

Mobile Startups Raise $3.8B in VC Financing in 2013

Q3 of 2013 posted the largest quarter in financing for the mobile sector ever, CB Insights reported this week. Venture capitalists invested $1.12 billion dollars across 150 deals in that quarter, and Q4 didn’t see a significant decrease in investment. Across all 4 quarters of 2013, VCs poured $3.8 billion dollars into the mobile industry.

That money isn’t just going to finance the next consumer app, either. (Though $190 million did go to consumer apps.) With 2013 being the year we all woke up to Internet threats, startups working on security took the largest portion of that funding (10%). Travel was the next hottest sub-industry, but the money spreads out a good bit after that. Payments, customer relationship management, and business intelligence/analytics were all sub-industries that pulled in big VC money last year.

Unfortunately, the money wasn’t as spread out over geography as it was over industries. San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Mountain View pulled in a combined $1.36 billion dollars. The next closest region was New York/Brooklyn with a combined $269 million.

What does this mean for startups everywhere else? Well, obviously, there’s money to be had out there. With some projections placing smartphone sales in the billions this year, and fewer companies than we thought going mobile first, it’s safe to say the market isn’t going anywhere.

Companies dealing in mobile security will probably still be attractive to investors in 2014. After all, black hat hackers and the NSA aren’t going anywhere.

Check out the whole report from CB Insights here.

Is Your Startup’s Founder Paying Themselves Too Much?

We’re all familiar with some of the stereotypes of 20-something founders at mega-financed, VC backed startups. Too often parties, fast cars, and fancy restaurants come into the picture.

We all know that’s not really accurate, though. In fact, last week we talked about how a majority of founders pay themselves less than $50,000 a year. Especially in places like the Valley and New York, that doesn’t go very far.

Location isn’t the only factor that affects salary, though. What about age, experience, and family responsibilities?

Oh, yeah, and revenue. How exactly does the “R” word affect founder salaries?

It turns out, according to Compass, monthly revenue is the most important factor in determining a founder’s salary. Until a company breaks $10k a month, most founders are still in the less than $50k range. When monthly revenue tops $1 million, founders seem to be more willing to increase their salaries above $100k a year.

The correlation really seems pretty obvious. If founders are fighting for every monthly penny, they’re less likely to want to pay themselves higher salaries. Company growth comes first. However, there’s obviously a point at which the company can grow AND the founders can pay themselves a living wage. That’s what we like to call the sweet spot.

Revenue was a big factor in founder’s salaries, but it wasn’t the only one.

Older founders pay themselves 71% more than younger founders, even though that is still just slightly more than $60k a year. Hardly raking it in or anything.

While it’s unfair to make blanket statements, it’s probably fair to say that younger founders can generally live on less. They usually don’t have kids or mortgage payments, and for the youngest set are still on Mom and Dad’s insurance. On the flip side, founders over 50 are likely to have savings or other sources of income and can therefore afford to take a smaller salary.

Both Compass studies come from self-reported data, so some of it is to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, they found that 78% of founders are under 40. That’s not really a full picture of startups, as Darmesh Shah points out.

Neither Compass study controlled for VC funding, either. It’s safe to say a series A company will be paying its founders more than a bootstrapped one will be.

What these studies do,though, is give us a baseline for founder salaries. That helps us have perspective on some of the rigors and sacrifices starting a company requires.

It also reminds us that the rich technobrat is probably a figment of our collective imaginations.

Cloudera A Start Up To Keep An Eye On

Cloudera is only 3 years old. It has the makings of becoming a billion dollar company in the near future. They provide customer support and tools that take advantage of an open-source platform called Apache Hadoop that they distribute. Cloudera offers many ways your company can take advantage of Hadoop including categories like E-tailing, Financial Services, Government, Health and Life-Sciences, Retail/CPG, Telecommunications and Web and Digital Media Services. In 3 years time they have already landed some big named clients such as Adconion, AdGooroo, Aggregate Knowledge, AOL Advertising, Apollo Group, Inc., Concurrent Computers, Explorys Medical, First Life Research, Groupon, Huron Consulting Group, JiWire, Klout, NAVTEQ, Opower, Rackspace US Inc., Samsung, Trends Micro Inc., Trulia, Tynt and the C.I.A. among many others.

In 3 years time Cloudera has built up their investments to reach over $75 million and growing. Cloudera has partnered up with Acer, AMD and Aster Data. One of Clouderas Co-founders Amr Awadallah told Business Insider “We are building this to be a huge, huge company,” he also said “My preference is to go public but it could be a big suitor taking it.” Who could be the big suitor? Dell perhaps? Whichever suitor chooses Cloudera, it is no doubt that Cloudera is a start-up to keep your eye on.

Cloudera, Business Insider