Patrick Woods Archives - Serious Startups

A Startup Walks Into A Bar And Orders…

Six decade old advertising agency archer>malmo gave an amazing discussion at SXSW 2013 called “When Bad Names Happen to Good Startups.” It was a candid look at naming mistakes startups make. While sometimes names are an afterthought based on a url’s availability, the folks at archer>malmo and their investment arm a>m ventures, preach the importance of a name because it’s the foundation of your brand.

Patrick Woods, a>m ventures Managing Director, says “say nodaddy to godaddy” referring to the practice of naming a startup for a URL. That was just the beginning of an amazing presentation at our Everywhere Else Cincinnati conference earlier this week. What transpired after a brief introduction had the entire audience talking for the rest of the conference. In fact, shortly after the discussion The Cincinnati Business Courier’s Andy Brownfield was so blown away he posted this story.

So the story goes like this: archer>malmo’s Senior Copy Writer Justin Dobbs is a close friend of Woods. “He’s one of the most creative guys I know,” Woods told the audience. So it was a feeling of shock, or possibly being blown off when Woods was recently looking for a gift to get a male friend for his birthday. He figured he would turn to Dobbs’ creative edge to help him come up with something truly amazing. Dobbs’ suggestion? A bar of soap. But not just any soap,

Dobbs suggested a bar of Duke Cannon. Now Duke Cannon is a man’s soap. Its brand isn’t just a brand; it has a personality. Brand is bold, and masculine and their branding is something Woods was successful in driving home.

Their website and brand image is filled with personality. “Tested by soldiers, made in the USA” is one of the rotating graphics that dons the companies web page. “Veggie Burger’s Don’t Mind If I Don’t” is another.

“Duke Cannon doesn’t dine with vegans and he could give a damn about your iPad,” it says on the company’s about page.

Duke Canon’s personality is that of a man, a man’s man. If he walked into a bar he would undoubtedly order something hard.

That’s one question Wood’s asked the audience at Everywhere Else Cincinnati. “What would your startup order at a bar?” “What would your startup order to eat?” was another.

Woods said startups that use simple descriptors may have found the perfect way to tell what their startup does, but they’re so simple that they are insulting to users.

Duke Cannon has a brand voice and startups need one too. “Startups almost feel like they need to sound like a startup. Don’t try to sound like a startup,” Woods said to the audience.

“When you develop a strong personality, you start moving your startup from a product to a brand,” Woods told Brownfield. “Personality is what your brand says when you’re no longer speaking.”

Nibletz would order a Redbull and Vodka and pizza.

Find out more about a>m ventures here.

Great Marketing Is Not The Enemy of Great Product

In some circles, “marketing” is a four letter word.

For some, it’s as if marketing is the enemy of product, and they believe a great product will somehow find a way to sell itself. The implication is that marketing is needed only when the product isn’t good enough.If you need marketing, you’re doing something wrong.

While it’s true that good marketing won’t go far in helping a bad product, I think the product-marketing distinction disregards the value that can be created when the overlap between product and marketing is realized and exploited.

This false dichotomy happens for a few reasons.

First is that the term marketing is too broad to be instructive when working with early-stage companies. Discussing the constituent parts of the process is much more useful. Distribution strategy and user adoption, branding and naming, messaging and copywriting, pricing strategy—these are much more meaningful than “marketing” as a category.

In a similar vein, product is dangerously broad as well. As marketing has constituent parts, so does the concept of product. User stories, back- and front-end code, UI design and copy, transactional emails, the overall look and feel—these are all constituent parts of product.

In startups, as in most companies, there’s a portion of product and marketing activities that bridge the gap and live in both worlds.

Elements of marketing can augment elements of product, and vice versa.

Real value can be created in the cases where facets of marketing and elements of product overlap.

There are many examples of this overlap. Here are a few:

Copy in the UI: does it align with the voice and tone of the brand as established in the brand platform, on the marketing site, and on social accounts?
Transactional emails: are they sensitive to the realities of user behavior as seen within the app?
Overall aesthetic: is there design consistency between the personality and texture of your name, logo, marketing assets, and user interface?
Blog posts, white papers, case studies, and other marketing assets: do they reflect the attitudes and beliefs of users? do they account for data about usage and allow that data to influence the direction?

In a world where the earliest interactions between user and product occur within the context of an app store–first with app icon and name, then with screenshots–the separation between product and marketing is an increasingly false distinction.

Couple that with the necessity of building in effective viral hooks along with other growth hacking techniques, and it’s clear that the monolithic categories of product and marketing are rarely meaningful.

Thinking in separate product-marketing silos, then, e.g. “we need to start thinking about marketing now that the beta is live,” is harmful to the growth of your product.

So take time to dig a bit deeper past the abstraction of high-level categories. Proceed with caution when you hear someone waxing poetic on the notions of product or the dangers of marketing. And take advantage of the product-marketing overlap to strengthen your experience and further endear yourself to users.

Still need help? I’m offering free 30-minute Google Hangout office hour sessions to take questions about startup branding and messaging. No strings attached. Get in touch if that interests you.

Patrick Woods is a hybrid ad man/startup guy. As director of a>m ventures, he connects startups with awesome branding, PR, and marketing strategy.

*Nibletz is an a>m ventures portfolio company.

**This post first appeared on Medium.

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?