Start-ups & Entrepreneurship

You get only one chance to make a first impression. That’s why, despite the popularity of “stealth” and “soft” launch approaches, you owe it to yourself to take a long, hard look at your situation and your prospective customers. Dribbling out your news and content in tiny, incremental steps over time might preserve cash or save staff time, but often you’re taking a chance. You might unintentionally forfeit your ability to make a bigger splash later. And you risk not getting noticed at all.

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over? (This argument goes for cost as well.) Once you become known in your prospect’s mind as one thing, you cannot cheaply and easily “flip a switch” and become something else. It’s foolish to think you can pivot your product or service without any negative impact on your brand, reputation and customer trust. From a marketing standpoint, pivot often means a radical move that requires the market to suddenly change what it believes about you. This goes to what you do, what your value is to them and why they should care about you at all. It’s a function of human memory and opinion formation habits which are seldom altered by marketing tactics (not even with a cool name like pivot).

So is there a basic recipe for a successful launch? We think so. Here are the 10 fundamental launch steps to get you started, developed from our experience in leading the launches of literally hundreds of products, services and companies:

The Countdown to Launch …

10: Market Research
Do your homework. That includes competitive analysis, market analysis, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), problem and niche definition and above all, listening to potential buyers and trying to learn about and categorize them.

9: Strategic Positioning & Messaging
Build on your research results. Boil down the essence of your differentiation. Research and refine your positioning and key messages. Document them in a detailed brief that guides all marketing. Tune them for what you know your buyer personas. Whenever possible, test them.

8: Brand Development
Extend the positioning by communicating your value proposition and uniqueness externally. Differentiate. The narrower the brand, the stronger it is. Well developed brands help us remember companies and why we care about them. This is not so much about “brand statements” gathering dust but about actual implementation, such as logo treatments, visual identity, taglines, voice, tone, personality, creative concepts and naming schemes.

7: High Quality, Original Content Creation (a.k.a Intellectual Capital)
Based on the positioning/messaging, go the extra mile to create high quality original content aimed specifically at your target buyers and their buying stages. Give every piece of content you create a set of goals, a job to do, a target audience segment and a set of metrics.

6: Testimonial/Third Party Validation
“Borrow” credibility from influential sources, including customers, prospects, analysts, consultants and partners. Aggressively solicit 3rd-party references and testimonials. Make it easy to say yes by suggesting multiple choices and levels of support. Align with longer term and sector-wide trends. Present references in context.

5: Content Strategy
What kind of story must you tell? What is the context? How does it relate to your prospects and their preferences? What do you know about their problems and views? How can you use that knowledge to tell your story in context to them? What media channels do you need? What is the right process for drawing back the curtains to reveal your story?

4: Mainstream/Trade Media Outreach
Define your pitch to the mainstream news media. How do you make your story newsworthy? What is the “tension” or conflict in the story? What background do they need to “get it”? What approach and tactics will help you cultivate key long-term press relationships?

3: Social Media Outreach
Where do you need to be active on the social web to reach your prospects and their influences directly? What networks, what communities, what groups, what chats, what channels? Identify your sweet spots. How can you encourage people to share your content and story? Start small and focused and grow out from there. Leverage content and connections across multiple channels. Don’t forget other influencers as well, including industry analysts, standards groups, online communities and consultants.

2: Launch Vehicle
Formalize your move into market with event of some kind — even if virtual. Focus the story to build momentum. Create a sense of “urgency” and timeliness for people to pay attention at a point in time to promote sharing. Whatever channels and media formats you choose, back them up with lots of rich content and several points from which to access your story.

1: Follow Up
Launch is only the beginning. “Launch Marketing” is a state of mind. Today, you can never really leave “Launch mode” or rest on your laurels. You may view it as a campaign–as long as you recognize it should never “end.” Be opportunistic, persistent and consistent!

By nature, start-ups are not encumbered by many of the things we’ve learned to hate about giant corporations and their marketing practices. I’m talking about the kind of marketing typically practiced by giant consumer packaged goods companies, retailers, utilities, Hollywood, politicians, etc. With few exceptions, these organizations are the Queen Mary and start-ups are the cigarette boats that run circles around them.

Here are 20 reasons to love start-ups, for starters:

1. Start-ups have no silos–they can’t afford them. This saves you from having to tear them down.

2. Start-ups have more flexibility. There’s fewer people to ask and fewer nods needed for a decision.

3. Start-ups have the David vs. Goliath edge. Everyone roots for the underdog, and wants them to win (except Goliath).

4. Start-up people are aware from day one they’re inventing a company culture and that everyone contributes.

5. In the long run, start-ups that laser focus on one thing and one thing only will beat a major corporation (that “focuses” on 100) every time. This is the basis for virtually ALL acquisitions of start-ups by big companies. (It’s the singular focus that yields valuable people and patents.)

6. Start-up people don’t need passion lessons. They already give a s*** or they wouldn’t be there.

7. Start-ups are not afraid to try something new. In fact, for many start-ups, something new is not only the best path, but it also may be their only reason to exist.

8. Start-ups have a better chance of making news and getting found. Most people expect things that are actually new to come from a new company, not from a monolithic multinational.

9. Start-ups are exciting and fun to work for (unless you’re a slacker).

10. Fast-growth (i.e. successful) start-ups give their people the equivalent of three years’ experience for working one year, and often, the rapid advancement to go with it. This is a great career fast track, especially for those just starting out.

11. Start-ups are more likely to reward people for extra hard work and major contributions. It’s easier for stars to shine and not get lost in the masses, and there’s less concern about protocol or hierarchy when giving rewards.

12. Start-ups are more often focused on continuous improvement, and less likely to become stodgy and shackled by “because we’ve always done it that way” thinking. This also means that the best start-ups foster a learning environment that aspires to be better than their competition’s.

13. Start-ups don’t just assist their customers, they climb down into the foxhole with them and get muddy and feel their pain. They eat the same dirt. This provides a level of customer engagement and intimacy that seldom happens at a giant vendor that forces customers to conform to “their way” of doing business.

14. Start-up people are accustomed to “doing whatever it takes.”

15. Although there are exceptions, start-ups usually appreciate the attention they get via trade media and social media, and don’t allow arrogance to convince them they “deserve” much more.

16. Start-ups are more agile and nimble. They move quicker. This is essential to their survival and also enables them to seize new opportunities faster than the big companies can.

17. Start-ups usually offer environments where people’s creativity is nourished and allowed to develop instead of being squashed.

18. Start-ups understand how to be frugal and make do with less.

19. Start-up people work harder, but they often also have a lot more to show for it as a result.

20. Do I even need to say it? Start-ups are where most actual innovation comes from.

There are lots of reasons to love start-ups. What would you add? What did I miss?

[Based on a post that originally appeared in Steve Parker's Marketing Dissector blog.]

We’ve offered product and company naming as part of our creative services for years. We have named dozens of products, services and companies, mostly in the software, IT and Internet sectors. Often we get asked for how-to advice by clients or prospective clients. While it’s true great names and the inspirations for them can come from anywhere, including some surprising sources, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to count on your name to descend deus-ex-machina from the sky on a silver platter. Uh-uh. You can’t plan for serendipity. Instead, create a purposeful creative process oriented toward reducing the risks of creating and choosing a bad name. And YES–of course you can ask for customer input. But it’s better to poll them to pick a best of three than to crowdsource the process outright, IMHO.

For anyone taking the do-it-yourself approach, here’s my advice:

Since domain names are so important, START there. Check what’s available and integrate the checking realtime into your brainstorming. While cycling through candidate names, sit in front of your screen and check domain availability as you go. This saves you from wasting enormous energy on unavailable names.

Don’t go with a nonsense name or fabricated word–if you can help it. That risks misspelling and SEO problems, and doesn’t usually adequately describe your value prop. The same goes for abbreviations and hyphenated words, unless they are very commonly used. Remember that the only remedy for a weak name is throwing scads of budget at promotion (in whatever form), and even then, sometimes it doesn’t work and often that’s not an option anyway.

Realize that, other than the URL and legal stuff, there are mainly just 4 variables to be concerned with. A name can describe: 1) what you do, 2) how you do it, 3) what the benefit is to the buyer/user, and/or 4) be memorable. Mediocre names only do one of these four. Solid, serviceable names can do two. Killer names do three out of four, but are extremely rare and unusual. I have never heard of any names that can do all four.

I recommend against crowdsourcing for naming, with one important caveat. IF you can actually find a way to survey actual prospects of your product or service, then their input into naming would be very valuable (even if not decisive). If you had 10 of them, it can act like a focus group. But if you’re asking friends/employees/colleagues/vendors, etc., not so much. (As Wisdom of Crowds author Jim Surowiecki notes: in order for it to work well, everyone participating has to agree fairly closely on what question they’re being asked to answer. With politics, or creative processes, getting that agreement is difficult.)

Don’t let morale boosterism spoil your creative process. It’s popular in high tech to run names and logo designs by all the employees as sort of a feel-good “inclusionary” exercise. (Kum-baya!) And it may accomplish that, however it also results in a lot of crappy names and logos–for two reasons: 1) the people involved don’t do creative work for a living (so it’s unusual for them to be any good at it) and 2) they are not the intended audience. Crowdsourcing doesn’t work here because it’s a complex creative process. This is why, if you want to write a better book, you don’t add more authors.

Deal with the trademark, service mark and copyright stuff last. That way you only have to run that gauntlet for the final name you choose rather than for a large set. This saves time and money.

Try to assemble a small group of smart people with diverse interests and talents if you’re going to do a brainstorming. Whatever you do, DO NOT involve any of the following in your naming process (don’t say I didn’t warn you):
• In-laws
• Interns
• Intensely passionate but empty-headed people
• Frequent misspellers
• Former siding or used car salespeople
• Web designers (or anyone concerned primarily with visuals rather than words)
• Hardware engineers (software engineers can be OK–they’re better with abstraction and interpretation)
• Anyone who thinks picking a “nonsense” word will make you the next Google (By the way, the name “Google” is only a nonsense word in part. It was derived from the actual mathematical term “googol.”)
• Employees in groups larger than 100
• Your banker
• Your tax accountant
• Your lawyer (except for the trademark part)
• Your (take a deep, slow breath…) spouse or S.O.

The reason for that last bullet?. If the name winds up being a dud, what’s the only thing that could make matters worse? “Honey, sorry, but that name you came up with sucks and we have to…” Really, just Don’t. Go. There.

Hey, if it all seems just too daunting, there’s always the automated approach. (Good luck, though.)

[Based on a post that originally appeared in Steve Parker's Marketing Dissector blog.]