Friday Link: Business Angels in Scotland
October 28, 2011 Leave a comment
The Entrepreneurial Exchange Blog has some pretty interesting content, including this recent article on Business Angels in Scotland, what they look for and how they work.
Friday Link: Startup credibility – look bigger than you are!
October 21, 2011 1 Comment
There is an interesting collection of blogs on the Andreessen Horowitz website, and this Scott Weiss post on how startups can benefit from Looking Bigger than they actually are particularly caught my eye.
I admire what he managed to achieve this way, but I there are a few cautions that I would add from my own experience…
- Looking big to achieve a clearly defined commercial objective is a valid tactic. Looking good to satisfy the vanity of the founder(s) is a waste of cash.
- For those who have a natural aversion to sales, “the user guide isn’t finished” and “the packaging isn’t glitzy enough” can be a great excuse not to start selling…
- Sometimes looking and behaving like a startup can be an advantage – I find friends and contacts will often do a lot of work to “help a startup get a meeting to find out about the market” where they wouldn’t make as much effort to help a more established company ”sell”
Friday Link: Minimum Viable Co-Founder
October 14, 2011 Leave a comment
I’ve done a Friday Link to the OnStartups blog before but it was more than six months ago and I think it stands repeating. I particularly wanted to link a recent post entitled A Minimally Viable Co-Founder – a great set to criteria for selecting anyone to join a startup and especially a co-founder!
Too many choices? Confused customers don’t buy!
October 11, 2011 Leave a comment
Seeing Red - New cameras are too complicated!
I’ve recently been thinking about getting a new camera, but the large number of choices with unclear differentiation between the options has taken all the joy out of the idea. More importantly, it has caused me to delay buying. Is that what the manufacturer had in mind when creating their product line?
Friday Link: Matt Mireles on the role of a Startup CEO
October 7, 2011 Leave a comment
I love this post entitled “Becoming a CEO; Yeah, I Suck“, which pretty much sets the tone – frank, outspoken and usually not far off the money! There’s some other great content on Mike’s Metamorphosis Blog too – enjoy!
Three Ways Super Models Aid Clear Thinking?
October 4, 2011 Leave a comment
Lego wasn't really the sort of model I had in mind, but my photo library is short on shots of supermodels...
Last week I found myself struggling to write some marketing material. I cleared my mental blockage by taking a step back and looking at my notes from my time at business school. I realised that I was struggling to write copy because I was unsure of the message I wanted to get across. Marketing messages are in turn build on top of STP – Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. I was clear on the segmentation of the market, and who we were targeting, but I couldn’t complete the template positioning statement in my notes. Once I realised what the problem was, I could communicate it to colleagues, and it proved quite easy to solve – the message flowed naturally from the positioning, and the copy almost wrote itself from the message.
I have a “toolkit” consisting of over 100 pages of models (including checklists and templates) that I have built up from experience, reading and crucially from my education during the Saltire Fellowship. I use elements of this toolkit regularly in my work – and I find there are three principle ways in which my collection is useful…
