StartupNorth

Category: Startups

  • Is 1 the Loneliest Number?

    Last week Tim Ferris, of 4 Hour Work Week fame interviewed the guys from Pivotal Labs and learnt the secret of their success – pair programming! It was a very thought provoking piece on how to get stuff done.

    Well here in Canada we have our own super hot mobile dev shop, Xtreme Labs, @xtremelabs, who are absolutely killing it, picking up huge customers like GroupOn. The guys at Xtreme Labs are also infamous amongst the tech scene for being pushers of pair programming.

    Now at Peek, where I’m CTO, we are all “Lonely Hero Programming” all the time. Our “bus count” is precisely 1. If somebody died tomorrow you know what I’d do? I’d hire somebody new!

    The Best Way To Program – By Vinoth Chandar, Some Rights Reserved

    So, being from this totally opposite world to pair programming, I wanted to learn a bit more about why a company would choose pair programming, and I thought I’d start up a friendly dialogue with Farhan Thawar of Xtreme Labs to gather this thoughts.

    Dan: Hey Farhan, how are things? I’d love to hear more about how you guys program at Xtreme. How are you setup?

    Farhan: Our work environment is what I call an Agile Team room. Super low cubes, everyone in one area, with programmers focussed in a particular technology seated close to each other (so iOS devs sit together, Android devs sit together, etc.).

    Dan: I’m going to start right off the bat with some basic math. If I have two people solving one problem versus two people solving two problems, doesn’t that automatically make me less productive? You know 1+1=2? How can I as a lean running startup afford to be half productive???? You guys have to pay your 2x workforce in real cash, right?

    Farhan: So the simple math is misleading, i.e. that 2 programmers working on the same task is less effective. For example, most agile shops typically get 4-5 hours of coding done per day. The rest is spent in email, meetings, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, reading blogs, etc. With pairing, we can focus our folks for 8-9 hours together to get a full days work done. Yes, it’s 8-9 hours / 2 = 4-4.5 hours of coding each, so at a minimum it’s the same hours. However, we have instant robustness (bus count), higher quality (i.e. less hacking), instant knowledge transfer (two people touch every line of code).

    Dan: I am a programming god. I go on tears for 2-4 weeks where I am an absolute machine. Knuth himself would have a hard time keeping up with me as I weave around in my language du jour (i.e. Haskell, gods only program in Haskell.. the language of the heavens). The last thing I need is some assclown developer tethered to my leg slowing me down. How do you handle god coders like me in pair programming?

    Farhan: Lol, badass programmers get better by pairing, just one example: http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/extreme-pair-programming-guy-steele-and.html. The reason is that it’s an intense learning environment, much like apprenticeship in the old days (you apprenticed to learn your trade). There’s no better way to get better and faster at your trade than to work with someone else who is as smart as you are.

    Dan: How does this work if you work on a lot of projects? What if you are doing maintenance on a few projects as well as new dev’t on another project? We have lots of guys who probably touch 2-3 projects on any given day? Do they have to find their pairing buddy for each project every time?

    Farhan: So the key is to not swap projects often. Almost 100% of our pairs are on a single project for the entire week. So week to week things my change (most time they don’t), but our devs are focused just on one project, on one platform. We do have R&D pairs and a Sustained Engineering pair who focus on multiple updates and fixes, but they aren’t dedicated full-time to any project. Folks also don’t find a pair, they are allocated before the week starts. We take tons of feedback on pairings and it’s very easy to see pairs that aren’t working well (they don’t talk much, or one person is driving the whole time)

    Dan: In a debate in my company a great coder I know basically said something like this “don’t most coders do pair whiteboarding/pair designing anyways? By the time it comes to actually coding, isn’t that the trivial part?” Lets pretend this is a law office or consultancy shop, would you pair (i.e. do teamwork) at the strategy phase/problem solving phase or would you pair during the document creation phase?

    Farhan: So the coding isn’t the trivial part, as the end product is based on the code. It’s almost like saying the ingredients and the recipe are the hard part but the cooking is trivial. It’s not (and I know, cause I can’t cook for shit). You want to write code that is elegant, understandable, maintainable, etc. and pairing forces that as two people have to understand what is going on at all times.

    Dan: Have you guys ever tried doing like a race? Put two coders doing 1+1 vs two coders pairing on the same project? Should we try to sponsor this type of event?

    Farhan: Bring it. We’d love this. Don’t forget, ACM programming competitions only use one computer 🙂

    Process Matters

    So here’s my take overall. Process matters. Even for dev teams of 1-3 people selecting the right language, technology, tool chain, and software process make a big difference in productivity and quality. Software engineering has improved by leaps and bounds over the past 5-10 years. Here are some of the best changes:

    • Opensource software and the explosion of re-usable software components
    • Iterations and demos
    • Continuous Integration, build servers and automated test suites
    • Continuous Deployments, i.e. the newer devops movement
    • Explosion of tools & infrastructure in the build, test, deploy area (think of tools like Heroku, Chef, Capistrano, build tools, etc)
    • Test driven development, test automation & significantly improved testing frameworks

    (Sometimes I write in ANSI C on proprietary embedded plaforms, where the tool chain and quantity of re-usable code is a fraction of what I want. You take for granted how much Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, etc have been built up.)

    These days, I rarely come across startups that haven’t adopted most of the above to a certain degree. And pair programming, truthfully its just not widely adopted compared to the list above. To me pair programming seems to be an overkill solution to solve the real programming productivity problem – communication. Engineers are classically trained to solve problems independently (though this is changing at the university level finally). Dr Amol Sarva, CEO at Peek, always mentored me with the following advice on communication, picked up during formal structured problem solving training at McKinsey.

    “Basically there are three stages of any problem where one can communicate and practice team work:

    1. Structuring – during framing of the problem. What are the steps I am going to take to solve this problem? Read the internet, talk to an expert, write quick hacks to test it, etc.

    2. Solving – during solving the problem. “Hey, I did this and this and here are the raw results, interesting, right?”

    3. Synthesis – communication while synthesizing the results of problem solving. “Hey guys, I solved this, here’s how. Code is checked in.”

    Engineers classically wait until synthesis to solve the problem. Which is too late. Others, (e.g. your classic ice-breaking consultant) do too much communication during structuring.”

    Pair programming forces engineers to communicate much earlier on in the problem solving process. Which is good! It also forces them to communicate across the whole problem solving spectrum from structuring to synthesis. Also good! But god it sure feels like an inefficient oversolve to the problem. Managers can bake in communication to their dev process without forcing pair programming in my opinion.

    Having said all that, I am always willing to try something new (good engineering demands experimentation and learning), so we are going to try pairing it up on a project at Peek and see if it works well or not. I’ll report back the results.

    I’d love to hear what others think. Is pair programming the real deal, have you found it to be more efficient in getting your code on? Or do you like to pound it out solo with headphones and your favourite hoodie?

  • What’s the point of following rules?

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur Hiten Shah who’s latest startup is KISSmetrics. Follow him on Twitter @hnshah. This post was originally published June 4, 2011 via his email newsletter Hitenism which you should definitely sign up for!

    By Antony Turner

    When we were kids, rules were used to teach us basic right and wrong; when we got to grade school, we were taught to follow them no matter what. By the time we become adults, playing by the rules is so ingrained in us that we never question why some rules exist, but you should, especially if you’re an entrepreneur.

    Why? Because if you’re an entrepreneur, rules aren’t your friend. Rules are designed to make you blend in, when as an entrepreneur, what you really want to do is stand out from the crowd.

    The sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be. Just ask Richard Branson; he’s been breaking lots of rules and things have turned out well for him over the years (he runs that little company you may have heard of… Virgin). He believes so fiercely in breaking the rules that he thinks you should empower employees to do the same, believing it drives business forward.

    Breaking the rules isn’t about being a trouble-maker, it’s about seeing the world as a series of norms and identifying places where you can disrupt things for the greater good: a better product, a smarter solution, a streamlined process. Flouting the social order can mean innovation, change, and even success.

  • WaveAccounting raises from INKEF Capital

    WaveAccountingOur friends at WaveAccounting announced yesterday that they had raised a $1.5MM seed investment from INKEF Captial. We’re big fans of WaveAccounting, in fact, it’s what we use to manage the receipts and books for StartupNorth. It means that others see the huge potential with this application. And we’re happy that our accounting provider continues to grow and demonstrate traction. I like stability 😉

    Wave also announced the addition of 2 new senior managers: Scott Zandbergen (LinkedIn) formerly of Sage Software and Stephen Dixon (LinkedIn, @sdixonhalloween) formerly of Deloitte & Touche. Looks like to great additions to the senior management team.

    This is the first investment from Peter Carrescia (LinkedIn, @pcarrescia) who is one of the two new Managing Directors at the INKEF Capital fund which is a ~$200MM fund from OMERS and ABP pension funds. This is really interesting for a variety of reasons. It means that INKEF is now capable of actively deploying funds, they have set up the necessary funding vehicles and mechanisms to be live. This is fantastic news. It also means that John Ruffolo (LinkedIn, @ruffoloj) has hired a team and is actively seeking out Canadian deals. This is great news to for entrepreneurs. John and Peter are well respected and very entrepreneur friendly, this is a plus for entrepreneurs. And simply additional growth capital is a good thing.

    Congratulations Kirk, Jame, and the WaveAccounting team.

  • DEMO Innovation tour returns

    Some rights reserved by The DEMO Conference
    AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by The DEMO Conference

    The Demo Innovation is Everywhere tour is coming back to Canada with stops in Toronto & Montreal. The event includes 2 parts, a chance to pitch/present to local VCs (Rogers Ventures) and a social party. Last years event was fantastic.

    We invite you to submit an application for a 30 minute private meeting with the DEMO team and leading Venture capitals in a city near you. We have ten spots available per tour stop. Each company selected will also have the opportunity to address a larger audience at the DEMO Tour party in the evening open to the entire DEMO community of VCs, investors, media and PR professionals.

    Location Date Register
    Vancouver, BC Canada June 23rd, 2011
    Toronto, ON Canada June 28th, 2011

  • Customer Retention: 7 Ideas for Marketers

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in June 9, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

    Photo by Sindy Kids - Some rights reserved
    AttributionShare Alike Some rights reserved by s?ndy°

    As marketers we are often so focused on new customer acquisition that we sometime forget to pay attention to the customers that we already have. That would be a massive mistake.

    It costs 6-7 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. You are 4 times more likely to close business with an existing customer than you are with a new prospect.

    I recently brainstormed with a CEO about programs for their current customers both to improve customer retention as well as to drive new business – here are some of the ideas we came up with:

    1/ Give your Newsletter a Kick in the Pants – We all get too much email. Your newsletter is going to have to kick ass just to get folks to open it, let alone take action. What could you give customers that would be so interesting, awesome or remarkable that they’ll say, “Yippie, the newsletter arrived today!” What works for you will depend on your market but I’ve seen good results with sample code, a customer spotlight feature, sharing industry data your customers don’t have access to, interviews with industry experts and video snippets of product managers or support folks sharing their favorite tips and tricks. I’m sure you could come up with a hundred other ideas. If your newsletter doesn’t feel like hard work to create, you could probably do better.

    2/ Campaign to your Lost Customers – You are twice as likely to close business with a lost customer than you are with a new prospect. With close rates like that, you should be treating these folks like hot leads. Doing win-loss interviews can help you identify patterns around what went wrong in the first place and get clues as to what to offer them to come back.

    3/ Campaign to your Inactive Accounts – These folks are like a loveless marriage – they haven’t divorced you yet but the thrill is gone. Maybe they stopped paying for maintenance during the downturn because of cost-cutting, or needed a feature you didn’t have (or they didn’t know you had), maybe there weren’t enough people signed up at the time to make the service interesting or maybe they were never really “activated” customers in the first place. Similar to a win-loss analysis you’ll want to get on the phone with a bunch of these folks to figure out what the patterns are and how you might get them to, ah, renew their vows with you.

    4/ Get Marketing and Customer Service Talking to Each Other – Only 10% of your unhappy customers will tell you. The others tell their friends. Your communications to your customer base can help keep customers informed and that’s a good reason to get marketing and customer service talking to each other. Marketing can help communicate workarounds for common problems or information about expected fix dates for known issues. And don’t forget to make it easy for people to complain via any of your communications channels (including the marketing ones). The sooner you know, the sooner you can do something about it.

    5/ Expand Inside Accounts – Think about ways to expand your reach inside larger accounts if you sell B2B. I once convinced a big retailer that had done a small deal with us to let us do a free coffee and donuts event in their cafeteria that turned into 2 six-figure deals. Don’t be shy about asking your sponsor inside a large account about how you might start a conversation with other groups.

    6/ Help Customers Promote Themselves – Smaller companies are looking for ways to promote their products and services and drive links back to their own sites. I once had a Fortune 500 CIO agree to do a video testimonial with me mainly because he was a new CIO and wanted to raise his own personal profile for his next job. I always wonder why companies don’t give more awardsto their customers and partners. Everyone loves to get an award no matter who’s giving it out and when they brag about winning the “Excellence in Accounting Software Deployment” award, they’ll likely mention your name too.

    7/ Show Them the Love (at least 20% of them anyway) – A few months ago I signed up for a pre-launch list for a new service.  I was asked to Tweet about it as part of the sign-up, which I did.  After the launch I got a form email thanking me for being a top driver of referrals (plus a t-shirt if I sent them my address). A personal email would have made a MUCH bigger impact on me, and how much time would it have taken? I bet I could write 100 of them in a day. I don’t want a t-shirt (side note–if your customers include women, you might want to re-think the whole t-shirt thing), I want to be thanked like a person and not some a faceless “top referrer.” Your business makes 80% of it’s revenue from 20% of your customers. Quit being so lazy – pick up the phone and pucker up.

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in June 9, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

  • iMessage & The Canadian Impact

    The launch of iMessage was an announcement with pretty significant impact on a few big/hot tech companies in Canada. Kik has obviously built a private messenger service around iPhone, RIM has taken an aggressive stance on promoting BBM, and of course lets not forget all the Canadian telecos.

    Being an investor in Kik and some others impacted by the new iOS announcements, Fred Wilson wrote a brilliant post analyzing the impact. “Expect platform owners to work against you”.

    In fact it was so interesting, that the product manager for RIM’s BBM service re-tweeted it (note that Theban is a good friend).

    ThebanGanesh

    Fred Wilson to devs: Expect platform owners to work against you | Tech News and Analysis http://bit.ly/m42nZC
    12 hours ago

    Which prompted this amusing exchange between him and I.

    dpmorel

    @ThebanGanesh you sir… are an ass… re-tweeting this as a “platform owner”

    ThebanGanesh

    @dpmorel lol – it’s a balancing act. Platforms need to protect themselves from the ‘tragedy of the commons’

    It is a fascinating lens into how RIM thinks of BBM and their own platforms. Despite my “ass” comment, I agree with him. Innovation often comes from the community who build things for the platform. The platform then needs to pull the best ideas back into the mothership – sometimes as an acquisition, sometimes they build it themselves and take on the “incumbent” in the community. This is in theory a good thing. We want the best innovations to be widely adopted. We want private messenger everywhere so we can all stop paying atrocious rates for SMS.

    And those atrocious SMS rates charged by carriers, brings me to my next conversation. A good friend of mine runs messaging at a major Canadian carrier. Him and I have had the debate several times over the past few months on whether or not private messenger is a big threat today and now for them.

    What i mean is that the argument about building SMS over data to drive costs down will go away in a few years as soon as LTE is deployed so ideally I want to invest in a solution I can leverage for more than a couple of years or so…

    Customer experience and scalability are key for me. If I am spending money to improve the customer experience, it has to be open to all subs without having to invite people, therefore is has to scale.

    The problem I have with the kik, textplus and the likes is that they are closed communities of 100,000 in 30 different countries or so and only address their own P2P niche market whereas SMS is an open community of a couple billion compatible devices; no need to register, invite friends, etc… While P2P SMS is plateau’ing in Europe, A2P SMS traffic is growing at a 25% rate yoy. In Canada P2P SMS is still growing at a 20% rate yoy and the A2P side of the business is still non existent.

    P2P = peer 2 peer (i.e. customer to customer), A2P = application 2 peer (i.e. app to customer).

    That list contains some some big, big knocks on ALL private messenger services – iMessage, BBM, Kik, TextPlus, etc. They are closed communities!! Meanwhile, with SMS, I can literally text ANYBODY in the world. Also, private messenger solutions don’t (yet) provide a solution for applications to talk to customers (A2P). And the carriers have a very real solution coming – LTE with better SMS clients on phones. SMS was literally one of the best services ever created – open, standards driven, no registration, etc. Awe-inspiring engineering. And with LTE the carriers will be able to take advantage of the cost savings of routing SMS over data, and they’ll have the biggest community (5b GSM users) and simply the best solution.

    Buuuutttt… its not here yet. And thats what this is all about. Messaging is in transition and there’s an opportunity to own “messages over data”. Richer messages, more social messages, better user experiences, more cost effective for customers, etc. Its a fat, fat bazillion dollar market. And thats why this has happened:

    • Apple launched iMessage, Facetime, etc
    • Facebook bought Beluga
    • Google + GoogleVoice + GoogleChat + Android push notifications
    • RIM doubles down on BBM
    • Venture industry putting big money into potential disruptors like Kik, Textplus, Color, etc

    By the time carriers get LTE out the door with new devices in market, the top end of this market may have already been won to the tune of 200-500 million users.

    There is maybe some good news for Kik out of this announcement. For a startup the biggest problem is almost never a competitor. The biggest problem is typically non-adoption. Nobody knows there is something better than texting available. Nobody knows that Kik exists. Well, Apple & iMessage are about to blow up the “private messenger” space. In an ideal world, as the market grows, Kik goes along with it.

    It’d be amazing if Kik & RIM (or others from up north) could figure out how to own this market. There are huge opportunities still – the A2P problem, the “interconnect” problem, etc. Lets hope they can figure them out and build ginormous services.

  • 2011, The 1 Billion Dollar Year??

    Edit 1 – Techvibe just put together a more comprehensive list than mine – http://www.techvibes.com/blog/techvibes-comprehensive-list-of-canadian-tech-acquisitions-50-and-counting-2011-06-08. It is an even a bigger year than I thought!

    Edit 2 – I have been corrected that the Coradiant acquisition was more likely $100m-$150m. Updated below. Bigger than I thought! Glad to see I was “under-reporting”

    Interesting first 6 months to 2011. Check out this list of exits:

    Radian6 – $326mm
    Coradiant – $100mm (guess – this one has been tougher to size, some searching shows them to be around 100 employees with 10mm revenue?? That Akamai partnership feels pretty strategic though…)
    Pushlife – $25mm
    Tungle – $20mm (guess off of last raise/valuation)
    PostRank – $15mm (consensus guess from asking around)
    CoverItLive – $10mm (big guess)
    tinyHippos – < $1mm (4 employees)
    ———————————-
    About $495mm. Give or take $25mm depending on my math.

    Firstly, this is a perfect example of how VC exit math works and the power of a fundmaker like Radian6.

    But get this, we are exactly 6 months in and almost half way to…. well… July/August/December all kind of suck for doing deals… buuuutttt… maybe… maybe if I utter the amount… people will dream and we could maybe dreamily hit 1 BILLION DOLLARS in returns this year. Wow, 1 BILLION. Thats nine 0’s.

    The Net Value of All Exits for 2011?? (by Adam Crowe, some rights reserved)

    We’d need another big mama ala Radian6, and another 4 $20-$30mm exits. I could hazard a guess at a few companies that could exit for $20mm+ today and now, but the big, big question is, where will the big exit come from?

    Kobo Books (@kobo)

    They just raised $50mm. Not sure about the valuation, but we could size it at say $150mm – $300mm (I’d go higher because they are very young and having a $50mm raise means they have a vertigo inducing growth/revenue curve). And lets not forget the mainstream press chatting about an Apple acquisition. This could be a high 9 figure to billion dollar plus exit if something happens.

    Freshbooks (@freshbooks)

    They state over 2mm users on their home page. Lets say 10% are paying customers and they pay on average $30/month (looking at their pricing plans). 200k * $30/month * 12 months = $72mm in annual revenue. Even at 5% freemium conversion they are at $36mm. Thats a big customer base and a big chunky, sticky subscription revenue base.

    Would love to hear from folks. What other startups do we have hanging about that could do a big exit? Am I missing any of the 2011 exits to date?

  • PostRank acquired by Google

    Ilya has confirmed today that PostRank has been acquired by Google.

    The launch of AideRSS, the precursor to PostRank, was one of the first things we covered here on Startupnorth, so we are happy to see such a great outcome for the team.

    Google acquires Postrank

    We are extremely excited to join Google. We believe there is simply no better company on the web today that both understands the value of the engagement data we have been focusing on, and has the platform and reach to bring its benefits to the untold millions of daily, active Internet users. Stay tuned, we’ll be sure to share details on our progress in the coming months!

    Of course, we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for all the help, feedback, and support we’ve received from our community over the past four years—thank you all, you know who you are, and we truly couldn’t have done it without you!

    Ilya also notes that the team will be moving to Mountain View as part of this acquisition.

  • A Startup Marketing Framework (Version 2)

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 4, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

    Back when I was running my consulting business I published a marketing framework that I used as a tool to explain to startups the types of things that I could help them with.  I thought it would be useful for startup marketing folks as a guide and I think it has been – it continues to be one of the most popular posts on this site.

    Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of smart feedback on the framework and I’m also back to working inside a company again so I thought it would be interesting to revisit the framework.

    Assumptions

    As I explained earlier, this framework doesn’t intend to cover Product Management (thePragmatic Marketing Framework does a good job of that) but rather the intention was to look at it from a purely marketing point of view.  This Framework makes the assumption that you have a product in market, you feel fairly confident that you have a good fit between your market and your offering and you are ready to invest in lead generation. If you aren’t there yet, there is a lot here that you won’t need to (and more importantly, shouldn’t) worry about yet.   Lastly, my background is more Business to Business marketing so like everything else on this site, this has a B2B slant to it.  That said, I think most of it is very applicable to a B2C startup.

    Startup Marketing Framework V22 A Startup Marketing Framework (Version 2)

    Market Knowledge

    Segments – Based on your interaction with early customers, these are the segments that have the most affinity for your offering and are the target of your marketing efforts.  These need to be well defined and very specific.  I’ve had folks ask me where buyer/influencer personas fit and I include those here as part of what you need to understand about your segments.

    Market Needs – From your experience with early customers you will be able to articulate the unmet needs in the market related to your segments (and beyond).

    Key Points of Value – These are the most critical key differentiated points of value that your product offers.  This is not a long list of features but rather small number of key attributes that customers in your segment love about your product.  This is important for startups in particular to understand the real essence of why people buy your solution and it has a big impact on messaging, campaigns, sales strategy, etc.

    Competitive Alternatives – These are the alternative ways that prospects in your segments can attempt to address their needs without your product/service.  These may be competitive offerings, features or pieces of solutions in other spaces or the always fearsome “do nothing”.

    Business Strategy

    Business Model – This describes how the company makes money from the offering.

    Sales Process and Strategy – The sales strategy is how the company will sell the product (including the channels if applicable).  The Sales Process is the detailed step by step process that a prospect goes through on the way to becoming a customer.  It’s important to note that this process starts long before a prospect interacts with a sales person and starts in the information gathering phase.

    Market Strategy – The market strategy is a higher level view of how the company plans to scale in the market from early adopters to a broader market, including the segments to be targeted and in what order. (in Crossing the Chasm, this would be the description of your lead pin and the adjacent pins)

    Partner Strategy – This box is new from the last version of the framework.  I had previously included indirect sales channels in “Sales Strategy” but there are more reasons to partner than just sales (sometimes it’s for marketing purposes, or to provide services for example) and since Marketing is usually responsible for this at a startup I thought it needed to be included.

    Tactics

    Outbound Lead Generation – On the original Framework I simply had one box for “Lead Generation”.  I’m deeply involved in Lead Generation with my current role (something I was less focused on as a consultant) and I started to think that such an important set of tasks deserved to be dissected a bit.  Onbound Lead Generation in this framework is the plan including budgeting and task execution for lead generation tactics that involve “pushing” marketing messages out to an audience.  This includes traditional marketing tactics such as events, advertising, telemarketing and traditional email marketing.

    Inbound Lead Generation – This box is similar to the above box except that it includes that set of tactics that you are running that are focused on attracting prospects to you (rather than pushing messages out to prospects).  This includes blogging, social media marketing, content marketing, and organic search tactics.

    Retention and Engagement – The plan and budget for tactics aimed at retaining existing customers (really important for SaaS offerings) and engaging existing customers both for retention but also for improving customer satisfaction, cross-selling and up-selling.

    Visibility – This is the bucket for all tactics related to ensuring that non-users of the product can observe that others are using it.  This includes product features that encourage people invite their friends or display to a person’s network some facet of using the product, referral incentives, website badges, shareable content, reviews and awards, customer testimonials and success marketing, etc. (I talk about this in Startup Marketing 101)

    Content

    Messaging – This includes the company messaging, product value proposition, company and offering stories, responses to common questions, objection handling and reassurances for perceived risks.

    Marketing Content – In the original version of the Framework, I had a single box called “Content Strategy”. I believe that the importance of content is growing to the extent that I think this deserves more attention. Marketing Content should still be planned out in a content strategy that will lay out what content will get created and for which purposes.  This will include blogs, video, podcasts, whitepapers and ebooks, research and data analysis, press releases, shared presentations, and anything else that is informative and helpful to prospects.

    Customer Content – This is a new box I added that is specifically focused on building a plan for content for customers (as opposed to prospects).  The purpose of this content is customer retention and engagement (and it’s not an accident that this box sits next to that one in the Framework).  Again, for SaaS type businesses, I believe that retention is increasingly important and marketing should be putting more energy and effort into “marketing” to their existing customer base.

    Media/Influencer Outreach – Actions, programs and tactics related to working with reporters, analysts, writers, bloggers and other influencers.

    Optimization & Market Learning

    Funnel Optimization – The ongoing process of tracking and analyzing each stage of the sales funnel with the goal of making incremental improvements. (I did a post on some B2B metrics that I track to look at funnel)

    Results Tracking – This was ROI Tracking in the last version but I broadened it out to Results Tracking.  Obviously for each item of marketing spend, tracking the return on that investment with the goal of doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t is still something every startup marketer needs to do but there are other metrics that you will be tracking as well that aren’t necessarily “ROI” numbers per se so I broadened this one.

    Customer Learning – The ongoing process of meeting with customers and testing the assumptions you have about their needs, environment, information sources and influencers, competitive alternatives, market trends, etc., capturing that information and feeding it back to the rest of the organization.

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur and marketing executive April Dunford who is currently the head of Enterprise Market Strategy for Huawei. April specializes in brining new products to market including messaging, positioning, market strategy, go-to-market planning and lead generation. She is one of the leading B2B/enterprise marketers in the world and we’re really lucky to be able to share here content with you. Follow her on Twitter @aprildunford or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in January 4, 2011 on RocketWatcher.com.

  • GrowLab & FounderFuel Launch

    The Blues Brothers Car
    Attribution Some rights reserved by Stig Nygaard

    Jake: Here’s the plan: we put the band back together, do some gigs, earn some bread, bang! We’ll have 5,000 bucks in no time.

    Seems like I’ve been talking a lot about incubators, accelerators, catalysts, spark plugs, igniters and other programs designed to engage, educate and enable early-stage, emerging technology entrepreneurs. In the past 7 days, we’ve now seen the launch of new incubator/accelerator programs in both Vancouver and Montreal. The are 2 new programs both focused on bringing together the best talent, access to mentors, capital and networks beyond what many founders are capable of doing on their own. (Full disclosure: I am a mentor for FounderFuel).

    Vancouver » GrowLab

    GrowLabGrowLab has risen out of the ashes of BootupLabs. It includes a spectacular founding team that includes a group of people many of whom I call a friend, and even more importantly they are a group I deeply respect. The group includes:

    The deadline to apply to the GrowLab program is June 15, 2011. Accepted startups and founders spend 3 months in Vancouver and 1 month in San Francisco with an intense mentorship program. The program also includes office space in both cities plus up to $25,000 in seed funding.

    Montreal » FounderFuel

    FounderFuelThe FounderFuel is a new accelerator program with support from the team who started Montreal Startup and Real Ventures. It is a accelerator program that has been seeded with Cdn$2MM and has put together a great mentorship group that includes 85 entrepreneurs, executives, VCs, angels (and me). Ian Jeffery is the General Manager and the Partner at Real Ventures responsible for making FounderFuel work. I first encountered Ian as a competitor to his startup TinyPictures (I was running product at Ambient Vector/Nakama back in 2006). Ian successfully raised a big chunk of money and then proceeded to execute and eventually sell Radar to Shutterfly. I agreed to be a mentor just to personally ensure I get access to the team of mentors. It is ridiculous! The list includes >84 phenomenal leaders, executives, investors, entrepreneurs and people from Montreal and around the world. A sample of the awesome mentors (sorry for every I am leaving out):

    The deadline to apply to FounderFuel is July 1, 2011. Instead of a 4 month program, the FounderFuel program is “12 intense weeks”. It is also a cohort based program that provides $10,000/startup + $5,000/founder in exchange for 6% equity. The program provide access to mentors, office space in Notman House, and access to a culture and ecosystem that has bred success in the past.

    One Observation

    My one observation about both of these programs is that Debbie Landa was the only female listed. It is a really difficult and sad state. There are great number of female tech founders and leaders in Canada. I am disappointed not to see:

    These programs need to do better on encouraging diversity and actively seeking out different viewpoints. The good news is that it is easily rectified.

    Consider Applying

    The deadlines for GrowLab and FounderFuel are approaching quickly. If you are interested in what hopefully is a world-class incubator/accelerator program you should definitely give careful consideration to these.