StartupNorth

Tag: aprildunford

  • Early bird pricing for StartupFest

    TL;DR

    Early bird pricing for tickets to International Startup Festival end on June 1, 2013.

    CC-BY-SA-20 Some rights reserved by Michael Lewkowitz

    We can all gripe about why founders and startups should not attend events, and they should get down to figuring out  if there is quantified market demand for their product.

    But lets face it, summer feels like it is here in Toronto (it’s hot). And we all need to blow off some steam. So why not take some 2-3 days and connect in Montreal (or Vancouver more on that soon). Startup Festival early bird tickets sales end tomorrow (June 1, 2013). There is an amazing lineup full of local, national and international recognizable talent. Come to Montreal. Be prepared to listen to amazing stories from real founders and investors about how they figured out traction for their companies.

    Folks I’m looking forward to hearing stories from:

    Dulcie MaddenDulcie Madden

    Co-founder of Rest Devices, Inc.

    Joe_ChernovJoe Chernov

    VP Marketing at Kinvey

    Fred DestinFred Destin

    Early Stage VC at Atlas Venture

    Jen van der Meer picJen van der Meer

    Advisor, Luminary Labs

    Michael BaumMichael Baum

    Founder of Splunk, Venture Partner at Rembrandt Venture Partners

    The part that I look forward to the most, is the part where I hang out with folks from Toronto (and beyond) because we’re all too busy with companies, family and kids. So I get to hang out with my friends Zak Homuth , Mark MacLeod , April Dunford , Harley Finkelstein , Ben Yoskovitz, Roger Chabra , Andrew D’Souza , Brydon Gilliss
    and Ken Seto .

    I’m going for the opportunity to learn from other people’s experiences. I’m going to connect with folks I’d otherwise have to travel to multiple places to connect with. And probably most importantly, I’m looking forward to strengthening the connections I have with folks I already know.

    Register Now

     

    Image attribution: AttributionShare Alike Some rights reserved by Michael Lewkowitz

     

  • We want you! – Looking for contributors

    Finish Line, CopperDog 150, Calumet, Michigan by Lina Blair (linainyoop) on 500px.com
    Finish Line, CopperDog 150, Calumet, Michigan by Lina Blair

    I was talking to April Dunford . It’s was a private message, so I am hoping April will forgive me for sharing, but it indicated how Jonas , Jevon and I have felt about our role and the role of StartupNorth.

    “We’re all making this shit up on our own when we should be sharing best practices.” April Dunford

    We can talk about how Toronto is broken, as long as “this is not a complaints department, but a solutions playground” (great quote from Mark Kuznicki at the first TransitCamp in 2007). When we started StartupNorth in 2007 because there were not a lot of people talking about high potential growth, emerging technology companies and emerging business models (if it is easier, you can think venture backable technology startups). There was a lot of great technology companies being built in Canada. We wanted an easier way to bring together people who were interested in the new companies and the ecosystem to support them.

    “We launched TechStars NYC with the goal of enriching the New York City entrepreneurial ecosystem; tapping into the rich resources and energy of NYC and galvanizing the community through mentorship.” David Tisch

    We launched StartupNorth in 2007 after 2 years of a completely unorganized effort (that supposes that this effort approximates organized vs the anarchy that it is) of hosting events like BarCampToronto, DemoCamp, a public Skype chat, and a Google Group. We didn’t have a fund. This wasn’t our full time jobs. We’ve never thought of StartupNorth as a high potential growth technology business. We thought of it as a way to help other entrepreneurs like ourselves. We tried to build what we thought was missing.

    • Funding in Canada
    • Getting access to foreign markets
    • The amazing talent in Toronto and across Canada
    • Events that bring together others interested in the same space to enable collisions (finding cofounders, hiring employees, business relationships, potential mentors, etc.)
    • Events like StartupEmpire, DemoCamp and StartupCamp

    We are contributors to both the solutions and the problems that exist. But that doesn’t mean we can’t contribute.

    We are Canadian entrepreneurs.

    Back in 2008, Jevon told us about “how startups will save venture capital in Canada“. You can look at the recent acquisitions (including Jevon’s GoInstant) are providing liquidity and bigger better investment opportunity. (OMERS Ventures has participated in rounds totalling >$112MM in the past 2 weeks alone: $80MM Desire2Learn, $20MM Vision Critical, $12MM Hopper Travel). Canadian entrepreneurs

    We want you!

    We are looking for new contributors to StartupNorth. We don’t want puff pieces. We don’t want press releases. We want to highlight Canadian startups, founders and technology. We want interesting stories. Let me help all y’all, launching is not an interesting story. I’d like to see posts on:

    • Cost effective solutions to common back office problems, tell us about how your financials, payroll, A/R works.
    • Look at the Upverter Under-the-Hood article and tell me about your infrastructure, personally I’d love to hear about Hopper’s Hadoop or Wave Accounting, etc.
    • Marketing automation and optimizing customer engagements. What tools are you using?
    • We’ve heard about Facebook’s Growth Team and their decision making, what about Freshbooks? Or Dayforce?
    • The impact that CRTC and Competition Bureau rules have on Canadian startups? I’d love to get Michael Garrity to tell the Community Lend/FinanceIT story. But there are more.
    • Examples of effective use of Facebook, mobile or other early customer marketing

    This list is no way comprehensive. There are lots of interesting stories. Got an insight, tip, cobbling together of tools that can help startups save money, grow faster, go further. We want to share. As April said, “We’re all making this shit up on our own when we should be sharing best practices.” and we want to help share.

    Just send me an email (davidcrow at gmail ) with a draft of your post. I will read, provide initial feedback, socialize with Jonas and Jevon and then we will set up an posting schedule.

     

  • 7 Ways To Rock a Startup Accelerator Mentor Day

    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  or RocketWatcher.com. This post was originally published in August 31, 2012 on RocketWatcher.com.

    I spent the day yesterday at FounderFuel for their Mentor Day. If you aren’t familiar with FounderFuel they are a very successful startup accelerator based in Montreal. And what a day it was – 8 startups pitched and then did roundtable breakout sessions with over 50 mentors including VC’s, angel investors, entrepreneurs and senior executives. Here’s my mentor’s perspective on how a startup can really get the most out of a day like that:

    1/ Pick your Target Mentors Ahead of Time: 50 mentors is a lot and they represented a wide cross section of folks that have deep experience in different consumer and business markets, and have a range of skills from technical expertise to sales, marketing, finance, and legal experience. Selecting a subset of the mentors with experience relevant to your business will help you target your discussions.A handful of the teams that needed marketing help reached out to me by email before the day and that helped to make sure that we connected at the session which I thought was pretty smart.

    7 Ways Rock a Startup Accelerator Mentor Day2/ Ask for Feedback on your Pitch: The mentors are both experienced pitch artists, and listen to pitches a lot. What better folks to give feedback on what worked and what didn’t work with the pitch you just gave? In this case the companies are all still in the early stages of the accelerator program so it’s a great time to get feedback that will improve the ultimate pitch you give on demo day. The feedback will also give you a feel for the differences in what an Angel investor might be looking for over what the more traditional VC’s are looking for in a pitch. “Tell me one thing that would have made my pitch better” or “What was missing from my pitch?” would both be great ways to start that discussion.

    3/ Ask for Specific Help: The mentors are ready and willing to help but they can’t guess what you need. Coming with a set of specific requests helps shape the discussion in a way that is most helpful to you. Don’t be afraid to ask for specific introductions – even if the folks in the room don’t have the answers you need, chances are they know someone who does.

    4/ Listen, Ask Questions (and Filter later): – The mentors yesterday came from really different backgrounds and had worked in a broad range of industries (consumer, gaming, retail, enterprise, financial services). Sure we’re all smart folks but you wouldn’t believe how different our opinons were about questions the startups were asking. For example, at my session with Openera – a tool for automatically organizing files and attachments –  we got into a discussion about selling to consumers versus enterprises as a starting point. I ALWAYS tilt toward enterprises when people ask me that because I know/love enterprise sales. The mentor beside me, Yona Shtern, the CEO from Beyond the Rack on the other hand thought selling B2C (or B2C2B) was just fine. Only Openera can decide who’s got smarter advice for their business (yeah OK, in this case it’s probably the smarty-pants Beyond the Rack guy but hey you get what I’m trying to say here). Another example – in the discussion with InfoActive (a very cool tool that lets you easily create beautiful interactive data visualizations), I immediately saw the applicability to creating interactive marketing materials. I’m a marketer, that’s the obvious use case for someone like me.  The mentor beside me (James Duncan, CTO at Inktank) on the other hand saw the value in selling to IT departments that needed a way to easily create good looking dashboards to help IT communicate to the business side of the house. That’s a great use case that a marketing person like me would be unlikely to immediately think of. Both ideas might be worth investigating but only InfoActive can really decide that. Avoiding “mentor whiplash”, as the FounderFuel gang refers to it, is a critical skill for startups in accelerators that have deep rosters of active mentors. Remember too that time is limited so you don’t want to waste it having a long debate with a single mentor over a specific point. Listen, probe a bit if you need to, and then move on. You can always schedule follow-on time with a specific mentor to explore an idea later.

    5/ Take Notes:  You put a couple of CEO’s a VC, a senior exec and a CTO at a table together and guess what happens? We talk. A lot. Not only that but the conversation moves very quickly from one point of view to the next. Some teams were recording the sessions but the room was loud (did I mention we talk a lot?) and figuring out who said what later might be a challenge by voice alone. Having someone taking notes is a good idea to make sure that you’re capturing ideas as they are flowing.

    6/ Work the Edge Time: By far the best way to get 1 on 1 time with a mentor yesterday was to do it over the break or over lunch. That also gives the mentor a chance to ask questions they might not get a chance to in a round table session.

    7/ Don’t Forget Everyone’s a Potential Investor : The VC’s are easy to spot (and there were a lot of them there) but most of the mentors I talked to are also doing a bit of angel investing as well. For companies at this stage anyone that’s willing to invest time with your company might also be likely to invest cash as well.

    So there’s my advice. I’m sure the other mentors all have different opinions – yep, we’re funny that way.

  • Pre-Launch Marketing for Stealthy Startups

    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 3, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

    CC BY-NC-SA Some rights reserved by Stuck in Customs
    AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved by Stuck in Customs

    Some products and services don’t have a pre-launch phase.  For companies where building a minimum viable product isn’t a months-long effort, it makes sense to just launch a beta and then start talking about it.  For other companies however, the product might take a bit longer to develop and talking about it before it’s been released in some form could be pointless (because you don’t have a call to action yet), risky (competitors position against you or customers get confused because there aren’t enough details) or both.

    One of the techniques that I’ve used in the past is to engage with the market by talking about the business problem that your product or service is going to solve, without getting into exactly how you plan on solving it.  At IBM we sometimes referred to this as “market preparation”.

    For larger companies this often entails spending a lot of time (and money) with industry analysts and industry leaders sharing your company’s unique point of view on the market and why it is currently being under-served.  If you do this properly you’ll come to a point where your point of view starts to align well with that of the influential folks you’ve been working with.  By the time you launch, these folks will be standing behind you saying that your view of the market is one customers should consider.

    Pre-launch startups generally don’t have the time, clout or cash to change the way Gartner Group thinks about a market but that shouldn’t stop you from taking your message out directly to the market you care about.  There’s never been a better time for startups to get the message out.  Here are some considerations:

    1. Create a clear message about your market point of view – you will need to create a set of messages that clearly illustrate what the unmet need is the in market and why that need has not been met by existing players.  You can go so far as to talk about the characteristics of the needed solution (without getting into the gorey details of exactly how you plan to solve it).
    2. Develop case studies that illustrate the pain you will be solving – Gather a set of real examples of customers you have worked with that have the problem and clearly illustrate the need for a new type of solution on the market.
    3. Spread the word – Launch a blog, write guest posts for other blogs, comment on relevant blog posts,  write articles, write an e-book, speak at conferences and events, open a Twitter account and start sharing information that illustrates your point of view.  There’s no end of ways to get your message out there.  Do your homework and find out where your market hangs out.  What forums do they participate in?  What blogs and newsletters do they read?  Get your message in front of them in the places where they already are.
    4. Engage and gather feedback – Starting a dialog with your potential customers about how you see the market gives you a chance to test your messages and see what resonates and what doesn’t.  You’ve made a set of assumptions (backed up by customer research hopefully), the more folks in the market you can talk to the more you can fine-tune your market story.
    5. Capture where you can – If it makes sense you can start capturing a list of potential beta customers or a mailing list that you can use when you launch.

    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 3, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

  • 7 Startup Customer Discovery Questions

    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 April 26, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

    Some rights reserved. Photo by dullhunk
    AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved by dullhunk

    Folks at startups have different levels of experience when it comes to working with customers.  At the early stages when you are identifying the problem to solve, the key features of the solution and the customer segments that are the right fit for the solution, you’re spending a lot of time with customers trying to tease out as much information as you can.  Last week I was asked by a new founder what types of questions he should be asking in these meetings.  Here are a few suggestions:

    1. What does your typical day look like? – This one is especially useful at the earliest stages when you are still trying to get a deep understanding of the space, the customers and what the key pain points are for those customers.
    2. If you could change anything at all, what would it be? – This is a good one to get at the most pressing problem that a person is experiencing with a particular task or process.
    3. What is the biggest pain you have today? – This will have to be framed within the context of the broader space you are looking at of course. The key with this question is to probe around the characteristics of the pain.  Why is it painful? What is the measure of that pain (time, effort, etc.)?
    4. How are you solving this problem today? – Again, try to ask a lot of open-ended questions around this one too.  When was the solution implemented?  Why was it done like that? Who made the decision?
    5. What is this problem costing you? (lost revenue, lost customers, increased service costs, etc.)? – This is your first indication of how the customer might measure ROI no a solution in this space.
    6. Who would you expect to solve this problem? – I like this one because it tells me a bit about how a customer would define the solution in terms of market space and also starts telling me something about channels.  For example, in a recent set of interviews I did the customers said they would expect their phone carrier to deliver the solution to the problem (vs. getting it directly from a software provider) or they would expect to get it from a local VAR.  In another set of interviews I did for a different product the answers were IBM, Oracle and Microsoft – with clearly a different set of expectations around that for service, price, etc.
    7. Who else has this problem? – This might be different groups in an enterprise or different groups of consumers.  It’s an interesting question to ask to see what else the customer is seeing in the space.

    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 April 26, 2010 on RocketWatcher.com.

  • 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.