Build Real Partnerships as a Startup

January 21, 2016/in Life at an Accelerator, Starting a Business, Startup Tools, Startups/by StartupYard

Building real partnerships with the right companies is something we emphasize in the StartupYard program. But what is a “real partnership” are all about? Many startups aren’t too sure.

Partnerships and “Partnerships”

A startup in our 2016 cohort approached me this week, with a simple-sounding problem. Could they prioritize a meeting over StartupYard mentoring sessions, if the person couldn’t meet at a time when mentors weren’t here?

Yes, they could if it is was really important. But what was the meeting about?

The meeting was about a potential “partnership,” with the CEO of a company that provided a key piece of technology that this startup was going to need. This was not a huge company, which is why the founders got a meeting with the CEO. But it wasn’t a startup either.

What did they want to get out of the meeting?

“Well, we’re hoping that he will be willing to let us use it for free or for a discount.”

And why would he do that?

“Because we’re a startup.”

Partnerships in Name Only

In a way, startups have become trained to expect this kind of thing from bigger companies. They assume that companies are willing to sponsor them just because they’re a startup, and they’re not always wrong. Many of StartupYard’s partners do give an amazing value in services to startups for free.

But those are our partners. While we have real, and thriving partnerships with some of these companies, this is not because we get free stuff. It’s because our organizations share complementary goals. In this case, it’s getting early access to the best startups in Central Europe, and helping them grow (us as investors, our partners as future providers of a paid service).

But this level of partnership, which looks more like sponsorship than a real relationship between equals, is probably not what many smaller corporates and other startups have in mind when they agree to meet a startup.

Based in Mutual Interest

It’s very easy to agree to partnerships that don’t require a lot of work or follow through. So it’s tempting to do this whenever possible. Many partnerships boil down to two companies putting their logos on each other’s websites.

This happens because in the course of exploring a partnership, one or both of these companies comes to realize that they don’t share a real mutual interest.

This is why it’s so important to pursue partnerships in the same way you pursue your sales goals. Partnerships are a part of your sales strategy.

Partners should have the same sorts of customers you have, but not be directly competing with your offering. Ideally, your partnerships should make the offering of both companies stronger, so that a customer who uses one, gets even more value from using the other.

At the core, a business partnership is about both sides developing their indirect sales channels, sharing, and better serving your mutual clients. It is a force multiplier for sales, because in a true partnership, much of the sales activities that the two companies undertake support the sales funnels of both companies.

This finds its most pure form in online affiliate partnerships, which is essentially an “automated partnership.” But that is only one form of partnership. You can base your partnership on sharing know-how and technology, but ultimately a partnership that lasts is one that makes the two companies interdependent, and stronger as a result, and that means both companies having a stake in the same pool of clients.

What A Company Needs to Be a Good Partner

Again, agreeing to a partnership is relatively easy in theory. It doesn’t take all that much. But in order to be a good partner, a company needs to have a team (or at least one person), dedicated to building and maintaining partnerships.

SendGrid, a StartupYard partner, is a great example of this. Instead of sponsoring accelerators and events directly, they have a dedicated innovation team that travels around the world, meeting with and advising startups and accelerators on issues involving transactional and marketing email infrastructure.

Every company they meet with gets at least a year’s worth of service with SendGrid for free, which is an enormous value for startups. And for StartupYard, it’s of great value to have a skilled and knowledgeable mentor team visit and do a workshop with our startups too. That builds the value of the accelerator and gives our startups a greater chance of success down the road. Meanwhile, SendGrid gets access to potential clients who could be worth thousands of Euros a month in a few short years. Win, Win, WIn.

Companies that have strong partnership programs also know what to look for from startups, which isn’t always just another client. They may be interested in sharing data, or even investing in certain kinds of companies.

A good partnership manager bridges a gap between sales and marketing, and has the pull necessary to bring your company to the attention of executives, even as a prelude to an acquisition, or sharing clients. They aren’t incentivized the way a salesperson is, so they’re more flexible about what they’re willing to bring to the table- it’s not about the bottom line for that person, which frees them up to explore other ways of seeking mutual benefit.

Preparing For a Partnership

One of the key mistakes that startups make when they approach partners, aside from the “gimme gimme” attitude described above, is by trying to “sell” them. A partner isn’t necessarily a customer, and you can’t approach them in the same way. You have to sell them on the mutual benefit of working together, and on your ability to do that; not on your ability to sell your product to their clients.

A good partner in indirect sales offers a few things. One is added value for shared clients, and another is defense against competitors. If you can make a partner’s offering to its clients stronger than its competitors, and if your partners (and competitors) know this, they will be willing to work hard to keep you as a partner, rather than see you support someone else’s sales pipeline.

So when you meet with partners, you need to ask questions. What do your customers need that you can’t provide? Why do customers choose competitors over you? What would make more of your clients stay with you? These can all open up opportunities for you to partner with that company, and those opportunities will be based on what that company needs, not only on what you need from them.

Why You Fail at Engaging Users Pre-Launch

January 19, 2016/in Marketing, Starting a Business, Startups/by StartupYard

The 9 startups in our 2016 cohort are in varying stages of development. Some have paying customers and a working product, while others are still defining their core product, and go to market strategy. Gaining users, and engaging users, sometimes feels like a distant goal. But it starts right away.

One thing all the companies need, now that they’re meeting with investors, mentors, and potential partners, is, at minimum, a landing page giving a sense of the company and product, and prompting visitors to get in touch.

The art of the “Coming Attraction” landing page is not new ground in startupland. You’ve probably signed up for one or two such newsletters yourself, if the concept was interesting enough. Companies at StartupYard with really compelling products can get thousands of signups for a beta launch or a preview of the product. Gjirafa, a Startup from our 2014 cohort, for example, collected upwards of 1,000 email addresses in one week.

But it’s not enough just to collect email addresses. Eventually you’re going to want something from these people. How do you lay the groundwork for that?

Asked-For Emails Get Read

There’s a world of difference between a pre-launch newsletter and a standard marketing campaign. For starters, users only get a welcome email when they do something- such as sign up for your newsletter or request access to a beta product. This email is specifically asked for. This means that right off the bat, welcome emails get opened much more often than other campaign emails you might send, and get read much more closely.

When I was working as an email marketer, sending millions of campaign emails a month, we would hope for a 3% open rate, and perhaps a 0.3% click through rate. Those are good numbers if you can get them, on that scale (0.3% of 1 million is 3000 potential customers).

With a welcome email though, you can get much higher response rates. According to SilverPop’s 2015 Marketing Metrics Benchmark study, which tracked “transactional emails,” (those emails delivered in response to user actions), transactional emails have a median open rate of over 17%, with a median 1.4% click through rate, with data collected from more than 750 companies in 40 countries.

That’s across all transactional emails sent from those companies. When it comes to a well-crafted introductory email, activated by a user signing up for your pre-launch mailing list, the higher performers can get up to 40% or higher open rates, and 10% or higher CTR. Those numbers add up fast when you’re working with thousands, or even just a few hundred users.

Asked For Emails Engage Customers

Getting your emails read is one thing. But it’s not worth much if you can’t identify your most engaged customers, and get them excited about your product offering or content.

I like to tell our startups to view essentially all communication with customers as some form of transaction. In a transaction, you have to give something, and ask for something back.

Many startups will simply send out a confirmation email, and ask their customers to tell their friends about the company on social media. But why would a user do this? What has the user received from the pre-launch startup, to inspire such kind generosity?

Perhaps the users who are rooting for the company to succeed, because they love the idea, will share it with their friends. But that won’t be the typical user. The typical user is focused on him or herself. What’s in this for me? Why waste my time and reputation on Facebook or Twitter for you?

Having already made your ask to the user, you will have spoiled a good opportunity to give that user something they really value- something that is relevant to them, and helpful to them. You will have lost an opportunity to inspire good will, and make sure that same customer will come back when your product or service is ready.

Engaging Users

I wrote last week about the “we problem” for startups. This is what happens when a startup forgets that their customers care much less than they do about what kind of company the startup is or wants to be; their ideals, their purpose, and their core beliefs.

Customers care primarily about themselves. What will this company do for me? What does this company think of me? So your first pre-launch email communication with a user should be focused on that user. It should offer them something they potentially value.

Content

An obvious starting point for engaging users pre-launch is with content. Create or find content that is helpful to users who have the problem that your product is meant to solve. This will get the users thinking about the problem, and it will position you as the company that understands it, and knows how to solve it for them.

Content can be about the problem, designed to get the user angry or annoyed about the problem, and excited for the coming solution. Or the content can be about the user themselves: giving them advice on how to deal with the problem for now, or prepare for when the product is ready. You can also market “around” your product, and tell your customers about other products that compliment your own, and get them more interested in the market you’re in.

“Content,” is not synonymous with blog posts either, though these work with a certain type of user. It can mean something more broad, such as a video, a survey, or a quiz, or even a contest. Anything that brings value to the user, and is worth their time, can be good content for engagement.

Prestige

Something else that engages early-adopters is status. The opportunity to be first to try something, or be the first to react to something new, is a big turn-on for a particular subset of users (ie: early adopters). If you offer users an opportunity to give feedback on your product, and show those users that they have had an impact, you’ll have a much easier time selling to them later on, and they’re much more likely to view you as a company who really cares about them.

Beta users and testers are highly engaged, and likely to become ambassadors for your brand, if they are treated with respect, and offered exclusive benefits.

You don’t have to have a beta-version of your product in order to do this. Simply asking every user to provide specific feedback can yield interesting results. And, as a bonus, if you address the first email that every user gets from the CEO him or herself, you’ll build goodwill with users right away, and show them that you are engaged with them on a personal level.

A Personal Touch

I advocate for startups to be as informal and accessible as they can with their customers, particularly in the B2C sphere. You may be the CEO of a company, but that doesn’t mean anything if you haven’t signed a single customer yet. So don’t act like it does.

Startups should never, I repeat never use “no-reply” emails when sending out their first notes to customers. I also personally detest info@ addresses for the same reason. Ditto for on-site message forms. Your email address is not precious classified information. Share it with your users to build trust. Deal with any spam as the price of doing business.

The address you send from should be one with prestige, such as the CEO or CTO. And if time and volume allows, those people should also personally correspond with any replies they receive. The way you treat people before you’re successful tells them everything they need to know about how you will act when you are successful. So don’t be above talking to your customers directly.

On a personal note here, during the last round of interviews for this 2016 cohort, I asked each company how they had heard about us, and decided to join us at StartupYard. 3 out of the final 9 companies told me that they had decided to join us because when they had emailed us requesting information, Cedric Maloux, our managing director, had personally responded to the message. That’s a relationship you can’t buy. It has to be earned.

Staying on the Radar

Many startups fail at engaging their pre-launch users only because they’re afraid of alienating them by “spamming” them. But someone who signs up for a pre-launch newsletter is already much, much more engaged with your product than the typical user ever will be. The threshold for annoyance from such a user is much higher.

Just think of yourself as a restaurant. The user that signs up for your pre-launch newsletter is the guy who knocks on the door 30 minutes before you open. If you disappear into the back until the exact opening time, that user might leave, or they might wait. But if you come to the door and say: “hey, I’m so glad you’re here. Just give us a few minutes, and then we’ll seat you early,” that customer is likely to be very grateful and understanding if you aren’t 100% ready to serve them right away. At least they feel cared for and special.

It is more often a lack of sufficient communication that will cause you to fall off a future user’s radar, than the fact that you’re sending too many emails. Sending regular updates, which contain real value for the users (and are not just about your team and your company), will ensure that those who are really interested in you will keep tabs, and those who would lose interest anyway will unsubscribe themselves.

The “We” Problem

January 11, 2016/in Marketing, Starting a Business, Startup Tools, Startups/by StartupYard

As we welcome our 2016 startups this week, I get to do one of the scarier and more rewarding parts of my job at StartupYard, and that’s helping these companies define themselves, their products, and their customers.

When startups are getting ready to launch, they tend to be very focused on “what type of company” they want to be. That’s normal, and healthy. And it feeds into their ideas about what their “brand” should be, and how they should express that.

And here is where many startups stumble at the beginning. They don’t fully appreciate who their messaging is really for (clue: it isn’t for them), and what it’s really supposed to accomplish.

Where Brands Come From

The word “brand,” comes from the 19th century American practice of burning a rancher’s insignia in the hide of a cow, or other livestock, before moving the livestock to a marketplace. This was done to discourage theft from the ranch, or during the drive season. The word comes from the Norse brandr, which means “to burn.”

The practice of maker’s marks and watermarks goes back thousands of years, all the way to at least the invention of currency in ancient Sumer. In all cases, the practice originated from a need to protect against fraud. A maker, manufacturer, or publisher had to find ways of making sure that customers knew the difference between their products, and fakes.

As the industrial revolution peaked at the end of the 19th century, it became common for manufacturers to “brand” all their products, usually on the packaging, to distinguish them from forgers or look-alike products, which were increasingly common, and threatened profits. It was then that the concept of a “trademark,” and the exclusive right to use a specific brand were introduced into the legal system.

In essence then, brands proliferated as a means of consumer protection. And in fact, that has not fundamentally changed. Brands are still, at the core, about helping people to make safe, fair buying decisions, and protecting them from fraud and danger.

Brands Are About Trust

It wasn’t long of course, before entrepreneurs realized that consumers recognized quality products by brand. And so they began to focus on the way their brands looked, and felt, to customers.

Manufacturers also rightly recognized that a trusted brand could convince people to buy new things from the same manufacturer. If you trust a company to make your radio, you’ll probably trust them to make your television as well. Sprawling conglomerations like General Electric and Samsung were compiled, based largely on this new realization.

Brands have become synonymous with design, with philosophy and politics, and with class, race and economic status. Today, people make statements with their brand choices. This can lead startups to forget that the chief aim of having a brand is not just building recognition, or fitting into a particular culture. It is about maintaining a level of trust with customers, that will follow them from one product to the next, or one year to the next.

The “We” Problem

Today, of course, we’re all very well aware of the effect that brands have on our thinking and behavior. We’re probably too aware of it. We’re told now that everything is a brand, and that every person can be a brand. This can get us off-track when it comes to communicating clearly with customers.

I recently worked with a startup that wanted to launch a new product, under a completely new brand. They needed help putting together their messaging, and writing copy for their homepage and other marketing materials.

At this point, when a company has a good product, knows its customers well, and wants to dive into the business of growth, is often where they stumble on what I began calling the “‘we’ problem.”

Simply, most of the copy they had written, and most of the messaging they were focusing on, was about them. To them, they were expressing the qualities of their brand. They were smart, they were hard working, they were trustworthy, they were friendly. So why shouldn’t customers want to buy from them?

Well, because customers buy solutions to their own problems. They don’t buy the work of your team, or the relationship you have with the product. Those things can be a plus, but they’re secondary to a buying decision.

The central questions you have to answer are these: Does the product do what I need? Am I the target audience for this?

If the problem is that you’re thirsty, then Coke has you covered in this classic poster.

People make their initial decisions based on that criteria, not on whether you communicate your attitude or your culture clearly.

Whenever I’m looking at copy for a homepage, I do a little experiment: I do a word search for the words “we,” and “us.” Then I compare that to words like “you,” and “our customers.” If you say “we” more than you say “you,” then you may have a messaging problem.

Startupyard.com, for example, contains 9 mentions of “we,” but 40 mentions of “you.” Also, several of the “we” mentions are directly followed by “you.” In addition, none of the “we” mentions are descriptive. They are active: “we’re looking for,” and “we try to.”

Most of the copy is concerned with either what kind of startup should join the accelerator, or what a startup will get by joining. These are the only two core criteria that matter in a decision to apply. “Does it do what I want?” And, “is it for me?”

Although it isn’t a rule that you can’t talk about yourself, you have to remain aware that to a prospect customer, how you see yourself is not that important. How you see them, how you value them, and what problems you will help them solve, are important.

Solve Problems, Make Emotional Use Cases

This is why we spend the first several weeks at StartupYard closely focused on one thing: the problem that the startup is solving for customers.

We work on positioning statements, which lead with who the customer is, and the problem being solved, and that is what initial conversations with mentors are all about. This helps the teams to stop talking about themselves, and start talking about their customers.

This also helps our startups to focus on emotional use cases. What frustrates customers? What aggravates them? What scares them? What brings them happiness? Saying “we have state of the art encryption,” is an unemotional argument. But saying: “Our state of the art encryption will protect you against hackers,” is a powerful motivator.

When Apple released the first edition of the iPod, it was famously “1000 songs in your pocket,” not “the next generation MP3 player, that can hold up to 4 GB.” This focus on the emotional use case: the feeling a customer gets from the promise of the product, is what makes Apple a powerhouse brand. It’s never about how smart they are, it’s about the experience you will get.

If you think your brand is about you, then you’re likely to focus on use cases that aren’t emotional for users, like efficiency, or price, or sophistication. In effect, you’re likely to make a feature argument, instead of a real value proposition.

It’s important to keep in mind what we talked about in the beginning. The primary purpose of a brand is to serve customers; to protect them from fraud and danger, by establishing a clear sign of quality. Only then can you leverage a brand to be something symbolic.

And that sign of quality can’t be forged. It has to be earned by solving customer’s problems- by offering them something they can clearly understand and want, and by delivering exactly what you’re offering.

The StartupYard Startup Reading List

January 6, 2016/in Financing, Marketing, Starting a Business, Startup Tools, Startups/by StartupYard

If you follow us on Twitter, you probably know that StartupYard is constantly sharing great content with our followers. Internally, we also keep a “reading list” of items we think our startups should read before, during, or after the program. This is the StartupYard Startup Reading List.

With a new acceleration round beginning next week, we thought we’d share the list we’ve compiled. It’s organized into Collections, Launch, Sales and Conversions, Retention, Growth, Marketing, and Free Stuff.

Under each item is a short extract from the link. If an extract wasn’t available, we added a short summary. Enjoy!

-The StartupYard Team

Collections:

http://startupstash.com/

40 categories of curated tools and tips for Startups. A must have.

http://marketingstack.io/

28 categories of curated Marketing advice and tips. A must have.

Launch

Quick and Dirty Guide to Launching your Startup in 2015

There are plenty of blogs out there that talk about paid advertising, social media, offline distribution, content marketing, SEO, SEM, e-mail marketing and so on. But I will be focusing on actionable items you can do to get your first 1,000 users in a weekend’s time and with less than $500 of investment.

16 Startup Metrics

We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company. Sometimes, however, the metrics may not be the best gauge of what’s actually happening in the business, or people may use different definitions of the same metric in a way that makes it hard to understand the health of the business.

The apps that help you bootstrap | Highfive

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a business idea today, and have that business up and running tomorrow? With today’s apps it’s totally doable.

Sales And Conversions

Complete SAAS Guide to Calculating and Optimizing Lifetime Value

Getting new customers is good. Keeping a customer and getting them to continue paying is better.

Conversion Optimization Psychology

Why are contrasting buttons effective? Why should you use 1st person CTA wording?Why (and when) are trust symbols effective?

Conversion Rate Optimization: Startup Growth Lessons

Some call it – *cough* – growth hacking. Others call it optimization. But what we’re all talking about, really, is crazy smart, innovative, results-driven, product-focused marketing that has an outsized impact on your company’s growth and bottom line.

Retention

Hooked Retention

How GrowthHackers(.com) Uses “The Hook Model” to Foster Incredibly High Member Retention

Why You Need Cohorts to Improve Your Retention

You need to dig deeper into your app using a method called cohort analysis. That’s how you’ll identify how well your users are being retained and the primary factors that will drive growth for your app. Here’s how the most experienced and analytical product people like Siqi go beyond your standard cohort analysis to do it.

Growth is Good, but Retention is Forever: 500 Startups VIDEO

A video from 500 Startups on Retention, and why it is eventually more important than growth.

Growth

The Ultimate GrowthHacking SourceBook

30,000 words of modern-day growth hacking strategies for the discerning SaaS growth hacker.

SaaS Metrics 2.0 – A Guide to Measuring and Improving what Matters

This article is a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and optimize a SaaS business. It is a completely updated rewrite of an older post.

43 lessons growing from $0 to $1+ million in revenue, twice

I realized the other day that we’ve grown from $0 to $1 million with two separate products (HelloSign and HelloFax). This happened a long time ago, but I was recently reflecting on the lessons.

Growth Hacking: VIDEO, Neil Patel

Pierre Lechelle: Growth Hacking Strategy

When thinking about Growth, most people think about CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) on the ToFu (Top of the Funnel). They don’t really understand what is the power of Growth.

How segment models growth for two sided marketplaces

Frameworks help us organize and understand the world, and data helps us stay focused and monitor progress. So, it’s no surprise we use them both to help us project future growth and figure out how to hit our lofty goals.

Build a Growth Machine Like Andy Johns

Andy Johns has had the good sense to ride not one, but FOUR rocket ships. He has been a key member of the growth team at…

13 Growth Hacking Techniques You Can Apply Right Now

Growth hacking is the idea that an entrepreneur can take a clever non-traditional approach to increase the growth rate and adoption of his or her product by ‘hacking’ something together specifically for growth purposes. Most startups find themselves facing the same problem: they build a product that no one ends up using. Say you have…

Video: 10 Habits of High-Growth Startups by Sean Ellis – GrowthHackers

Sean’s talk at the DEMO Traction Conference.

The Ultimate List of B2B Growth Hacks

Marketing

How We Addressed our Main Content Marketing Pain by Outsourcing to Freelancers

Today I’d like to share with you one of the biggest marketing struggles we experienced at Ivalua, the previous company I worked for and where I handled Marketing for over 2 years: content creation – and how we overcame it leveraging freelance writers.

Why You Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
The most popular digital marketing mantra in recent years has been “Content is King”, and while the mantra itself may be a touch overused, it is by no means inaccurate. Now more than ever it’s incredibly important to create a content marketing strategy and make it your your own unique content marketing strategy if you hope to drive traffic and boost brand awareness from online channels.

Persuasive Writing Techniques
Design, SEO, and advertising can only get you so far. If you want to accelerate sales online, you need persuasive copy. According to Harvard Business professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of our purchase decision occurs in the subconscious mind. Most marketers ignore how our brains work and fight against human psychology.

SEO Tools

153 succint reviews of SEO tools, by Brian Dean

Paddle: App Marketing Ebook

Paddle’s guide to app marketing explores the techniques developers can adopt to drive more downloads and grow their apps.

The science behind killer landing pages

A great list of the essential elements of a landing page, and why certain types of things work for conversion.

ViperChill’s Private Niche Project

A fascinating, if amoral, view of online marketing and networking building

What Startups Need to Know About Content Marketing

With content marketing, you can educate and engage potential clients while differentiating your company and positioning it as an industry leader.

The definitive guide to lead generation Facebook ads

In marketing, lead generation is the generation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a business. For the purpose of this article, lead generation refers to the generation of consumer interest. A list of qualified leads is a priceless asset for your company. It’s cheap to build and works great for every kind of business, including “boring” B2B companies.

CopyWriting Tips

Which words do you choose?
How do you frame the offer?
How can you sell without appearing sleazy?

5 Smart Ways To Use Retargeting To Drive Leads In B2B Marketing

Creative ways to use retargeting ads to improve lead generation. Learn how B2B marketers target site visitors based on funnel stage, industry and email contact information.

How to Win Trust from Google and Rank Well

If your website isn’t trusted by Google, you’re basically consigned to the lowly, deep dark depths of search results pages ten and onwards.

A simple SEO guide in 2015 (Infographic)

Is SEO really a harder game to play as KunoCreative’s Dan Stasiewski put it in this excellent SEO guide infographic?

Investment

A map and List of Investors in Europe

TechStars created a map and list of 300+ investors who routinely invest in Seed, Series A or Series B rounds raised by European startups. All in all, it totals about €15 billion worth of funds.

Amy Guttman: Don’t write business plans: Advice for startups from one of silicon valley’s top seed investors

1. Don’t write business plans; instead build prototypes & test them with customers.

2. Don’t create five-year revenue projections; create 12-month expense projections.

3. Do create marketing plans, but focus on unit economics and metrics/analytics of:

a. what customers cost to acquire,

b. what products cost to build/deliver,

c. how much customers generate in revenue and when

4. Test and iterate on your assumptions — turn your business plan into a business metrics dashboard of KPIs, and continue to measure and improve every week.

5. Don’t run out of cash. Check your monthly burn rate, cash in the bank; figure out your remaining runway and try not to get below six months of cash.

The Guide to Finding an Angel Investment

This guide is indispensable for all wanna-be Business Angels and those entrepreneurs seeking Angel Investment! It contains best practices and practical tips culled from Busi- ness Angels around the world. It is a must-ready, easy-to-read, and great-read for all those private investors interested in playing a major role in the early-stage investment eco- system and those entrepreneurs interested in attracting Business Angel Investment.”

– Candace Johnson, President, EBAN (Europe)

Horror Story: How to Build a Unicorn From Scratch and Walk

A cautionary tale about keeping your priorities in order as a startup founder. Great read!

Social Media

15 New Social Media Templates to Save You Even More Time

Our best list of social media templates for scheduling, organizing, analyzing, and sharing better and faster than ever before.

80 Twitter Tools for Almost Everything

Twitter is chaos, but in the midst of this beautiful mess is a ton of data that if you can understand

What You Need to Know About Open Graph Meta Tags for Total Facebook and Twitter Mastery

Marketers create a lot of content. Yes, content is king, but a king is powerless without followers. So, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you want to reach a broader audience with your awesome new post?

Facebook Data Study Insights

The Facebook pages that are doing wonderfully well with likes, shares, and comments on their posts have so much to teach about new tactics and worthwhile strategies. Our friends at BuzzSumo analyzed 500 million (!) of these Facebook posts, and we’ve learned some amazing takeaways that you can implement on your page today.

Free Stuff

The Design Freebies List
Free Stock photos

A collection of sites that offer with-attribution, or free to use images for your startup. Always check the terms on individual sites before using an image!

https://blog.bufferapp.com/free-image-sources-list

https://www.pexels.com/

Meta-Search for GNU Public and Free Stock Images

StartupYard Invites 9 Startups for 2016 Accelerator

December 16, 2015/in Startups, StartupYard News/by StartupYard

We’re very pleased to announce that after an intensive screening process that whittled the over 300 applications to StartupYard 2016’s open call down to only 19 Startup Day participants, we have now selected and invited 9 startups to join us for the 2016 accelerator program.

19 teams attended Startup Day, a two day event in which the startups pitched, and met with a group of mentors, and the StartupYard team. They also heard from Mergim Cahani, CEO and Co-Founder of one of StartupYard’s major successes, Kosovo’s Albanian language search platform Gjirafa. Mergim spoke about Gjirafa’s recent successes, explosive growth, and the role of StartupYard in his success, both during and after acceleration.

A Diverse Group

As we noted recently, this year gave us the most geographically diverse group of applicants we have ever had. Among the finalists at Startup Day were entrepreneurs from The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, India, the UK, Bulgaria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Russia, and Romania. Among the 9 teams selected for StartupYard 2016, are Czech, Swiss, Polish, Bulgarian, and UK teams.

There are surprises and unexpected outcomes every year in the StartupYard selection process. This year is no exception. No less than 3 travel startups will join us at Node5 for 3 months of acceleration- an outcome we could not have predicted, but a testament to how much technology is now disrupting travel around the world. We will also welcome our first health startup, our first sharing economy startup, and our first “neural networks” focused team. Also for the first time, we have accepted two teams focused on exciting new advertising technology.

How We Select Teams For StartupYard

Mergim Cahani, Founder and CEO of Gjirafa, spoke to Startups about the StartupYard experience

19 finalists joined us at Node5 last week, in a marathon session involving pitching, individual meetings, and conversations with the StartupYard team, investors, and a select group of mentors.

As always, each member of the selection committee had their own views on each startup, and each had their favorites, but the final decision to invite each of the 9 companies we have selected was arrived at by consensus. We believe in every one of these companies, and their potential to succeed globally.

As we’ve said frequently, both to our applicants and to the mentors who participate in our selection process, StartupYard is not a contest, and there are no losers at Startup Day. Each of the applicants impressed us and managed to convince us in different ways. Most of the applicants have the potential, and the ambition, to raise successful companies that have a positive impact on many people.

So when we decide not to accelerate a particular company, that isn’t necessarily because we don’t believe they can succeed. We often think that they can and will.

But we have to also consider whether a startups wants to be, and can be, the kind of company that will be a smart investment for StartupYard, in terms of time, money, and energy from our team, our mentors, and our investors. We only succeed when our startups grow and expand globally, so no matter how interesting a team and their idea is, it has to have the ambition to be that kind of globally scalable company.

There is nothing wrong with companies that want to be influential and disruptive on the local level. But these companies would benefit less from our help, and would be pushed in a direction that they don’t necessarily want to go. We can’t be the main drivers of ambition for a startup, so that vision of the future has to come built in.

Names to be Released in February

As in previous rounds, StartupYard will release the names, web pages, and descriptions of each of our 2016 Startups sometime in February of 2016. While several of these companies have products on the market, and some are already generating revenue, we don’t discuss startups until they have had a month of intense mentoring in our program, and they are thoroughly ready to talk about their future plans.

By then, we’ll be ready to roll out detailed interviews with each company, and an in-depth look at each of their future plans. Stay Tuned!

6 Tips For Finalists at StartupYard

December 9, 2015/in Startup Tools, Startups, StartupYard News/by StartupYard

This week, StartupYard will welcome about 20 finalists for up to 10 positions in our 2016 cohort. They’ll spend a full day meeting with the StartupYard team, and a select group of mentors and investors from the StartupYard community.

This isn’t a competition, and it isn’t a job interview. We aren’t typical investors, and we aren’t employers either. We have a special relationship with all of our startups, and we have to make decisions quickly, but carefully.

So what are we looking for in our final finalists? Ultimately, we are looking for the smartest investments for StartupYard. That means teams that not only impress us with their vision and ambition, but that also offer us an opportunity to make as big as an impact as possible, so that their successes will be our successes too.

Today, we’ll share a few pieces of advice that we’ve come up with over the last few years, on how to navigate this process for the best result:

1. It’s Okay to Say “I Don’t Know.”

As we wrote about yesterday, being a credible leader doesn’t mean you have to have all the answers. If you do have all the answers, there’s a fair chance that some of your answers may not be the best ones possible.

Better that you should be able to say “I don’t know,” when faced with something you haven’t had the time or resources to address yet. Part of being a high growth company is not being able to predict every little thing you’ll have to do along the way. You can show you’re prepared, but you will never be able to convincingly show that you’ve figured out every step. If you had, you wouldn’t be talking to us anyway.

2. Acknowledge Challenges You Face

On a few occasions (thankfully never at StartupYard), I have had the displeasure of witnessing really poor mentoring and feedback on startup pitches.

The worst, and most useless kind of feedback goes like this:

“Well, I worked with a company that tried that, and it didn’t work. So, I don’t know. You’ve got a lot of challenges ahead.”

Duh. This can hardly be called feedback. But sadly, as a startuper, you’re going to hear it a lot.

There are going to be inherent challenges in your near and long term future. That’s a given. But it’s important to recognize, especially when talking to an investor or a mentor, the difference between useless feedback like that, and more serious questions:

“What are you going to do about x competitor?” Or, “Why would people would pay for this?”

A lot of founders get so used to being bludgeoned by stupid feedback, that they start to ignore legitimate concerns instead of acknowledging them. They’ll give bogus answers like “we are smarter than the competition,” rather than talking specifically about how they’re going to challenge a competitor. Or they’ll say: “we are going to work really hard to sell this,” instead of really answering the question, which is not about how hard they’ll work, but about what strategy they will use, and what opportunity they see in the market.

The fact that you have challenges ahead shouldn’t be news to anyone. But how you face those challenges says everything about how you’ll fare against them. You won’t overcome these challenges because of who you are, or how much you want to. You’ll overcome them by thinking about them, so start doing that first.

If you can show you understand what the challenges are, you will have a much easier time convincing us you can solve them.

3. Demonstrate Ambition

Arrogance is certainly a problem for many entrepreneurs, but it can be just as easy to make humility into a vice.

What we’ve found over the years, particularly with startups in Central Europe, is that they can be surprisingly shy about sharing their long-term, “big vision” ideas, because they are afraid that they will appear either stupid, or foolishly ambitious.

It’s not fun to listen to someone who can’t stop talking about their big vision and focus on the details, but it’s important that we do understand what your ambitions really are. What kind of company do you ultimately want to have? What position do you want to be in, in 5 years? It’s really ok for these ambitions to seem somewhat unrealistic. Again, if they were realistic at this moment, you wouldn’t need our help at all.

So don’t think we’ll laugh at you for wanting to be a worldwide leader- if that’s what you really want.

4 Talk Yourself Up

We just got done saying that you shouldn’t be shy about your ambition. You also shouldn’t be shy about your accomplishments.

Last year, as we were working on the Demo Day pitch for one of our startups, the founder was having trouble with what he wanted to say about the team. He couldn’t come up with a convincing argument for why they were the right people to solve a complicated problem on the market.

As it turned out, and as the founder had never shared with us previously, he just happened to have previously worked for companies who needed to calculate orbits and fuel usage for satellites in Earth orbit- he helped those satellites in the sky.

So, in other words, he was a rocket scientist.

And he was someone who was having trouble articulating why it was that he was qualified to take on complicated problems.

I don’t think many reasonable people would think he was being arrogant for mentioning that qualification to investors. But I’ve been consistently surprised by startup founders who do fail to mention important details about themselves and their qualifications.

That’s admirable, that these people choose let their work speak for itself, but if you’ve earned a little bit of respect for what you’ve done in the past, by all means, use it!

5. Ask Questions

This process is not just about us picking favorites. It’s also about you deciding what’s best for your company, and your own future. We don’t know what you don’t know, and since we assume we’re dealing with pretty smart people , we don’t always tell you everything you might want to know.

So ask us. And judge us on our answers. That’s only fair. Our reputation has to be built on our transparency and honesty with startups. If we don’t have that, we don’t have much.

6. Don’t Sell: We Aren’t your Customers

This advice goes back what we said yesterday about “trying too hard.” You have to acknowledge challenges, and talk yourself up, but if you aren’t careful, doing all those things at once can put you right into “salesman mode.”

Pretty soon you’re “acknowledging challenges,” before they’re even brought up, and talking yourself up when you don’t really need to. Your ability to sell is important, but we aren’t your customers.

The unvarnished truth, or at least something closer to the unvarnished truth, is important to investors in making the right decisions- not just for them, but also for you. As I often tell startups: you can sell anybody something they don’t need or want, but only once. After that, you’ll never be able to sell to them again. But if you find the right “customer,” or the right investor, you can develop a lasting relationship.

So don’t treat us like a customer. We aren’t buying anything.

What It’s Like to Interview 40 Startups in 2 days

December 8, 2015/in Startups, StartupYard News/by StartupYard

StartupYard’s open call for 2016 has attracted more applications than we’ve ever received before. More importantly, it has attracted more high quality applications than we have ever seen.

And that makes our job both exciting and difficult. As has been our pledge since the beginning, we’re going to try to be as transparent as possible about what this process is like for us, and how we can possibly hope to decide on only 7-10 startups out of a pool of over 300 applicants.

It’s Really, Really, All About the Team

We say this so much, but I don’t think startups ever really believe us. I like to put it this way. Imagine StartupYard had a grading system for Startups. Now imagine that 70% of that grade was the team, and 30% of that grade was the product, with just 75% would be a “passing” grade. We would want a team that was scored at 75%.

While we don’t actually judge startups this way (how do you exactly grade a product or a team?) We do try to think this way. If a team really blows us away with their ambition, their poise, their market knowledge, and their confidence in what they’re doing, then we can overlook serious reservations about the product they’re working on.

At the same time, a team that raises a lot of question marks can potentially blow us away with a killer idea- although that pretty much never happens. We don’t look at product demos or pitch decks, so even when we’re hearing about the idea, we’re really hearing about the team; about the team’s ability to draw us into their ideas and keep our attention and imaginations going along for the ride.

It’s Not a Pitch, It’s a Conversation

When we talk with our shortlist of founders who make it to the semi-final round of the StartupYard selection process, we give them only 3 minutes to pitch their startup, and 12 minutes to answer questions. We don’t allow them any visual aids (other than their own faces and hands), and we don’t look at any charts or figures they might try to get us to read.

Several teams were surprised, and asked us why they couldn’t give a “pitch,” the way that startups have been trained to imagine them. Their charts and graphics were very important to making their point.

Except, they really aren’t. Pitch decks are great for talking to a huge audience with a range of interests, who may or may not know what you’re talking about half the time. And slide-decks are great if you need someone to quickly understand what you do.

But when you really need to get to know people, and if you want to work with them every day for 3 months, then these things are at best distractions. At worst, they push the conversation down a rabbit hole of irrelevant details.

Most of what’s in a pitch deck isn’t real, particularly at an early stage. It’s aspirational. three quarters of startups who applied to StartupYard this year are not even incorporated, so revenue projections for 2 years aren’t based in any reality. But that’s only one part of what we need to know about teams. Aspiration is important, but perspiration is also vital. We need to know what teams have actually done, what they actually know, and what they are actually working on.

Trying Too Hard

One of the hardest things about this process is that people come attached to ideas.

Ideas by themselves can be attractive or not, and people can be charming and interesting, or not. But evaluating a startup forces us to evaluate a person in the context of an idea, and an idea in the context of a person.

This is why we do interviews. On paper, an idea can be deeply inspiring and exciting. Or it can be deathly boring and played out. But the person attached to an idea is the one who will bring life to it, so that person has to fit the idea well. And figuring out how a person fits with an idea, much less how that person and their idea fit in with us, is a scary thing to have to do.

We are not only deciding whether we believe in people and their ideas. We have to also somehow decide whether we are going to be able to help them. The last thing we want to do is to take a startup, and be a blocker to its success by wasting its time and energy. Our definition of success is one thing- but for many companies, that definition is unrealistic.

We get many notes following rejection letters, asking for feedback: “what did I do wrong?” “What could I have done to succeed?” These are in many ways the wrong questions to be asking. Not joining an accelerator is the right outcome for a team that is not going to benefit from being here. We don’t want to be tricked. We want applicants to show us who they are, and give their best effort, but not be who we want them to be, just to get in.

We also get notes saying: “we’ll try harder next year.” I can’t disparage those people. They have the right attitude. But at the same time, we have to be looking for people who aren’t trying too hard, to be the kinds of people we want to work with. Ultimately, they have to be themselves, and play to their own strengths, or they won’t be able to grow professionally, or as a company.

We often meet with startup founders who we believe are perfectly capable of being successful, but who should not be running global startups. These entrepreneurs play to their weaknesses by trying to overextend themselves, and their ideas. But that is what they think they should be doing, because so much of the startup culture is focused on the rare exceptional people who can play at an international level. Most never will, and not because they aren’t trying hard enough.

Trying often seems to get in the way of doing. Trying harder can be an excuse for not changing something you don’t want to change, either about the idea, or about yourself.

For example, we meet startup founders, many of them young, but some who aren’t, who want to compete in global markets that they clearly don’t understand well. Often we don’t even have to know much about those markets ourselves to know that they don’t either. We have to rely on instincts, and a spidey sense for bullshit. We have to listen for red-flags in a pitch: “nobody else in this market does this,” or “we have no real competitors in that.”

These are the kinds of projects that can sound really good on paper, because the founders have spent time building a case for why the business will work. But they haven’t spent time really challenging their own assumptions, so when they’re faced with questions they can’t answer, they tend to try and change the subject, or just plead ignorance. These kinds of founders end up sounding like an actor who has lost his script- something very polished and rehearsed quickly turns into an uncomfortable squirm-fest (for us as well).

It’s not that their ideas are bad either– sometimes founders come to use with great ideas that they just aren’t ready to execute. We also meet founders who just don’t have the skills they will need to do what they want. These startups often reveal themselves in their choice of project, and how they talk about it: “we found an easier way to do this,” or “nobody ever combined X and Y before… so that’s what we’re doing.”

These startups are often looking for someone to save them from themselves. They’ll say they want help “figuring out” what to do next, but in reality, they’re looking for someone to tell them what to do. As an accelerator, our job is to point startups in the right direction, not push them over the line.

And I don’t think this happens because people are lying to us. I very rarely get the sense that applicants are being basically dishonest. More often, they’re being dishonest with themselves. They may be engaging in wishful thinking and hand waving about the challenges they face, or or maybe they’ve been too lazy or in denial to do their research. Whatever it is, one of the most common failings that a startup demonstrates during our interview process is that they have ignored their own doubts, and so haven’t really been able to overcome them constructively.

Leadership: If and Wow

“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too; “

from If–, by Rudyard Kipling

Cedric Maloux, our Managing director, put this to me very succinctly this week. He said: “There is a very big difference between ‘if’ and ‘wow.’”

It seemed that interviews tended to end one of two ways. Either we would hang up with the candidate and say: “if he’s right, then this is a pretty good idea,” or “if the team can do this, then they can definitely be successful,” or, we would hang up and simply say: “Wow.”

The “wow” teams didn’t leave many questions for us about their abilities, their market knowledge, or their passion. The “if” teams gave us reasons to doubt them in at least one of those areas.

Most companies have their own “ifs.” That’s not a failing, but we go into every interview hoping for a “wow” team. And what that usually comes down to is a sense of strong, clear leadership.

The above couplet is from a legendary poem by Rudyard Kipling about leadership. The poem has enjoyed a lasting impact in schools, and among people who talk about great leaders and visionaries. You have probably encountered it before somewhere.

Its ideas have also been thoroughly absorbed into the modern Startup culture. One often hears words very similar to these when Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk, or some other figure is under discussion.

We hear it all the time: “I know myself, and I know I can be a success. I don’t doubt myself.” But founders can easily confuse doubting oneself, and refusing to listen to the doubts of anyone else. If you aren’t a strong leader, you may try to seem strong by refusing to be dissuaded by doubters.

But the second line of the couplet is possibly among the most under-appreciated in literary history. Doubts, Kipling points out, are an important part of leadership. If you can’t engage with and answer doubts, then you can’t lead. People don’t believe in leaders who don’t allow themselves to be questioned, and the strongest leaders listen carefully to input, and make hard decisions to change direction when that input is convincing.

So these “wow” teams are really the ones where the doubts have been, and are being considered and worked on. These are teams led by founders who are aware of what they can do, what they will need to do, and what it will take to do it. In short, startups led by real, natural leaders.

And, not coincidentally, that’s the kind of team we can also help the most, because they will let us help them.

Can Central European Startups Compete?

December 4, 2015/in Starting a Business, Startups/by StartupYard

The following was set to appear in a Czech business publication, but was, possibly to our credit, deemed a little too controversial. Thus we’re publishing it here, because we do stand by what we’ve said.

2 years ago, StartupYard set out to answer a single, vital question. Can Central European, and especially Czech startups compete on the global market? After validating the concept of an internet accelerator for 2 years in the Czech Republic, mostly focusing on local startups, we set out in late 2013 to turn StartupYard into a platform for Czech and other Central European startups to go global. Here are the answers we’ve found so far:

Global Vs. International

To answer this question, first, it’s important to understand the distinction between a “global company” and an international one. Many Czech companies are, by necessity, international. Czech tech companies typically rely on clients and customers from abroad, often Germany, the UK, and the US, who can count on Czech agencies, developers, and manufacturers who are reliable, high quality, and above all, cost effective.

But being the cheap alternative to the local workforce for comparatively rich markets does not make Czech companies global in scale, nor in ambition.

Instead, a global company is one that provides an innovative product or service, with the potential to disrupt the way all sorts of things are done, regardless of geography. A global company is one that has no borders, and that does not rely on its primary location as its main competitive advantage.

The Curse of Cheap

What we saw straight away as we turned StartupYard into an accelerator for global projects, was that the Czech tech ecosystem was addicted to “cheap.”

Today’s Czech software houses and digital agencies came of age when the costs of development, even for relatively simple products, were significantly higher abroad than they are today. Even now, these companies keep their international edge by keeping salaries low.

But this pattern of subservience to the bottom line has become a trap for the Czech ecosystem. By continually restricting itself to the low-cost alternative model, the ecosystem has encouraged some of the best and most ambitious innovators and engineers to flee to markets where investors have more appetite for risk. Czech startupers who are serious about global growth tell each other to leave the Czech Republic, and seek opportunity elsewhere.

Global is The Future

Czech entrepreneurs have been slow to enter the global market because of some obvious practical and structural barriers. Access to capital, and the ambition to match that access, has been limited by the size of the Czech market. It’s now easier for an American company to launch in Europe than for a European company to launch on the American market. That is owing not only to an imbalance in access to capital, but also to the historical fragmentation of the European market.

Language is another barrier , and the maturity of Czech business practices and the educational system have been another. Czechoslovakia’s long separation from world markets kept this country’s golden hands from important new ways of working for decades.

But today, these barriers are eroding. The Czechs are catching up, as the European economies integrate, and Czechs have several important advantages, not least a strong public education system, a smart and hardworking employment base, and a strong technical infrastructure. Today, as an example, the Czech Republic has faster average internet speeds than the UK and the US, ranked 9th internationally by Akamai Technologies.

No More Excuses

Wannabe Czech entrepreneurs are addicted to excuses, rather than to positive action. And we hear every excuse in the book. “Investors here are too conservative, there’s no capital,” or “we have no Czech role models,” or “we’re not good at storytelling and marketing,” and “we’re just a small country after all… this isn’t Silicon Valley.”

Identifying problems isn’t solving them. And we could dispute every excuse there is.

Two StartupYard investors alone, Credo Ventures and Rockaway Capital, have 10s of millions of Euros to invest in Czech startups, and they are constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. In our mentor group alone, we have a dozen angels actively looking for smart investments, and willing to invest early on.

And we have dozens of entrepreneurial role models, like Roman Stanek, Tomas Cupr, Michal Illich, and many others who are actively seeking to support Czech startups. The problem, more often than not, is that the startups just don’t reach out, and aim too low to begin with, assuming they won’t be of interest to these figures.

If small countries can’t make big waves in the international tech economy, then someone should inform Estonia, which has given the world Skype, and Transferwise, and is little more than a tenth the size of the Czech Republic. Estonia has turned its tiny size to an advantage by being globally minded for over 25 years. Czechs have no legitimate excuses for not doing the same.

I’m from “Silicon Valley,” which is not a real place in the sense that many Czech entrepreneurs imagine. I was born and raised just south of San Francisco, and I can tell you there is nothing special in the water there; no magical advantage that startups gain when they land at San Francisco Airport. Nor are most of the people there particularly entrepreneurial by nature.

People used to take buses to LA to “become movie stars.” Now it seems they think they can take a flight to San Francisco to become tech billionaires. But it just doesn’t work that way.

San Francisco arose from a gold rush which never really ended, but has constantly changed its focus for nearly two centuries, from gold, to silicon, to smartphones, and now to ideas.

Silicon Valley is a state of mind. It is just full of people who have strong views about the future, and refuse to see limits to their ambitions. Going there won’t change who you are. You can set your personal goals higher, no matter where you live.

Storytelling

The global marketplace has its own demands, and presents new challenges to Czech startups. Chief among them, is the importance of soft skills that Czechs have not yet emphasized sufficiently. The Czech Republic severely lags Germany, Estonia, and all of Scandinavia in English proficiency, and the vital (for a startup) skills of storytelling and brand building are de-emphasized in a business culture that is all about the bottom line, or about technical innovation over customer focus.

Telling stories, the act of constructing a convincing narrative for success that a customer, an investor, an employee, or a partner can engage with and which can inform and inspire people about your company and your products, is a precious and vital skill among startups.

If Czech entrepreneurs face these challenges head on, they will find that they can win investments, gain customers, and attract talent anywhere in the world. Silicon Valley may be where a lot of startups live, but it isn’t where they all come from, and it isn’t where they will ultimately win customers, and make money.

The Czech Republic has produced generations of ingenious builders, who already have the skills to create some of the world’s best tech products. It must now produce a new generation of ambitious, thoughtful communicators in order to sell those products to a wider audience. Czech startups have to stop doing what comes naturally: they have to stop focusing on being builders for hire, and start focusing on building their own future, with their own customers, and their own stories.

Signs of Success

The Czechs, it seems, are in a constant state of crisis of confidence. But one wonders why that is. The Czech Republic is the only country in Europe that has developed a viable competitor to the global search giant, Google, in Seznam.cz, and it hosts two of the world’s leading computer security companies, Avast and AVG. AVG became the first Czech company to IPO on the Nasdaq just 3 years ago.

Today, the Czech Republic is a net technology exporter, and its name is associated internationally with quality workmanship, efficiency, and creativity.

As barriers to the global market come down everywhere, and as consumers and businesses all over the EU and the world become more used to innovative and disruptive global startups, nothing stands in the way of Czech startups, and their global ambitions.

Today, Czech technology products touch the lives of millions of people, all over the world, in ways visible and invisible. From StartupYard alone, companies like BrandEmbassy, TeskaLabs, and BudgetBakers, to name a few, serve hundreds of thousands of people daily, and are growing fast.

A future in which a local resident of Sao Paolo, of London, of Bangkok, of Delhi, or of San Francisco, can make a Czech technology product a part of their daily lives and routines has already arrived, and there remains no excuse for Czech startups not to compete for the attention of customers and businesses everywhere.

StartupYard’s 2016 Open Call: Visualized

November 24, 2015/in Startups, StartupYard News/by StartupYard

StartupYard’s 2016 open call has now closed, and we’ve collected over 300 applications to StartupYard.

300 applications represents a 30% increase over the application rate for last year’s program, and a 200% increase over the number of applications for StartupYard 2014, the first cohort which was run by our current Managing Director, Cedric Maloux, and the first time that StartupYard began focusing on startups with global ambitions.

Where are Applications Coming From?

For that 2014 cohort, the vast majority of applications to StartupYard came from the Czech Republic. But over the last two years, as the number of applications have increased, so has the geographic diversity of startups interested in acceleration. As before, the majority of our applicants come from the Czech Republic. Here is a visualization:

Interestingly, last year the Czech Republic and Slovakia represented a supermajority of all applicant countries. This year, the Czech Republic remained the majority, but Slovakia was surpassed by several others, including Russia, Poland, Romania, Italy, and Ukraine, among others. This was a surprise, but highlights the trend towards startups looking outside of their own ecosystems for accelerators and investors alike.

Here are the applicants, without the Czech Republic:

For the first time, StartupYard had applications from Poland, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and France. We also saw applications from as far away as India and Hong Kong, as well as an increase in applicants from the East, including Russia, and Ukraine. Romania continued its trend of increasing applicants: we have taken Romanian startups in both of the previous two cohorts, and we have made three recruiting trips to Romania over the last year.

Which Country has the Biggest Appetite for Acceleration?

As with last year, StartupYard shared an application pool of over 700 startups with CEED Tech, a consortium of 5 accelerators in Central Europe. The syndicate garnered applications from every country in Central Europe and from most countries in Europe. Here is a visualization of the full application pool by country of origin:

Here, Slovakia does make a big appearance. Slovakia generated more applications for all the CEED Tech accelerators than any other country. But whereas last year, Slovak startups applying to StartupYard outnumbered all other countries combined, this year, the distribution was much more even.

Poland, Central Europe’s biggest country, did not account for many applications. Still, this is the first year that we have ever received applications from Poland at all. Our two trips to Poland this year to promote StartupYard supported the idea that the Polish ecosystem is somewhat insular, and startups in Poland are less likely to seek investment and acceleration elsewhere.

This is not necessarily surprising: Poland’s size as a market gives startups more local opportunities, and fewer reasons to launch startups globally, whereas smaller market startups like Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia are forced to be globally minded, because their home markets won’t support sustained growth.

What are Startups Interested In?

Our applications included a set of keywords for each startup, which represent their areas of interest generally. Here is a visualization of those keywords:

Mobile, data, education, media, and analytics make big impressions in this graphic. There is sustained interest among startups in pushing more use cases for mobile apps and smartphones, and this includes another big keyword: advertising.

While StartupYard doesn’t consider startups that are built on an advertising model (meaning ad-supported business models), we do see many applications for mobile optimization of advertising and marketing processes. As pressure has grown on media and communication companies to monetize their mobile users, ad-tech has become of increasing interest for startups.

There was also an increase in applications around the fields of health and wellness, as well as medicine, over previous years. We are seeing more startups who are interested in leveraging IOT devices and mobile interfaces to improve health and fitness, and promote wellness generally. While these companies have diverse approaches, they typically are being made possible by the pervasive nature of mobile computing and internet access now available.

Also, somewhat surprisingly to me, we saw a sharp decrease in the number of consumer SaaS products and social platforms coming from startups. Is there a feeling that the booming consumer app market has become saturated over the past few years? Certainly, the number of speculative social networking and dating apps decreased significantly in comparison with previous rounds. We received only a handful of such applications this year.

What Startups are Working On

This is not to say that startups are not still working on platforms and apps. The vast majority are still focusing their development on mobile solutions, but with a noticeably broader set of approaches to different markets. Startups are finding value propositions in supporting an already complex array of platforms and services currently available. Here is a breakdown of the words that appeared most often across all applications:

Clearly social, mobile, and apps remain important topics. But “platforms” now represent the most common piece of jargon for today’s startups. This is not surprising, and it’s a trend we’ve been observing over the past few years as well.

While talk was always about apps a few years ago, as cloud services and consumer access to smartphones and tablets has become nearly universal, startups generally have begun to see themselves as selling something more than software.

When app stores first premiered, the interest was in leveraging the technology that people had in their hands. What could a smartphone do? There were many exciting new applications.

But today, 8 years after the premier of the iPhone, leveraging a smartphone’s hardware is much less of a focus. In order to engage users and continue to provide them with value, startups are focusing on building platforms on which services can be integrated and extended to meet consumer needs continuously. Companies like Uber, AirBnb, WhatsApp, Dropbox and Facebook leverage mobile technology by building connections between people and services, people and information, and people to people. The value of smartphones has become their ubiquity, not their internal computing power.

Gone are the days in which startups thought of getting a million downloads, and serving ads to make money. Today, consumers are looking for a continuous value proposition from mobile products, and are more prepared to try different solutions. As markets have become more crowded, unintegrated one-off products have become less viable. Consumers are less willing to pay just for software, but want a product that will evolve with their own needs.

At What Stage are Startups Applying?

It’s quite difficult to precisely pin down a startup’s stage of development in a written application. Many are great at talking about their ambitions, but have little work actually done. Others have executed a lot of development, but are not very clear on the direction they will take as businesses.

We asked a simple question to try and gauge startups in terms of their general development:

What we found was that the majority of startups applying are not incorporated. This really demonstrates the value that accelerators can bring to young companies.

We don’t generate ideas or inspiration: we accelerate them. We help startups make themselves into real businesses, so it’s not a surprise that many who apply are not yet thinking of themselves as businesses at all. Making the leap from an idea, or a prototype, to a business is one you have to take with a running start- exactly what startups will get with StartupYard.

5 Questions To Ask Before Sending Any Marketing Email

November 13, 2015/in Marketing, Startup Tools, Startups/by StartupYard

Recently, one of our startups got a big boost of incoming users. I asked the founder, “what did you do to take advantage of the situation?” “We increased promotion in our channels,” came the reply.

Alright. Well, as we discussed recently, there is a big difference between user acquisition, and user retention. If you suddenly find yourself with a big group of new users on your hands, you have to be focused on retaining them. Andrew Chen pegs the most vital period for activating and retaining users at just 7 days from app install, for mobile apps.

Chen is right when he says that customer lifecycle emails are not the end-all for customer retention or activation. But they can play an important supporting role, particularly if your product has anything like a learning curve involved- that is, if it takes users some time to understand how they can really use it.

Customer retention can be aided even within the first visit, if the onboarding process establishes behaviors and patterns that can be activated again later on. You can show users what life will be like with your product, and get them to “buy in,” by doing a few things right away.

But once you have established a relationship with a user through the product, you will probably want to make use of some smartly timed email marketing to further activate and convert that new user.

After talking with the founder, and sharing some typical email activation and conversion strategies that I have picked up over the years (which I think I will write about more in another post), I thought it might be a good opportunity to pose some important questions that startups should ask themselves before sending any marketing email.

No matter what kind of email you’re sending, these questions can force you to examine the purpose, the content, the goal, and the timing of any marketing email. They are as follows:

1. What Is the Goal?

Before hitting send, ask yourself what you hope to get out of this email. Do it not just in the sense of what your ideal reaction to the email is, like “I want the user to know about a specific feature we have,” but in terms of what the campaign as a whole is meant to do.

Make sure that the email has a goal that is trackable. “Informing our users about a new feature,” is not an easily trackable goal. But it is trackable if, for example, you give those users a way to show they know about the new features, or if you track user behavior before and after the email is sent and read.

This should lead to a few more questions: do I have a success benchmark for this email? Open rate? CTR? Conversions? Hits on a landing page? Engagement with the product? Do I have an easy way for the users to react to this email? Is there a clear CTA (more on that later)?

Try as much as possible to tie the email to some real data points, and to have some expectations for what it will accomplish. If you meet those goals, you can use the experience to replicate the good results. If you don’t, you can look for specific problems, or ask someone else for their input on where it all went wrong.

2. What is your Claim?

Every marketing email -in fact every email- has a basic “claim,” and often more than one. A claim is a statement of fact, or values, which you hope will be received by the person who receives the email. A claim doesn’t have to be said in words, but it has to be felt. It has to come out of reading the email, that this is the reason you are communicating with the user.

Try and spot the claims in this fictional marketing email:

Dear Lloyd,

It’s that time of year again! The leaves are turning, and the snows are inbound! And here at XYZ Inc, we’ve been working on an exciting new way to keep you warm during the coldest months.

Check it out here. Get a special discount of 25% if you purchase before Nov. 30th!

Bye!

XYZ Inc Team

Wow, well I’m definitely intrigued here. So what’s the claim? I can spot a few candidates:

1. You need this product for the winter.

2. We are a cool innovative company.

3. Our products are affordable.

All that was accomplished without directly saying any of those things. But these are very clearly communicated claims.

The claim can be many things. It can be something really simple, like “we care about you.” Or it can be “this new feature will make your experience better,” or “we understand you and your problems.” It can be very direct: “you have 6 days left before your plan expires.” It doesn’t ask users to do anything- that’s for later. Instead, it is simply the broader message of the email.

Try, as an exercise with yourself, to put your claim into clear and specific words, in your own thinking, before you send the email. Ask someone else to review the claim, and tell you what they think it is.

When we are writing community emails to mentors, teams and our community, StartupYard Director Cedric Maloux and I often start with that question: “What are we claiming here?” Then we make a bullet point list of claims we could be making, and we choose the one that is most clear and true to us. Then we make sure that our communication centers around that claim in some way.

So, what is your claim? Force yourself to answer that question clearly.

3. Where is the CTA?

The CTA, or Call To Action, is the thing you will ask your user to do, once they have seen your claim. There is a clear CTA in virtually every email I write- even personal emails. Marketing tricks are, after all, just systems for thinking about normal means of communication.

A CTA is usually directly tied to the goal of the email. What do you want the user to do now? Do you give them a foolproof way of doing it?

I don’t want to speak in absolutes, but it’s difficult to imagine an effective marketing email that doesn’t contain some kind of CTA. A CTA doesn’t strictly have to be a button or a link either. You can have a CTA that doesn’t even lead to your product or site (although the results of such a CTA are harder to track).

A common mistake is for a CTA to be too vague, or to be too complicated. “Please share this on Facebook.” Ok, but where’s the share button? Where’s a link to let me do that?

And another common mistake is to not inform the user of what will happen when the CTA is followed. This is a common reason why people don’t follow CTAs- because they don’t really understand what is being asked of them. Emails come in, and because the author was concentrated on getting the CTA out there, it appears at the top, possibly with several exclamation points:

“Dear User,

Click here right now it’s amazing!!!“

Not only is this a pretty good way of getting yourself caught in a spam filter, it also just doesn’t really work. People want to know what they’re really being asked to do before they decide to do it.

You need to set up a CTA with some context, and possibly follow it with some reassurance:

“Dear User,

You may be interested to know that we just added a really cool feature we think you’ll like!

Click here to check it out. It’s a way of sciencing your tech using tech science. Cool right? “

Very cool. I’ll check that out, because I know what I’m being asked to look at.

4. What Time Are you Sending this?

This is as much about understanding your own users, as following any specific rules. Will your users get your email at work or at home? How old are they? How late do they stay up? How early do they rise? What time of day are they likely to follow the CTA you send?

Anyone who’s ever received pornography and viagra spam emails knows that they come at night, because that’s when spammers think you’re just loose enough to give them a look. Well, they do that because it probably works.

So take a look at your user’s behaviors, engagement times with your product, and the data you’ve gathered in the past in order to time your emails to maximum effect. Don’t be afraid to experiment! There’s no rule about this. It’s whatever works.

5. Who are you sending this to?

Just as important as what, and when, is who. A really common problem with startups that are growing their marketing efforts via email is that they don’t pay enough attention to grouping and categorizing their users, and sending emails that are likely to have the highest impact for those user groups.

For example, do you ever wonder why so many online services ask for your birthday, despite the fact that there is no conceivable reason why they should need to know it?

Recently i was suggesting to one of our startups that they try a “Birthday Campaign,” which is an old favorite of email marketers, and it goes like this: On the user’s birthday, you send the user a limited time discount offer to upgrade/extend/buy your product, but only within the next 24-72 hours (the details depend on what your goal is, and how long it should take a person to make a buying decision).

It turned out the founder I was talking to was not collecting birthdays in his onboarding process. Too bad! He should start doing that, and see if he can do something with it.

But that’s not the only way to go about it. Companies collect birthday info because they know that people spend more on or around their birthdays and, crucially, they ask people for things they want. Parents give kids money on their birthdays, as do grandparents, and spouses drop hints to each other about what they might like.

And there are lots of personal details that can be taken into account. Should your Christmas campaign really include customers in Israel? Should your back to school discount reach users in their 30s? Should your valentine’s day campaign go to single people? You don’t have to collect an extensive survey on your users in order to learn at least a few things about them, but those valuable bits that you do know can make the difference between a successful campaign, and a flop.

Partnerships and “Partnerships”

Partnerships in Name Only

Based in Mutual Interest

What A Company Needs to Be a Good Partner

Preparing For a Partnership

Asked-For Emails Get Read

Asked For Emails Engage Customers

Engaging Users

Content

Prestige

A Personal Touch

Staying on the Radar

Where Brands Come From

Brands Are About Trust

The “We” Problem

Solve Problems, Make Emotional Use Cases

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1. What Is the Goal?

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3. Where is the CTA?

4. What Time Are you Sending this?

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