Marketissimo | Startup Marketing

Do you have your VC pitch ready?

Your pitch to Venture Capital firms should answer one essential question: Why should I give you my money?

I have created VC slide decks that answers this question through the following 11 sub questions. The answer to each question becomes a slide. Here you go:

1. What customer problem do you solve?
2. How does your solution or product solve it?
3. How big is the market for this?
4. Who is competing with you and why are you better?
5. How do you plan to sell your product?
6. How do you make money with this?
7. When do you expect a return?
8. Do you have an experienced management team?
9. What are the key mile stones and when will you reach them?
10. What do you want to do with our money?
11. So, why again should I give you my money?

By answering each question with one slide you should have a nice and short story that you can tell and that VC's will remember. This also means you won't end up with 28 or more slides. Keep it simple, short and compelling.

The goal - get them interested, get them thinking about it, get another meeting.

It is all about Positioning

A few months ago I asked an executive of a startup company what they do. He said: “We are the global leader in software-as-as service for ….bla, bla, bla”.  Throughout my career I heard similar statements over and over again.  People work lots of hours on wordsmithing a sentence that is pretty much meaningless to the target audience. Your target customers only wants to know:

- Is this for me?

- Can this help me to make my life easier, better, more exciting, etc.

- Does it save or make money, improve quality, etc.

- How does it work?

- Is it worth the money and effort?

There is a great book called Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout and I found one quote in the book that tells it all:

“Positioning is not what you do to the product, it is what you do to the mind of your audience”

So, don’t look at your product, think about your customers and prospects and how they will use it. You just have to “position” a picture that shows your audience that life will be so much different, better, more efficient, etc. when they use your product or service. And a great way of doing this is by telling a story. My next blog will be about story telling marketing. Stay tuned.

Is Camtasia the next American Idol?

Do you know Camtasia? It sounds like the name of an American Idol contestant, but it is not. Anyway, Camtasia is my idol. It is a video capturing and editing tool that makes it fairly easy to create product demos and videos. Check out a product demo overview and a fun brand marketing video I created for a client. Here is why I think Camtasia is a great marketing tool for start-ups:

• You can create low-budget videos in a few days
• You can easily combine product screen recording with other graphic elements
• You can easily edit the timeline and overlay your marketing message
• Audio can be recorded separately and overlayed with music
• You can easily export the video to Flash, Mov or other formats
• It is "Do-it-yourself" - you don’t have to be a flash designer
• You can easily edit the video as things change (which happens quite often in start-ups)

And I am not getting any commission for saying this, I am just a customer. And I write about this although I never talked to the Camtasia guys – they didn’t even have to sell it to me. Isn't that what you want from your customers?

Do you really know what your customers need?

Many startup companies LOVE technology, they create lots of features, and talk about it.  As we all hopefully know by now (see my other post about customer focus), customers don't buy the product features, they buy the VALUE of the product. So, in order to build and market the right value you need to really understand what customers need. I just got this graphic that illustrates the issue that different people within the organization have different understandings of the customer needs.

Disclaimer: I did not create this graphic, somebody sent it to me. And I would like to recognize the unknown person who created it - great job!

Are you a customer of your own company?

The key of doing great and effective marketing is to understand your customers. Besides doing research, focus groups and ongoing interaction with your customers, you should think about these three questions:

1. Step into the role of your customers and ask yourself: Would you buy your product, honestly?

The answers will help you better understand why people buy and why they don’t buy.

2. Do you use your own product?

It always amazes me how many companies find lots of excuses for not using their own products – probably the same reasons why their customers don’t. 

3. Are you selling a product, or are you selling the value (of the product)?

People don’t buy products; they buy the VALUE of the product. Don’t market and sell features, sell the value of the features.

Answering these questions will help you be more effective in your marketing activities and also to improve your product or service offering. Be your own customer - everyday!

Startup Marketing made simple

Here is a nice quote from Leonardo da Vinci: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"

We all have the tendency to show off all the cool features and product capabilities to impress people. We pack lots of information on our slides and forget about the core value of our product or service.

Why is simplicity important? It brings you back to the essence and core value of your product or service offering. Your customers will find it easier to understand what you do, they can better remember it and it is just easier to make the buying decision.

Why is it so difficult to achieve simplicity? It takes more time (not less) to make things easier, simpler and shorter because you need to capture the essence of the product or service your are offering.

Another great quote from an unknown author: "I did not have the time to make this letter shorter".

Here is your homework for today! Try to explain in ONE (1) sentence what your startup company

does. If you have some more time try this one: 5 word, 10 word, 25 and 50 word statement of what your company does. Just by going through this exercise you learn a lot about the core value of your offering.

Marketissimo = Startup Marketing

Marketissimo is a new blog from Startup Ramp that shares advice, ideas and commcon sense on how to make your startup marketing more compelling, effective and "superlative". The suffix "issimo" comes from the Latin (Italian) language...

Suffix     -issimo

... and is added to adjectives to form absolute superlatives.

If you are an entrepeneur, CEO, VC or marketing executive of a start-up company then this blog is for you. I hope that this blog will be useful to build, launch and ramp up your start-up company.