Growth and attraction
Good lesson from the course and mentioned before in my blog posts, when starting a startup you should not focus on competition. You should be aware of what your competition is doing, but your competition should not be the base of what you are doing. You need to think about your customer and how to create ten times the value. The thing is that when you become successful, people will start copying what you are doing, and that is when you need to get paranoid and keep on innovating. The competitive advantage you gain from value creation and excellent product development will buy you some time and money to innovate.
We had a great guest lecture from Xiaochen the co-founder of Guide to Iceland, where she discussed the growth of a startup. The lecture was not only practical but also motivating as Guide to Iceland have recently been through the process, from startup to a successful business.
She began her lecture by talking about consumers. Travelers today don’t want to be called tourist, they want to be called travelers and get local. This was (or is) their concept. When starting out, they were thinking about travelers not about the business. Because when you are starting a business you need to think in value, when you have value then people will come to you (pull strategy). Networking effects come from true value. She found it critical to think about the bigger community. Everyone in Iceland want to take a piece of the tourist industry in Iceland. Last year around 1.500.000 tourist came to Iceland, where only 300.000 people live. If you don’t get networking effect in the tourist industry you will have a difficulty. By putting up a community, solving problems, adding value, you will increase your changes of getting networking effect. One other strong point in value creation is that if you create value for your customers, they will be willing to pay the margin.
One part of growing is hiring new team members and spreading the responsibility. When looking for team members she found it important to look for people that will make through the hard work emotionally. The lack of sleep alone will make you very edgy. It is important for the startup to hire the right employees and it is import for the employees that their co-workers find out what motivates them, what makes them happy and what their mission is (motivation and appreciation). You should definitely not hire cheap, it is very hard to deal with frustration of employees and if you don’t have the money you should think about other things that the employees might be interested in.
In my past blogs I have been writing a lot about lecture where the importance of building great products and problem solving have been given some thought. Now I think it’s time to quote the Startup Iceland Blog, traction trumps everything.
“Getting to traction is not a function of money, although in some cases it could be. Time and time again I have found startup founders not focusing on this. Building a great product is important and solving a big problem is also important, but all that would be moot if you are not able to show growth.”
Makes sense doesn’t it?
19 channels to reach to your customers:
- Viral Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Community Building
- Engineering as Marketing
- Public Relations(PR)
- Business Development
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social and Display ads
- Offline ads
- Targeting Blogs
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Programs
- Unconventional PR
- Speaking Engagements
- Offline Events
- Trade Shows
- Existing Platforms
- Sales
http://startupiceland.com/2015/02/03/traction-trumps-everything/
hr1bergs 