Blog

A lot of startup founders work hard on getting their product ready to launch before understanding the economics of marketing. Specifically, how to acquire customers at reasonable economics. Sometimes that topic is met with a genuine head tilt and quizzical look. Sometimes it’s met with a “handwavy” response – usually by those who believe if they

Part 3 – Making your first data driven decision Given what you have discovered so far in your experiment, what’s your next step in investing in your MVP and this idea? Because it’s easy to spend reach cash on advertising it’s important to have a thesis on why you’re investing in this idea. What I’ve

As a marketer, I love compelling value propositions. When they line up, the offer is clear, the call to action is timely and the offer is compelling enough to make me take action right now! But like writing any good headline, they are really hard to do and will take time and iterations. The media

Momentum is a funny thing.  For a startup, you know when you have it, and you know when you don’t have it. But you don’t always know why you have it and you can’t necessarily point to when you actually got it started. Planning for momentum is a bit like planning for virality. There are

I had a chance to speak at the Tampa Bay Tech Forum last night at The Wave in downtown Tampa. Thanks to Heather Kenyon, Kimberly Wander and the team at TBTF,  as well as Mike O’Donnel for invite and the attendees for a fun event. One of the items I talked about was how to

Don’t get me wrong, I love inbound marketing. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are awesome marketing tools. But this specific tool won’t work for every type or stage of business. I hear too many startup companies talk about Growth Hacking and Virality as if it’s an app they can deploy after

I was speaking at an event in Seattle for NWEN at the Graham and Dunn offices and downstairs is the restaurant formerly know as Waterfront – now Aqua. It’s part of the El Gaucho ownership and like El Gaucho, it’s awesome (and spendy). We were chatting as a group and one of the wait staff

Mentor Advice: from T.A. McCann. Find the blogs of thought leaders that you want to have know your product and promote your brand. Rather then asking them to do so directly, go to their blog and comment on their posts. Smart and intelligent comments, not  blather, add some value reference other resources and research. After