Rocket Watcher Startup Marketing

Startup Messaging

I was lucky to be invited to speak at DemoCamp Guelph last night. There was an awesome crowd of smart startup people there and a great set of demos were shown.

I gave a talk on messaging for startups.  I picked that topic because I think messaging is pretty hard and a lot of folks don’t know where to start to create better messages.

The essence of my talk was that good messaging answers the following questions for potential customers:

• What the heck is it? (meaning can you tell me in plain language what it is that you do)
• Is it for me? (meaning does your messaging appeal to the segment that you are targeting)
• Why buy it from you? (meaning what are the compelling reasons to choose your offering over a competing offering)

I also noted that these questions need to be answered for prospects in that order.  Trying to differentiate before people understand what you do is pointless.

Here are the slides:

I want to thank Brydon for inviting me to speak as well as everyone else that took the time to chat with me last night.  I spent years in Waterloo, both as a university student and later when I was working for Watcom/Powersoft/Sybase so it was fun to go back and see how well the startup scene is evolving there.  I need to figure out a way to spend more time out there.

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