Rocket Watcher by April Dunford

In the last post I talked about some reasons why you should run an advisory council. Customer advisory councils are more work than they look. Here are some tips on running a better customer advisory board that have worked for me.

I’ve run a few customer advisory councils and I’ve found them to be really useful both from marketing and a sales perspective. Product feedback is just the beginning. A well-run customer advisory council can be a great source of sales leads, can increase your marketing ROI and improve your operations.

You’re pitching your startup to a lot of people including investors, business partners, customers, prospects, media and analysts. It might be tempting to build one pitch and re-use it. Don’t do it! Recycling is good for the environment but it’s very dangerous for your startup.

Lean startups and hands-on angel investors are changing the startup landscape in Toronto. An article (plus video) I did for CityNews and The Mark News.

Attaching your startup brand to a movement involves figuring out what your brand stands for. Here’s a hint – the movement isn’t called “Making me Rich.”

Research shows that there are a set of factors that effect the rate of adoption of a new innovation. Clearly product characteristics are a critical factor each of these but there isn’t a single one where marketing can’t have at least some impact. Here are a set of things to consider when marketing to early adopters.

Startups often try to cram too many features into their messages and include benefits that aren’t differentiated or are irrelevant to their target market. This post covers a method for getting to a more streamlined value proposition.

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A recurring theme of my conversations with folks in the past week has to do with Beta products and what the goal of beta testing is really about, particularly when you are talking about bringing a new product to market.  My point of view on this is that beta testing is as much a marketing [...]

Gaining early market traction as a lot to do with getting the right products for your market but it’s also important to define who the early adopting customers are in that market. The way you construct your value propositions, your call to action, how you attract early customers and possibly the look and feel of your early product will be influenced by what you define those early segments to be.

Estimating the size of an addressable market for a startup is hard but not impossible. The key is to start with what you know, extrapolate in a reasonable way and then test your assumptions on customers.