Get Your Startup Going with Marketing 101

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The MBA Highway blog gives Startups a quick course on Marketing 101:

Most start-ups usually fall short because they don’t have a marketing plan and a sales strategy. In the dramatically competitive and challenging business environment, it is not enough to do something well; you must be a good communicator, seller, and marketer. That means knowing how and where to market, and developing a defined, clear sales message. The customer wants to know if you are credible, that you know what you are talking about, and that you can help them.

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Crash Courses – An Online Boot Camp for Entrepreneurs

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Today, American Express and New York Startup Veri announced the launch of Crash Courses, a new, disruptive learning platform designed for entrepreneurs.

The online, interactive social learning platform will educate entrepreneurs on how to implement important business functions into their organizations—everything from the Art of Hiring to Website Conversion. Courses challenge users to hone-in on subject matter that gives them the option to learn more on the topic while they collect IQ points to see where they stack up against others. Research shows that the human brain accepts new concepts largely through constant recall while interacting socially—something that has brought notoriety to revolutionary programs such as the Kahn Academy.

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Video: Crockett & Bowie – An Authorized FFL Firearms Dealer Startup

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrhgoZsJtMI

Can you really buy guns over the Internet? Not really, but you can shop. In this video, Mike Bernhardt of Crockett & Bowie discusses the advantages of purchasing a quality firearm from an experienced, veteren-owned business.

We take great pride in working with our clients to provide advice and guidance, helping them to make smart decisions. We work with clients to find exactly what they are looking for – and help them understand the best options for their needs.

There are hundreds of websites where you can research different gun models and compare pricing. This is not one of those sites. If you are interested in a firearm, give us a call (or send us an email). We’ll discuss what you are looking for, how you plan to use the firearm, and other important facts. We’ll come up with several suggestions and then give you our opinion (if you want it), tell you what the current price is for those particular firearms, and if you’d like to purchase one from us, we can have the item ready for you typically in 48 hours.

Learn more at Crockett & Bowie.com.

Cloud Computing Providers a Growing Target Market for Startups

James Hamilton from AWS writes that it’s a clear sign that the Cloud Computing market is exploding when Startups begin to target cloud providers as their primary market.

An excellent example of this new trend of startups aiming to sell to the Cloud Computing market is SolidFire which targets the high performance block storage market with what can be loosely described as a distributed Storage Area Network. Enterprise SANs are typically expensive, single-box, proprietary hardware. Enterprise SANs are mostly uninteresting to cloud providers due to high cost and the hard scaling limits that come from scale-up solutions. SolidFire implements a virtual SAN over a cluster of up to 100 nodes. Each node is a commodity 1RU, 10 drive storage server. They are focused on the most demanding random IOPS workloads such as database and all 10 drives in the SolidFire node are Solid State Storage devices. The nodes are interconnected by up 2x 1GigE and 2x10GigE networking ports.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv9i9zlPWtY

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Why Tech Startups Won’t Save Us from Recession

Tom Foremski takes issue with the notion that Tech Startups will save us from the recession:

Last year I spoke with Bob Ackerman, a leading Silicon Valley venture capitalist and founder of Allegis Capital. He said that many startups are being bought by larger companies because they can’t IPO.

“Startups have to rely on being acquired by a larger company once they reach a certain size because there isn’t an IPO market to help them recapitalize and grow to the next stage. The largest expansion in jobs for a young company comes in the period after an IPO. If a company is acquired it doesn’t lead to the same job growth.”

This makes perfect sense to me having been part of Sun Microsystems, which acquired dozens of companies while I was there. It seems like the first thing they did after absorbing a company was trim the tree. Read the Full Story.

A New Business in Five Easy Steps

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In this special guest feature, James Kim from Choosewhat.com gets your new business going with five easy steps.

Whether you are sick and tired of the office politics, or you just want to do something you love and earn money from it, setting up a business is probably something that you have thought about but always put off because you believe that it costs too much or you would never be able to do it.  Now you can set up your own business and with these five easy steps you will soon be well on your way to living the life of your dreams! These steps provide you with everything you need from the legal entity to your online fax service.

Read the Full Story. For further information on setting up a business visit www.ChooseWhat.com.  With these easy steps all done you are on the road to having a successful business!

Building a Movement for Your Startup

With your Startup, are you building an Empire (Amazon), a Powderkeg (Twitter), or a Movement? Gabriel Weinberg writes that beginning with the wrong expectation will greatly increase your chances of failure.

When you have your idea, you like to think of it as a “game-changer,” i.e. an empire or a powder keg. With high probability, it is neither. It’s a movement. Of course, it could eventually turn into an empire (Google) or have its powder keg moment (Twitter). Bu it won’t start out like that.

Weinberg says that you need to be prepared for the movement lifestyle– struggling to get customers, fighting to get people to care, or even getting people to give your idea a ten-second glance. Read the Full Story.

Video: From Just an Idea to a Business

In this video, Scott Hamlin, the founder of the innovative upcycling company Looptworks, shares his views on the importance of knowing who your customers will be, how you’re going to distribute your product and what makes it meaningful and different.

Figure out how to sell it first. If you can get that done, the rest of the challenges will fall into place.

Video: Meet the Startup – CPusage

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itE7lSN7Nfo

In this video episode of Meet the Startup, Jeff Martens, cofounder of CPUsage, discusses his new startup and how you might utilize your computer’s downtime.

Don’t Be So Friggin Strategic

Sriram Krishnan writes that sometimes Startups have to try to not be so friggin strategic:

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt in the corporate world, it is that a staggering amount of ‘strategic analysis’ is nonsense and guesswork. There’s nothing wrong in admitting that. Figuring out the market, what the future looks like, what users want or heck, even what your own company can do is hard. Bloody hard. Eric Reis says that all startups are experiments and the same can be said for any company in a fast changing industry too.

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