Startups Wednesday Social Club - Share What Events You Are Attending This Coming Week |
- Wednesday Social Club - Share What Events You Are Attending This Coming Week
- Those who have experienced Y Combinator or other accelerators, what was your experience like?
- If you've raised VC money, have you had THAT call with your investors yet?
- If there was a checklist for startups what would be the first five tips to founders on that list?
- Instagram for social media marketing! Yay or nay?
- Startup Marketing Advice: How to Use Your Blog to Find More Customers
- Am I missing obvious use cases in microlearning?
- Suggestions for SaaS onboarding?
- Working with freelancers any experiences? [advice needed]
- how does a startup get sketches for large scale urban projects?
- Sign up/login help for mobile app MVP
| Wednesday Social Club - Share What Events You Are Attending This Coming Week Posted: 25 Mar 2020 06:06 AM PDT Welcome to this week's Social Club thread.Share what events and meetups you are going to so we can discover new ways to be social together offline and help grow your local community. Focus on sharing events that are happening within the next 7 days of this date of this submission. Anything that falls outside of 10 days will be removed, no exceptions. No duplicate posts. If you happen to be attending an event that is already posted, leave a comment to inform the community that you will also be there. If you are hoping to organize something on your own, outside of an existing event, feel free to use this thread to rally some people together to meet up. Please use the following format to share an event: Event Name and URL: Location: Event Date: Event Time: Event Description: Event Cost: Discount Code: [if applicable] Please use the following format to organize people to meet up together: Location: Purpose of getting together: Suggested Places to meet up: You can also find more support using instant chat on the /r/startups discord. [link] [comments]  |
| Those who have experienced Y Combinator or other accelerators, what was your experience like? Posted: 25 Mar 2020 01:48 PM PDT What was your experience like, or what is it like now within Y Combinator. If you're part of another accelerator the same questions applies. How did you find out about the accelerator and what was it like getting accepted? How much would you say the accelerator helped? What were the most noticeable benefits of the accelerator? Would you do things differently? I would love to read your experiences. [link] [comments]  |
| If you've raised VC money, have you had THAT call with your investors yet? Posted: 25 Mar 2020 07:20 AM PDT I'm curious because the number of friends I've had report back to me that VCs are in portfolio panic mode is shocking. We did this in 2000 and it was the most painful experience of my career (sitting down with 10 companies and deciding which ones stayed and which were given the Old Yeller treatment). Angel money will probably ride this out, but VC's are a skittish bunch. So, if you've had a talk and are being asked to curtail expenses, slow burn rates, etc, etc. share your story. Good luck to everyone. [link] [comments]  |
| If there was a checklist for startups what would be the first five tips to founders on that list? Posted: 25 Mar 2020 02:19 PM PDT There is so much information out there about what founders need to know when building a startup. Not every venture is a startup and not every startup will be successful. If you had a list to give to the next founder, based on your experience, what would be the first five tips on your list? [link] [comments]  |
| Instagram for social media marketing! Yay or nay? Posted: 25 Mar 2020 06:24 PM PDT Hey, I'm a curious, budding social media manager. I want to know what business owners like you guys think about Instagram. Do you like it? Is it an effective marketing tool for you? If you've used Instagram and don't anymore, what didn't you like about it? And what platforms do you prefer for your brand's social media? [link] [comments]  |
| Startup Marketing Advice: How to Use Your Blog to Find More Customers Posted: 26 Mar 2020 01:10 AM PDT Hey everyone, As we sit at home and wait for our businesses to recuperate, now is the perfect time to plan out your business's next moves. A lot of you might be producing content to promote your product/service. But are you effectively creating the content that will draw in customers? I'm talking about your website. Does your website create the content that your customers will find when they are looking for the service you provide on Google? Most of the time, I've found that businesses create blog posts just to create blog posts. There's no end goal in mind and most businesses don't realize that the content they create can be utilized to draw in more customers. Why Creating Content is So Important for Your Business There are several ways that you can acquire customers for your business. You can go the traditional sales route and call potential clients while following a script. Or you can build an inbound channel that passively brings in leads every month. That's why creating content is so important. Building an inbound channel that passively brings in leads requires content. Lots of high-quality, customer-targeted content. When your customers have questions that need to be answered and you answer them, not only are you now seen as an authority figure, but you've also proven that you can serve them, giving them an incentive to buy your product or use your service. How to Know What Questions Your Customers are Asking When we create content, we need to create it for a reason. Why are we creating the content that we are creating? What purpose does it serve? The content you create should be the beginning of your funnel, answering a question that visitors have. From there, the content should strike an interest in the visitor's mind, leading them to explore your site more and the services/products you offer. In order to know what your customers are searching up, we need to do keyword research. The tools I would recommend are:
These tools help us research keywords that people are searching up on Google. Basically, we can figure out what people are asking, how many people are asking that question, and questions related to what they're asking. To start figuring out what our customers are asking, we need to compile a list of our competitors and a list of themes related to our industry. For themes, pick relevant topics surrounding your industry. For example, if you own a pressure washing business, you might have the following topics:
Four topics is more than enough to create content that sufficiently answers your customer's questions. Through Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SpyFu, we can find questions and topics related to the four topics presented above. If you have the budget, I HIGHLY recommend getting Ahrefs. They offer some of the best keyword research tools that I've ever seen and it gives you a serious advantage over your competitors if you use it right. You can get their basic plan for $99/month or you can get a $7 one-week trial which is more than enough time to get enough keyword research done. Answer the Public and LSIGraph are used to find related keywords to the keywords we find through Ahrefs, SpyFu, and Keyword Planner. These two tools help us find some high-quality questions that your customers are asking, questions that we can answer. How to Find the Content Your Competitors Are Creating To get even more ideas on the content we should create, we can take a look at our competitors. Compile a list of 5-10 competitors in your area/industry and plug them into Keyword Planner and Ahrefs. While Keyword Planner will give you keyword ideas based off your competitor's content, Ahrefs will actually tell you the keywords they're ranking for, their rank, and the difficulty of the keyword. This makes it incredibly useful to use in situations where we want to outrank our competitors so through Ahrefs, we can find keywords that our competitors aren't ranking well for and create even better content than our competitors. How to Create Better Content So now that we have a list of keywords that we know our customers are searching up, we now need to create content for the keywords. But how do we get on the first page of Google? Some might tell you "just create better content." Yes, that's one part of the formula. But you also have to take into account linkbuilding and on-site SEO. Content is not king, not without links and an optimized website. Now, I have found keywords which I've ranked solely through content. But these pieces of content took ages to rank and I was targeting keywords with a difficulty of virtually 0 on a scale of 0-100. Furthermore, most of these keywords have had a volume of 150 searches per month, max. Our goal here is to create better content than the rankings above us and in order to do so, we need to outperform them in every aspect. Great content not only answers the searcher's question, but any other questions they might have. To find the other questions that people are searching up, you can use Google's related search queries on the footer of each search page or you can use a tool like LSIGraph to find which searches are semantically related to your main keyword. Easy readability, consistent image usage between your content, infographics, and a strong silo structure all contribute to a better piece of content than what your competitors are writing for that keyword. But how do we get started? Here's a to-do list of what you need to do once you've determined which keyword you're going to target first:
If you follow these steps, you'll have generated a piece of content that is worthy of being linked to by other websites. But not only that, your initial ranking will also be stronger when Google puts you in their search results. Of course, links won't build themselves which is why I highly recommend you reach out to other websites and give them a reason to link back to your post. There are several linkbuilding strategies out there that you can choose from. A few to list are:
How to Get the Customer This is probably the hardest part. Chances are, most visitors are going to bounce after reading your post. A small percentage will check out your website and see what you have to say, but only a few visitors will reach out to you, looking to use your product/service. To interest as many readers as possible, you need to add CTAs throughout your content. Convince them as to why your service/product is the best out of the ones offered in your post. For instance, if my service is selling custom trips to the Maldives and I create a piece on the best spots to visit in the Maldives during the summer, I might plug a paragraph mentioning how my travel service offers a full tour of the islands with scuba diving included. While you're not directly asking the customer to try out your product/service, you are explaining why your service/product should be on their radar. At the end of the content, you can try to directly sell to your visitor, telling them that if they enjoyed the read to check out what you have to offer. Don't expect conversions to be extremely high. Out of 100 visitors to your piece of content, you might find 3-4 people who are interested in your service/product. But that's only one piece of content. Turning your blog posts into a customer acquisition channel takes time to scale and as you start to create more content, you'll find that those 3-4 people interested will soon turn into 6-7; and from 6-7 to 11-12 and so on. Once you scale up your blog with enough valuable content that visitors want to read, you'll start to see a steady flow of potential clients ready to start working with you. But from there, it's not over. Keeping your blog as a customer acquisition channel takes time and effort. That means you're going to need to spend time creating content and building links always. A few hours out of the week every week should be enough to see results but this isn't a fast game. Remember. Scaling your blog into an acquisition channel takes time. I hope you enjoyed my guide to using your blog to find customers. Seeing as we're all stuck in our homes, it's the perfect time to start planning our next steps for our businesses. This could be one way many of you scale your business in the coming years. If you want me to take a look at the content you already have on your blog, feel free to reach out and I'll give you some pointers. If you need any other digital marketing help, my inboxes are always open! Again, don't forget. Content takes time to rank and scale before you can start seeing customers flow into your inbox. It's a patient game, but it's one that pays off if you're willing to put in the work. Stay safe everyone and don't forget to wash your hands! [link] [comments]  |
| Am I missing obvious use cases in microlearning? Posted: 25 Mar 2020 03:33 PM PDT My background is instructional design and learning management systems (LMSs), mostly in medical and government use. Corporate training departments usually focus on large, planned training needs when allocating resources. Last year I began working on a concept for a microlearning platform that could be used around an organization to fill in the gaps that traditional training courses miss. Mostly this seems to be things that arise out of continuous improvement methodologies (Six Sigma, TQM, Kaizen, 1MM, etc.). Something that could be done at the manager level without involving IT or training departments, and that doesn't need to be sold at the highest levels of a corporation. In December I built a static version of the site to collect feedback from friends in the industry. Over the past 3 months I developed an MVP of the product which is pretty much ready for use. It allows anyone to create, share, and learn with microlearning regardless of their background. It is built to be a grassroots tool, and can work side-by-side with an LMS instead of competing with it. I anticipate the pricing model will be free, with premium services offered to generate revenue and add value. I have some extra services identified but will wait for more feedback before building them. What I am wondering as I get ready to pull the switch is if I am missing any obvious use cases outside regular corporations. For instance, it can be used to pull together YouTube videos into a learning course that can also have assessment questions and survey questions inserted where needed. That seems like it might be a useful application for the technology outside a corporation. Any thoughts or ideas on additional use cases? [link] [comments]  |
| Suggestions for SaaS onboarding? Posted: 25 Mar 2020 03:08 PM PDT I thought that if any group of people had insight into growth problems and automated onboarding, it'd be the people at r/startups. Here's my problem: my company uses several different SaaS platforms (inventory management, communications, document management, etc.). We also hire a lot of people every year, and teaching everyone all this software is repetitive, prone to instructor error, and unable to be easily replicated (if someone forgets how to do something, their manager has to troubleshoot it). I'd like to integrate a User Onboarding platform like UserPilot, WalkMe, or WhatFix into an LMS like Thought Industries or Northpass. My major challenge is that most onboarding platforms require a JavaScript code on the app that gets the walkthrough, but we can't do that because our systems are all SaaS. Does anyone here have any exposure to this problem and can offer a solution? Thanks! [link] [comments]  |
| Working with freelancers any experiences? [advice needed] Posted: 25 Mar 2020 09:35 AM PDT Hi guys! [link] [comments]  |
| how does a startup get sketches for large scale urban projects? Posted: 25 Mar 2020 09:58 AM PDT For example they wanted a special type of bridge to be implemented on certain surfaces. Do they get regular artists or do they hire designers in architecture firms? I know some are sketches that look super realistic.I am complete noob so i apologize for sounding dumb! [link] [comments]  |
| Sign up/login help for mobile app MVP Posted: 25 Mar 2020 09:51 AM PDT Hey guys, I'm working on the MVP for a mobile app and I'm unsure how to best handle the sign up & login process. To give some rough context, the app will be a place where you can give/receive anonymous feedback, and will be able to store the feedback for each user. There is no public profiles however. Having basic user data would be helpful (age/gender/location), but maybe not necessary for the MVP. I want to keep barrier to entry low, and simplify development as much as possible. I noticed Whisper (another app that is anonymous but stores stuff on account level e.g. likes/comments) seems to skip account signup/login. Does this mean they auto create an account & associate it with the device ID? This could be a viable solution. (PSA this app is very different from Whisper but shares similarities on this level) Let me know what you guys think, any help is appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
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