If our values described on the jobs page sound like you, join our team and help us grow SoundCloud into a top global brand and company, with its heart at the heart of Europe, Berlin:
You really want to experience Berlin in the spring and summer, get here early to feel the magic.
The Startup Kids is a documentary about young American and European web entrepreneurs, made by my two Icelandic friends Sesselja and Vala.
Sesselja and Vala have been working on this documentary for a long time. I first met them, I think, 2 years ago or so when they started recording the first series of interviews. A lot of time and effort has been put into this documentary, including a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign.
As a Kickstarter project backer I had the chance to watch the full documentary and it is really inspiring. Sesselja and Vala have captured the essence of entrepreneurship during their conversations with a plethora of entrepreneurs, many of whom you will recognize in this trailer.
I gave a brief talk today to a small group of MBA students at the European School of Management & Technology in Berlin. The topic was ‘Startup Marketing’ and lessons learned from my experience at SoundCloud.
Despite the bold title of ‘Marketing is dead, long live marketing’, my thoughts here are mostly an aggregation of other people’s perspectives synthesised for my style. And while I spent a fair bit of time philosophising about the role of marketing within a startup, I wanted to make sure people came away with actionable and useful pieces of knowledge as that’s what I really missed from my MBA classes on entrepreneurship & marketing. So I created the toolkit - the 5 or 6 key things a startup marketer should be doing/measuring/thinking about in those early stages.
Let me know if I missed anything (perhaps the content doesn’t come across perfectly in pure slide mode) but it was fun to do. Only 20 months after I sat in my last MBA class I was now giving one… scary. And no, it doesn’t matter which side of the desk you’re on, slide completion 10 minutes before the event is still the norm.
Here’s a slide deck by our very own Thom, VP Marketing at SoundCloud.
A lot has been written on the process of joining a startup, and I’ve written a bit on the topic. Less is written about what to do once you join. Truth is, that’s when the fun starts, and it’s important to optimize your experience from day one. There are a few things I wish someone had told me…
Eric’s been killing it with his series with tips about how to best join & contribute to an early-stage startup.
Songkick’s CEO Ian has initiated this pretty amazing list that can (will?) help startups find the right tools for a variety of areas and tasks. Must-bookmark.
The list is quite extensive already but if you there are any tools that you love missing in the list, you can request access to the wiki.
This is a Forbes interview with Jason and Bradford of New York City-based Fab.com
I don’t remember exactly when and why I started following Jason’s Tumblr betashop but I’m glad that I did. At one point a few months ago, Jason started to publish unusually transparent blog posts about the early steps of Fab and it’s been more than interesting to follow the progress ever since. In this 4-minute video, Jason and Bradford talk about how they turned a social networks for gays into a super slick service offering daily design inspirations at reduced prices.
It’s been truly inspiring to watch Fab move at such a fast pace, always focusing on the attention to detail and excellent user experience. They now have over 600,000 members with over 150,000 different units sold three months after launch.
If you liked this video, you’ll also like the longer version of their story in an interview with Kevin Rose. As Bryce would say, this is required watching on david-noel.com
I sure do hope they’ll start to ship internationally soon, I’m sitting on $100 worth of credit thanks to their invite scheme. If you’d like to join Fab.com for free, here’s my personal invite link.
Startup anthem about getting investment! It’s about our startup Cardinal which is now in beta…it makes music sharing awesome!
http://cardinalpower.me
In anticipation of the workshop in Berlin next month, TechBerlin sat down with CEO coach Jerry Colonna to find out what it is a CEO coach does. (via AVC)
Good list of tips for startups from Paul Jozefak.
Fridays @ Six | Berlin
A bunch of us were invited to the first-ever podcast/live stream show called Fridays @ Six at Amen HQ and these are the highlights.
You can listen to the entire show here.
Reuters came in the other day to visit SoundCloud for a video segment they did on Berlin startups and besides chatting to Eric & Alex for a bit, they also took a look behind the scenes.
Thank you, Reuters.
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Loic Needs To Get His Head Out Of His Silicon Valley
A true Mike Butcher. Just like in the old days. Great post celebrating European startups. Please read it.
Thank you, Mike.
