David Noël

thommyc:

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. 

Eric Stromberg: How to Make an Impact During the First Month of Your Startup Job →

estromberg:

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. 

The Ultimate List For Startup Tools →

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. 

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)

My simple tips to start-ups in the current situation →

Good list of tips for startups from Paul Jozefak.

soundcloud:

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.

"And can US startups learn anything from Europe? How about scaling internationally and working across dev teams between places like Kiev, Paris, London and Estonia? Have you tried that? Or building something in an old culture where failure is looked down on? The new European entrepreneurs – the ones that grew up while Loic was in the Valley – deal with that every day. And you know what? They don’t care."

—

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.

"When neither person has an idea prepackaged with some degree of emotional attachment, it becomes far easier to engage in honest customer development, rapid iteration, and all the other lean processes that will eventually help you find product-market fit."

—

Please, please, please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder. - humbledMBA

Truer words and such. 

(via pheelmore)

Click through, this is a great post.

So You Want A Job At A Startup

So you want to join a startup? That’s awesome, startupland always needs hungry, driven, smart and scrappy women and men to come help out.

Let me rewind a little bit: back in 2009 when Alex was out hustling to raise our series A, things didn’t look too well. I’ll overly simplify here but pretty much every VC back then said: “Dude, cool glasses and a nice SoundCloud leather jacket and all but have a look at what’s happening out there [remember the climate in 2008/9?]; thanks but no thanks, we’ll pass.”

The only currency at Alex’s disposal to attract people to join SoundCloud during this gut-wrenching process was a beautiful product he and his core team built, thousands of people engaged in a growing community, an incredible sense of leadership and a bold vision. 

For those of us who joined back then, that was enough to jump off the cliff and take a leap of faith. There was little to no talk about pay checks, stock options, exits or valuation.* 

Lately, I’ve read an increasing amount of blog posts and tweets about job seekers wanting to join a startup. In general I think that’s awesome and I’m excited to see more and more people open to join a startup rather than a big corporation or the financial sector. 

With a revival of tech IPO’s and the club of billion dollar companies lately growing almost weekly, it’s natural that tech startups have started again to become an attractive alternative to other traditional career paths. Which is good. 

However, something that I believe is important to mention, is that dynamics in a startup (early and even later stage) are very very different and that aside from the traits described above, having the right mindset and personality plays a big role. Who knows what macro-economic challenges we’re facing that we’re not considering today? The 2008/9 crisis wasn’t our crisis but surely affected us when raising the A round. 

Are you in it for the good times or do you have the right personality to stick with the team when the shit hits the fan?

Need some tips when applying for a startup job? Check the links at the end of this post.

* I’m not saying this isn’t an important topic to address, what I’m saying is that it shouldn’t be the first or single reason you want to join a startup.

"Entrepreneurs gonna entrepreneur. I have a new startup! We are building something consumer-facing, something social — all the things I love best — for optimal founder-market fit!. It’s crazy times in the Valley and while I prefer doing startups when the going’s tough, money is scarce, and engineers are unemployed — the best time to start a company is always two years ago, and the next best time is now. So now it is."

— Flickr and Hunch Co-Founder Caterina Fake Onto a New Start-up - Liz Gannes - Social - AllThingsD