Public Relations Advice and Innovative Marketing Strategies From Today's Small Business Leaders. What Startups Should Know About Public Relations. Many startups or emerging businesses can benefit from an investment in public relations.
It’s a cutthroat world out there, with all manner of new and fast-growing companies competing fiercely for media and investor attention. Most entrepreneurs realize that a well-focused PR program can help drive visibility, highlight what makes the business or its products different, and even generate business. But not all entrepreneurial businesses have the right stuff – both monetary and human resources – to commit to a PR strategy or program.
An obvious answer is to hire a PR firm, but in some cases it’s premature, both for economic reasons and because the effort needs to scale gradually, as the business does. And there is a vocal minority of founders – most notably, Mark Cuban – who feel the task is better suited to the CEO. Why Startups Shouldn’t Hire PR Firms. A quote from my book, How to Win at the Sport of Business got picked up in multiple stories.
In the book I stated effectively that “Startups should never hire a PR firm”. As you would expect, the PR Industry was not over-joyed at the comment. How To Hack Your Startup’s PR Strategy. Oh Sh*t!
There’s only a few weeks left until you launch your product to the world and you haven’t spent any time on PR. Now you know to get press, don’t pitch your product and you understand what PR agencies do – but you still have no clue what steps you need to take to make it all happen?! Alan Weinkrantz is one of Clarity’s most knowledgeable experts when it comes to breaking down the overwhelming process of PR. What makes him so great? He continues to mentor/advise leading accelerators in the U.S., Israel, Palestine and Latin AmericaHe spoke at SXSW 2013, Google Israel, and Dad 2.0 SummitHas been mentioned for his advice in notable business forums like Forbes, San Antonio Business Journal and Good Morning America The article below, by Alan Weinkrantz, shows how to hack your startup’s public relations initiative in five key steps.
I am of the belief that PR should be part of your development and marketing strategy. Early on, PR is not about getting coverage. When To Start. Want to be an entrepreneur? First, ask yourself these five questions. I’m fairly entrepreneurial, having started a few businesses that have made me well off enough that I can now pursue my personal mission, which is to be of meaningful help to my people without expectation of financial reward.
Who are “my people?” Over-educated Westerners. My people know a lot about a lot, but often little about themselves. For nearly a decade I’ve been studying what it takes to be of good character, what constitutes a robust personal philosophy, and how to have a meaningful life. I’ve come up with 54 questions that you can ask yourself and I’ve put them all on Q54Club.org. 1.
Funders and Founders - Visual Startup Blog. Think Like an Entrepreneur - Creative Line Of Thinking Illustrated. How does one learn to think?
If you get lost, here is a line of thinking map. “Forget everything you learned,” they told me on the first day of law school. Three years and $150,000 later they erased from my mind all the half-truths I learned from school and my family. They were not teaching law, they acknowledged, they were teaching thinking. As an entrepreneur, you, too, have to relearn everything from scratch. As much as it seemed like a ripoff back in law school, I later realized knowing how to think is the most valuable thing. I was riding the New York subway a couple of years ago. How Startup Valuation Works - Illustrated. How would you measure the value of a company?
Especially, a company that you started a month ago – how do you determine startup valuation? That is the question you will be asking yourself when you look for money for your company. Create an infographic timeline like this on Adioma Let’s lay down the basics. Valuation is simply the value of a company. Funders and Founders - Visual Startup Blog. How Funding Works - Splitting The Equity With Investors - Infographic. A hypothetical startup will get about $15,000 from family and friends, about $200,000 from an angel investor three months later, and about $2 Million from a VC another six months later.
If all goes well. See how funding works in this infographic: First, let’s figure out why we are talking about funding as something you need to do. This is not a given. The opposite of funding is “bootstrapping,” the process of funding a startup through your own savings. If you know the basics of how funding works, skim to the end. Every time you get funding, you give up a piece of your company. Splitting the Pie The basic idea behind equity is the splitting of a pie. When Google went public, Larry and Sergey had about 15% of the pie, each.