56% of startups fail in Canada in the first year
Is it because of bad management teams? Because of lack of money? Because the business model was poor?
It turns out the most important reason why a company fails in the first year is that it lacks a product which a large-enough market wants. A product that only fixes a problem for a small number of people or businesses … or basically NOT HAVING ENOUGH CUSTOMERS.
What we do for you:
We help you find the “big” market, find the key points in your service or product that you need to develop, we build that relationship with your customer and we tune the entire go-to-market strategy to maximize your returns in your first year.
How do we do it?
There are some basics you need to do to help yourself out.
- If you are a Business selling to other Businesses (B2B):
- get a Website with a thought-out name based on your product or brand
- get a LinkedIn company page and get your employees to state they work there
- get a MailChimp account and get your customers to agree to get a newsletter from you
- build a year long content strategy that helps your customers for knowing you, and explains how your products and services will help them
- If you are a Business selling directly to Consumers (B2C):
- Do all of the above, and
- Get a Facebook company page, Twitter company account, and an Instagram account.
- In both B2B and B2C setup web activity logging with Google Analytics and turn on your own metrics.
- Have the management team spruce up their LinkedIn profiles with useful, industry leading information, comment in sections of posts where your customers hand out.
- Build a profile of your buyer and how they will journey from discovery to purchase
- Use a Customer Relationship Management tool like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, or SuiteCRM.
- Test your metrics along the entire journey, and improve the worst performing sections.
… you’re welcome!
We’ll give you a couple of weeks to try this stuff on your own …
Intro Package
For true startups only. We seed your thinking with our guess on: who your buyer is, when they search for your product, what brands they encounter on the way, what brands are successful and why, and finally we give you our take on what to do with your brand, how to interrupt your customer to buy from you, and a guess on your market size at the city level.
PR Package
Get your first press release out there! The Package includes an interview with you for your big announcement, finding a list of consumers for the announcement, authoring the release with your target audience in mind, and releasing it. The desired result is your readers getting back to you to write about your announcement.
Branding Package
Our experience with start-ups, our database with corporate profiles, our data sets of online users, a bunch of self-learning algorithms, customer surveys and some luck are thrown into a bag. We shake it all up and we tell you what brand, promise, colours, and messaging will work with your customers. The outcome is input to your strategy package.
Customer Package
We speak with your customers and find out how good (or bad) you are. We do this in person, online, or through the mail (or some combination of these). We start with a customer profile. This includes a needs assessment, a buying habit and a purchase preference. The outcome is input to your branding package, your pricing package, or your service package.
Social Presence Package
We setup your company pages on LinkedIn, Facebook and your Twitter account. We choose messaging, icons and images from your branding package. We setup Pinterest and Instagram based on where your customer is. We polish everything up and hand it over to you with a suggested usage schedule based on when your users are online.
Content Writing Package
We setup and manage your blog. We build a meaningful collection of articles for your buyers consumption, schedule them throughout the year, time their release, distribute them on the social sites you have setup and sit back and watch the customers roll in! Then we capture them visiting your site, capture who they are and find more of them.