Leigh Winter Martin @leighmartin - Tumblr Blog

Hey UrbanSitter, how about a White Flag button?

It usually hits on a Sunday. Whether you’ve just hit max on your whining threshold, or have been flying solo because your partner has had to work all weekend, all of a sudden a wave crashes over you.

Fuuuuuck. Why didn’t I line up a sitter?

It’s that moment when you would give anything to have a sitter show up and take them off your hands for a few hours.

You want to wave the white flag and surrender.

So how about it, UrbanSitter?

How it could work:

After you’ve used a sitter, you mark in your profile whether or not you want them added to your White Flag list (sitters also opt in/out for White Flag alerts)

When desperation sets in, you open the UrbanSitter app and hit the White Flag button

A notification goes out to all the sitters on your White Flag list

If a sitter is free and wants the immediate work, they can reply to accept the job

May want to geo-bound the list to an area where a sitter could get to a White Flag job within 30 minutes

You could also do the notifications in reverse, with a favorite sitter throwing parents an optional lifeline

Instant relief for parents. More jobs for sitters. And from a business perspective, it acts as an incentive for parents to post more jobs in order to build up a big enough list to make this killer feature work for them.

Thoughts?

#urbansitter #parenting

Key Takeaways from the NewsCred #ThinkContent Tour SF

I’m a little delayed on this, but wanted to capture and share some of the best takeaways from this awesome event.

The New Consumer: How Understanding Consumer Behavior Can Help Connect You To Your Audience

Cenk Bulbul, Head of Strategy & Insights, Ads Marketing, YouTube

Consumer needs are…immediate, purposeful, personal

Content should be…informative, authentic, original

Model for thinking about how your content maps across the customer journey:

Hero – entertain and inspire

Hub – regularly updated destination with valuable content

Help – answers to consumer question

Good to know: lots of data available at www.thinkwithgoogle.com/youtube-insights

Speaking To Millennials: Why It Matters & Strategies For Success

I initially wrote this session title as “Speaking with Millenials” which in retrospect probably would have been a more accurate participle to choose. Anyway, this was a panel discussion with Hamilton Brown from Taco Bell, Eric Toda from Airbnb, DJ Capobianco from Twitter, Annie Lee from Pinterest, and Eric Oldrin from Instagram, moderated by Sarah Frier from Bloomberg.

Don’t encourage them to story tell, encourage them to story make (have adventures) – Eric Toda, Head of Global Social Marketing, Airbnb

You don’t want to walk into a party and just talk about yourself – Eric TodaThink about grouping users by ethos, not by age - Airbnb has Identity Voyagers, Pioneers, and more

Let people have fun with your brand and poke fun at it – Pinterest highlighted and celebrated “Pinterest fails” Halloween costume attempts

Real-time = a great opportunity to deliver value to your users, and capture great everyday moments that can be turned into future content – Airbnb sent a helicopter for a stranded user whose lodging fell through

The Era of Amplification and Personalization

Jason Miller, Senior Manager, Global Content Marketing Solutions, LinkedIn

Highlight of the day for me. Beyond the great content marketing advice, this was a master class on how to give a kickass presentation while also cementing a distinctive personal brand. His blend of content marketing expertise with metal/rock gods (exploding pie charts, anyone?!?) was memorable, valuable and fun. Some choice takeaways:

When did we all forget to be interesting?

Be the best answer to the question on your customer’s mind

Content marketing is easy; being interesting is not

Repurpose content like leftover turkey – start with a Big Rock, then lift/repurpose to create turkey slices

Big Things Happen When Content Meets Data

Peter Krmpotic, Senior Product Manager, Adobe Experience Manager

This was primarily a discussion about how channel proliferation drives a need for tools to help manage it all. Biggest takeaway for me was a model for thinking about making messages channel-specific.

SENDER-->(pre-production)-->MESSAGE-->(production)-->CHANNEL-->(delivery)-->RECEIVER

How to Plan & Build Your Content Marketing Strategy

Liz Bedor, Content Marketing Strategist, NewsCred

A great walkthrough of their model – you can check it out on SlideShare, so just a few points here.

Love this quote: “We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” – Craig Davis

Content is currency, something you can give customers

Calculate the cost of unused content, steal budget from underperforming content

Go back to basics and answer your customers’ questions – be helpful! A good slide/framework for working through this:

Persona --> Stage --> Questions/Concerns --> Keywords

Then evaluate if you have content that answers those questions and will rank for the corresponding keywords – and if not, build it

Redefining the Rules of Marketing

Shafqat Islam, Co-Founder & CEO, NewsCred

I’ll just wrap with one takeaway here, which pretty much sums it all up:

“If you think your product is the thing you sell, you will be disrupted. Your product is the customer experience.”

Great event – if you are in London or Chicago see if you can request an invite to their upcoming stops on the #ThinkContent tour!

#newscred #thinkcontent #content marketing

Visiting the WWII Memorial

Normally when I visit monuments or historical sites I don’t like having random people in my pictures. Like at Machu Picchu, I want to imagine myself back in history, without all of the other tourists there. I’d wait for people to pass by, or try to crop shots in a way that cuts them out.

But Saturday I had an entirely different experience, visiting the World War II memorial in Washington DC. We had driven by it two nights earlier on an evening bus tour of the monuments, so I was like, I’ve seen it already but sure, let’s go. There are swarms of people of course, and I thought, well no use trying to get a clear picture of anything here.

But then I started looking at the people, not the monument. And the floodgates opened. All walks of life. Young, old, black, white. So many veterans, some in wheelchairs, others defiantly walking and pushing their own empty wheelchairs. A group of 50+ veterans from Southern Indiana gathered for a group picture in front of the fountains, each holding pictures of themselves when they were young.

It’s hard to visit Washington DC without feeling a heightened sense of national pride. Often it’s seeing the monuments that does that for me. This time it was opening my eyes to my fellow Americans. Good reminder to let people in.

#wwii memorial

A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for

William Shedd

#bebold #don't be boring

You have a choice to make. You now have a Williams degree, which is your ticket to success and comfort. You can wring your hands over the sad state of affairs [in the world] or you can become part of the crusade for continuous change. You can reap the benefits of the sacrifices of those who have gone on before you, or you can honor the memory of those on whose shoulders you stand today and help build a better tomorrow. I suggest that you have no choice at all. In fact, when you enrolled at Williams, you already cast your vote. This noble institution does not graduate people content to sit on the sidelines.

Adam Falk, Williams Commencement 2015

jeollado

leighmartin

beautiful...and now i’m hungry

1300 year old business...imagine the pressure this daughter must feel not wanting to take it over but 1300 years tho

#houshi

10 Marketing Ideas for Sprig

The startups I tend to get really excited about these days are solving one of two problems: “Making Life Easier” or “Making Life More Fun.”

Sprig is tackling both of those problems in the most delicious and delightful way possible. The food is great, but it’s the experience that sticks with you long after. Memorably easy. Faster and healthier than other delivery options. And at the core, both the food and the experience pay off the same need: Be good to yourself.

Huge potential, and just a fun business to think about. Here are ten ideas (based on no real data, because I don’t work there*):

New Customers

1. Revamp the Referral – Something about the code “MARTIN5507” just doesn’t feel natural on social media. Yes, I want to tell my friends about Sprig, but in an authentic way. Why can’t your referral code just be your Twitter handle? “Hey mention my name” feels a lot more natural than “Hey use this code.” Or what if we move the referral bonus to after the sale? Make it part of the feedback screen, where first-timers are asked after the order to thank a friend and treat them to a free meal.

2. Pinterest Buy Button – As Pinterest rolls out its new Buy button, why should Instacart have all the fun? Would need to think this one through in terms of how we align it to meal availability, but would be interesting to test the option to Order Now outside of the app.

Buy More, Buy More Often

3. Big Sprig – Essentially a family size option for certain fan favorites.

4. Alert when a Favorite is back on the menu – Pretty self explanatory, but could be made seamless for the customer if there’s a way to auto-create a Favorites list based on feedback ratings (or even Pins/Tweets/Likes somehow?).

5. Golden Spriget – A Golden Ticket—or Spriget—is inserted into a handful of orders, customers can cash it in for a month of free delivery.

6. Loyalty Program – Pretty straightforward but not currently in play, worth considering, get a free meal after x number of meals ordered.

7. $10 Tuesday / Free Delivery Friday – Again pretty straightforward, and this one would be contingent on studying traffic patterns to see if there’s a low day/time to target to stimulate orders.

8. Tweet of the Day / Sprig Selfies – Give a free meal to one @Sprig/#Sprig tweet each day, hypothesis is that the ROI in repeat purchases and word of mouth will be worth it.

For the Love of Sprig

9. Donate your Cutlery – Similar to the Whole Foods option to donate the nickel when you bring your own bag, give customers the option to set “no cutlery” as their default for Home delivery and donate a small portion of each order to a food-oriented cause.

10. So Easy / So Good – Just a sprig of an idea at this point, but in thinking about the key value prop of Sprig, I can see some people falling on the side of simplicity, others falling on the side of good food. Potentially this era’s “Less Filling / Tastes Great.”

*Yet

#sprig #marketing

So You’re Saying There’s A Chance

There’s one day a year when you have the chance to be right. Not just right, but righter than almost anyone has EVER been.

I’m talking of course about the first day of March Madness. A pristine bracket lay before you with 63 chances to be right. (yes 63, stop trying to make the play-in round happen)

It doesn’t matter that you know it won’t really happen. There’s still that sliver of a what-if. What if I get one right, and then another, and another, and as they say in Dumb and Dumber, “so you’re saying there’s a chance!” The hope and anticipation is electric.

I was lucky enough to be born Joe Winter’s daughter. And that meant that the best Christmas presents as my brother and I got older were simple sheets of white printer paper, maybe in a binder, wrapped up in a Nordstrom box. And printed on those sheets of paper in large Times New Roman font were those magic words…”You are the recipient of a [year] sports package!” Red Sox tickets for the daughter in Boston, Cubs tickets for the son in Chicago. The Breeders Cup one year, the U.S. Open the next, the Kentucky Derby. The freaking Super Bowl, are you kidding me?!?!?

Beyond the joy and privilege of experiencing these events themselves, the unforgettable moments of my sporting life encapsulate the feelings I aspire to in the rest of my life.

I was at the Final Four in Indianapolis the year that Butler came up a rim bounce short of an epic upset win in the Championship game. The tension, the hope, the electricity was palpable.

I’ve sat in the Rose Bowl the moments before kickoff with the late afternoon sun giving my hometown San Gabriel Mountains that picture-perfect warm glow, backed by the perfect soundtrack of 100,000 excited fans, and literally been brought to tears.

I’ve sat in the Superdome when the blackout pressed pause on Super Bowl XLVII, before the 49ers mounted an almost-epic comeback.

And there’s that feeling again, that high. A shared experience of the unexpected. A sense of being a part of something bigger than you, history in the making. The feeling of community, optimism, anticipation that makes your whole body buzz.

So as my bracket takes flight this morning, my hopes for it echo what I’m looking for in life – the chance to be right, both in terms of intellect and integrity, and the chance to be electric.

Good luck to all, and here’s to March Madness!

#march madness

Reunion and All the Feels

I love reunions. My favorite things in the world—good friends, laughter, and photography—blended together in one adrenaline-high of a weekend. Poly, Williams, and Chicago all made me who I am, and those communities remain the most treasured to me.

Reunions can bring out a lot of feelings. Excitement about seeing friends and reliving good memories and good times. The requisite “holy shit we are old” moment. And a bit of reflection: Are we where we thought we would be at this point in our lives?

As we ramp up towards our 10th b-school reunion, consider two classmates’ state of affairs.

Chicago Booth Grad A: Four promotions. Making more than 2x the money since first position post-graduation. Got married, had three healthy, adorable boys. Sojourns to Fiji and Paris, and semi-regular trips to Hawaii. Volunteer leader for leading higher educational institutions.

Chicago Booth Grad B: Desperately unhappy in current job. Reads about classmates starting companies, classmates with titles like VP, SVP, CEO and feels woefully unaccomplished. Wonders where she went wrong and how she can course correct to get back to achieving what she set out to upon leaving Booth.

Who is more successful?

Now, fans of Matthew Berry know where this is headed: A and B are the same person. Me.

I’ve got excuses and reasons by the bushel. Thinking well I’ll be pregnant any day now so I shouldn’t start a search now, and having that turn into an emotionally draining multi-year journey. The fatigue of new motherhood delaying the search for just a little longer. And I mean, it’s good for one of us to be stable and corporate while my husband takes a position at a startup. Another year passes. I just had twins, I shouldn’t be so hard on myself!

So I will be at reunion, and I will be smiling, and I will genuinely be so, so happy to see you. I will show pictures of my three adorable boys, and re-tell funny stories. I’ll tell you about our delicious home brew, and you’ll think that’s pretty cool. I’ll steer the conversation away from my career and back to yours. I’ll say I’m unhappy in my job and you’ll say “but look what a beautiful family you’ve built.” And I have, and that is certainly my most prized accomplishment.

Except it’s not enough. I came to Chicago because I set out to achieve something remarkable in the world of business. And I haven’t lived up to my end of the bargain. Yet.

But one of these reunions, I will stand before you and tell you about something I am proud of in my career, something I have built. I won’t hide behind stories about my kids and our latest vacation (that’s what Facebook is for). I owe it to myself, and I owe it to our community, to the next generation of Booth grads who I’d like to hire someday.

There is still time for me to write a new chapter. There has to be.

So if you feel like you are nowhere near where you wanted to be in your career, 1) you are not alone, and 2) well of course you feel that way! We are a group of talented over-achievers who have only just started to make our mark on the world.

Looking forward to reconnecting and getting re-inspired at reunion.

#reunion #chicago booth

Back to Chicago

I'm back in Chicago today for the first time since you've been gone. It's weird without you here. You were the first I would race to see after landing at O'Hare, the one I would take new friends to meet. I know you had to move on but it doesn't make it any easier. I miss your creativity, your genius, your warmth. And most of all, I miss your delicious hot dogs. A belated farewell, Hot Doug's. You were my Chicago.

#chicago #hotdougs

jmonegro

Deep Web Marketplaces

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been frequenting the deep web marketplaces most famously used for buying drugs online with Bitcoin.

I wanted to see if there was anything we could learn about how these illicit marketplaces work that could be applied to improve the legal marketplaces we invest in at USV.

As part of my research, I purchased an item on Evolution (no, not drugs – a pair of furry boots) in an effort to understand the dynamics of these marketplaces, from trust and safety to flow of funds. This is what I learned in the process.

leighmartin

Fascinating read on deep web / dark web

Great lecture by Paul Graham on startups

"If you think of technology as something that's spreading like a sort of fractal stain, every moving point on the edge represents an interesting problem. So one guaranteed way to turn your mind into the type that has good startup ideas is to get yourself to the leading edge of some technology"

#startups

Kendall Payne has Two Mouths

I love the moments where you can practically see the synapses firing and forming connections in my 2.5-year-old's brain.

B and I are driving in the car and Kendall Payne's "The Moon" is playing on my iPhone (a temporary change of pace from our usual repertoire of Frozen and audiobooks). He asks who is singing the song, and I say Kendall Payne. Something about the song sits right with him, so he's asking for it over and over again.

B: Does she have two mouths? Or only one mouth?

What? At first I thought it was just a wild imagination. Then I realize he's reacting to the harmony and trying to figure out how on Earth she is doing that with just one mouth. So maybe she has two mouths! (Before I sold him on the idea that maybe it's Kendall Payne and her friend, he was perfectly accepting of this answer to the mystery, saying matter-of-factly, "Kendall Payne has two mouths.")

Seeing his mind untangle things like this is one of the more amazing things about being a parent.

Good song by the way...

#kendall payne #kids are amazing

How to Raise a Bears Fan

B: “Hi, Brandon Marshall, what are you doing? Playing football? Ok bye.”

We have a little 3-player (QB/WR/RB) TD only fantasy football leage in our family, and this year my 2 1/2 year old picked Brandon Marshall as his wide receiver. Mostly because "Marshall" sounds a lot like "marshmallow" (his RB is Marshawn Lynch, giving him the 1-2 marshmallow brothers punch).

So this past Sunday night was the Bears-49ers game - a big game in our family as I'm a lifelong diehard Bears fan and my husband is a 49ers fan, and we are both vying for our team to capture the heart of our little guy.

Now, I know I'm a longshot in this quest. We live in the Bay Area and had season tickets for the past six years until the new stadium priced us out.

I wasn't counting on much. The past two times the Bears have visited the 49ers I've been there in person for the misery. The Jay Cutler 5-INT game in 2009. The battle-of-the-backups in 2012 that saw Colin Kaepernick emerge as a star (and Jason Campbell, well, not). I expected heartbreak once again.

Blocked punt? Of course. Down 17-0? Yep. But then there we were, watching Brandon Marshall score a touchdown. And then another one.

B: "Where’s Brandon Marshall?"

Me: "He’s sitting on the bench now, but in a few minutes he’ll come back and score some more touchdowns."

And then he did! Man, if only B were a few years older, this would be the kind of memory that would be seared into his memory and lock him in as a Bears fan for life.

But for now, I'll settle for a nightly game of B running around the house saying "I'm Brandon Marshall. You can be Brandon Marshall, too. We have two Brandon Marshalls. Touchdown!!!"

#chicago bears #fantasy #football #brandon marshall

Testing out adding "gif" to any YouTube video to make it a GIF. (www.gifyoutube.com)

Answer (1 of 41): Move your startup to Morocco! I'm a co-founder at Maptia and after we graduated from the TechStars Seattle program at the end of last year, our team's temporary U.S. visas expired, and so we were forced to re-locate away from the States. Being three British co-founders, London...

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