#13p5

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Why Audience Building is the Key to a Successful Startup

The real, tested value of building and engaging with an online audience

Derek Halpern of SocialTriggers was able to make $46,398 in 10 days. How did he do it? By building an audience. There was a time when advertisers with big budgets could buy people’s attention and get them to buy any product. These days—in this digital era of ours—that is no longer true. And that’s great. Any startup can take over the space with a great idea, but that also means that there are an incredible amount of ideas overloading the market at any given time.

With so much information flying around, people’s attention is more valuable than ever, and it’s not so easily bought anymore. You need to build an audience and you need to do it by providing content that people love to engage with.

Derek’s audience is huge with hundreds of thousands of subscribers to his blog. You can’t really anticipate that kind of success, especially when you’re just getting started, but luckily you don’t need anything remotely like that to make your audience the most powerful part of your business. Your audience is more than just an engaged customer—though that element shouldn’t be discounted. They are the lynch pin that will help you create products that people want, retain and find new customers, and build a brand that has lasting impact.

Your audience can help you build a better product

The much-discussed lean startup methodology leverages your audience and their feedback to help you build a better product. The concept of creating the “minimum viable product” (MVP) and getting it out there as quickly as possible is central, but this idea is just as applicable when it comes to creating the “minimum viable audience” (MVA). To have that all-important feedback loop, you need people to bounce your ideas off of, but it doesn’t take an audience the size of Derek’s to make that possible.

An MVA is more than just a source to know what your customers want to buy. For digital entrepreneurs in particular, finding your MVA gives you a number of distinct advantages if you know how to recognize them and put them to work.

Some of those benefits are very much in line with what the lean startup methodology promises. Your MVA can serve as the most organic form of market research imaginable. You are communicating with real people with real opinions by way of your product and they will help to you get a better sense of what the market wants. They will also help you build a better product faster. You can be more transparent with your MVA, who are those early adopters that want to see you succeed. With your goals and intentions clearly expressed, they can help you tune your product quickly and efficiently without unhelpful criticism.

Your audience can help you find new customers

Your MVA can also help to locate new customers and continue to build your audience further. If your audience is engaged enough that they are giving you feedback to improve your product and interacting with your content, then they become invested in the success of that product and your content. Leveraging that feeling and making them as much of a part of the experience as possible will turn your already engaged customers into evangelists for your brand. That kind of word of mouth marketing is your most powerful resource for spreading the word.

Your audience can you help you build your brand

When you start out with an idea and some sense of what you want your business to be, all the details aren’t always clear. You learn a lot along the way and adjust accordingly and that’s great, but you can’t do that without the all-important MVA and the feedback they provide. If you let yourself get trapped in an echo chamber then you’ll have no sense of how your audience sees you. Their opinions are crucial when it comes to identifying what your company does and what it is. They can clarify your vision, help you identify the values that matter most to your business, and keep your mission on course. In short, your audience is the key to building a strong brand if you invite them in.

Your audience can do so much more

The power an audience can have on business doesn’t even stop there. If you are committed to building an audience, you engage them every day, and you create excellent content that speaks to their interests, then the possibilities are infinite. You can follow in Derek Halpern’s footsteps and monetize them directly. Audience growth often leads to user growth and that leads to a better valuation and the chance at getting investors attention. So long as you are putting audience building first, success is only so far away.

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6 Ways to Gain Respect as a Young Entrepreneur

The great thing about the startup space today is that anyone with a great idea can break in, but if you want to build a long-term, sustainable business, it helps to have the respect of everyone around you. Your customers, your team, your investors, and your clients all need to believe in your ability to do the best possible job for them.

This is especially tricky for young entrepreneurs who may be perceived as inexperienced in a position that they haven’t “earned.” Whether any disrespect you might receive is fueled by jealousy or other negative emotions, it always pays to defy expectations and put your best foot forward. If you want to be the kind of business leader that people believe in, here are 6 ways to make it happen.

1. Be Prepared

Once it’s clear that you will be leading a team, you should start preparing immediately. Demonstrate a keen awareness of the field you are working in as soon as you walk through the door. They’re not lying when they say that the first impressions are key. Be prepared to dress appropriately and speak politely in any given business situation. Many work environments are casual and there’s nothing wrong with encouraging that as a leader, but always be prepared to adjust to whatever a customer or investor might expect. Respect others and you will be respected in turn.

2. Build relationships with your team

You might have some desire to be the enigmatic entrepreneur, secluded and eccentric. That sounds cool, but doesn’t lend itself to a friendly and productive work environment. If you want your team to believe in you then you need to take the time to get to know them personally to build a good working relationship. Show an interest and dissolve any misconceptions that you have an ego before they take root. This not only leads to better communication and workflow, but more respect and people that you can trust in turn.

3. Know your customers

Developing good relationships is just as (if not more) important with your customers as it is with your team. If all your customers know about you is that you are young and relatively new to the business then they might form false conclusions about you. Spend as much time as you can afford on the phone and on email with customers and clients and make sure they know that you can satisfy all of their concerns. This will not only build trust, but it’s also a great way to get a better sense of who your audience is and what they want most out of your product.

4. Listen & Communicate

Don’t let the experience of your team members go to waste. Listen to what they have to say and learn. When you’re just getting started, make sure that you are taking in as much information flow as you can. If there are any blind spots in your knowledge (and chances are there will be a few) then this is an easy fix. This is also the best way to earn the respect of your team. If they see that you take their contributions seriously then they will feel the same about what you have to offer. They will also recognize and respect your quality of character and your willingness to learn and grow when you show genuine interest.

5. Lead by executing

Your team needs to see that you’re ready and willing to get your hands dirty. Show them that you’re capable of executing in every part of your business and they will follow your example. This is also a great way to develop the kind of experience you’re going to need before you can begin sending your team off on their own to do the right kind of work for you. Build a culture of hustle by showing your team how hard you are willing to work. When you make a commitment always follow through and your employees will do the same.

6. Innovate the space

You are uniquely positioned as a new business leader to be a force for change. If people wanted the same old thing then the veterans with years of experience would be better placed to do that job. Respect old strategies, be thorough in your arguments for why a change will make things better, and follow it up with strong actions. Always stay curious, always try to innovate. That is exactly what it takes to stay relevant, push the industry forward, and be a thought leader in your space.

Earning respect isn’t easy, but it’s an incredibly valuable trait to develop that will help in every business pursuit for the duration of your professional career. You might as well start early.

– ZK

[13p5]

Transparency Matters for Startups. Here’s Why

A look at how transparency can bolster your business beyond a simple marketing tactic. 

Transparency is a tricky word with many conflicting associations. Business owners may think of it as nothing more than a buzzword, pushed as a label purely for PR purposes. There’s a school of thought that looks at transparency and sees restrictive measures and an unprofitable business strategy. For these people, transparency is a marketing tool to brand yourself with honesty in mind, but barring that, it doesn’t do anything helpful for your business.

There are others who disagree. There has been a growing movement in the startup world over the last few years that takes transparency seriously and sees real value in applying it to many different component parts of a strong business.

So let’s take a closer look at how these people define it and three core ways to empower your business with a strong commitment to transparency

Feedback when you need it most

Many startups see real value in making transparency a part of their business model. Being transparent with your audience is a core tenant of an incredibly popular and successful business development methodology. The lean startup, the strategy behind some of the most successfulinnovations of the day (Facebook, Spanx, Uber, and AirBNB), encourages companies to invite their audience to be a part of the development process.

Rather than hiding your efforts behind a screen and waiting for feedback only after you’ve released your final product, the lean startup is all about an open-ended development process working within an iterative cycle of building, gauging response, learning, and going back to the drawing board. This degree of transparency leads to better products tailor fit to what your audience is really looking for.

Strong Leadership

A good leader inspires trust and the best way to make that possible is to have a policy of aggressive transparency. The workplace runs more smoothly when uncertainty is eliminated and everyone is working on the same page. Transparency culls rumors before misinformation can confuse and distract. If your team has clear sense of your expectations and what they mean then they can act more quickly and more efficiently.

Companies like Yesware have even found that sharing the concerns of executives to the rest of the team managed to cut down infrastructure costs dramatically (from 60% of their top line to as little as 17%).

Building a culture

Being transparent in your internal comms and your leadership as a whole will help to build astronger company culture as a whole. When team members have a context for what they are doing and a sense of how meaningful their part is in the greater whole then they are more invested and ultimately more productive. Communicating a strong sense of what that whole is, what it will do for your customers, and what part each individual has to play is an incredibly powerful means of uniting your team and getting the kinds of results you want. 

How much is too much?

It’s important to keep in mind that there are limits to transparency and what you should and should not be sharing. For example, sharing compensation levels is usually more harmful than it is helpful. A good rule of thumb is to look at whatever you are being transparent about and identify ways that it has a positive impact on your business. If there aren’t any, then it’s probably not worth sharing. At the end of the day, this is about results and making your company run better, not worse.

Everyone doesn’t need to know everything at all times, but they should have access to information if they want it.  That’s the key factor. Overloading your team with information is far less useful and more distracting than providing them with what they need to know when they need to know it.

How can you be more transparent?

It’s good to know that transparency is a powerful tool in your toolbox, but it’s better to have specific strategies to put those tools to work. Here are some of the best actionable directives for a more transparent and more successful business.

Hold Q&As where team members can get the information that they are looking for.

If you’re having an issue staying afloat, share the data that you have and what the strategy is going forward, not your guesses at the future.

Decentralize the strain and the responsibility. A benefit of transparency is that, if done in the right way, you can delegate and create new leaders to share the load.

Source feedback from your audience as a part of development. There is definite value in checking out the lean startup strategy, especially for tech-based products and services.

If customers see an issue then it’s important to take that feedback seriously. People are better than ever at detecting BS, so an honest show of your intentions and your plan to make their lives better is usually the best way to go. A transparent business model that leverages your audience to build the best kind of product is a proven strategy for great results. Your team works, delegates, and interacts better when you emphasis transparency from the top down. Transparency in your business dealings isn’t just about putting on a good face. If managed the right way, it can lead to real, quantifiable success.

[13p5]

13p5: An odd name

Understanding how to break through early adoption is the point of 13p5

In 1962, Everett Rogers published a book called “Diffusion of Innovations.” He wanted to understand and to explain how new ideas and new technologies spread. Rogers highlighted five categories of potential users. The group known as early adopters made up 13.5% of his curve.

13p5.

Early adopters were the first people to take on new ideas that the innovators had created. Like Rogers, we believe strongly in the value of the early adopter – and in helping our readers reach that most valuable market.

Half a century later and we’re still trying to understand how innovations take hold. New ideas and new technologies are cropping up every day. Finding out why some succeed and others fail stilldominates much discussion. Many people chalk up success to a lucky few who were in the right place at the right time. We disagree. We believe there is a method to the madness of startup success and what we intend to do here is to search out just what makes up that method.

Our intention here is two-fold: We want to aggregate some of the better advice out there for new start-ups looking to get a foothold in their given industry, while also sharing some insights of our own. We hope that by putting more tools at the disposal of people with great ideas, it will help lead to more successes. The second approach is best described as a general effort to discover that fickle formula for success. We hope that by taking a close look at success stories and maybe a few failures too, we can begin to identify winning strategies useful for every person that wants to take their own shot.

One of the mistakes often made by new start-ups is a refusal to learn from the experience of others. It’s easy to write off success as a blind stumble into a hungry market. What we want to do here is learn from even the most seemingly random of successes and to try to pinpoint what they did well that others before them did not.

What we want to do here is learn. And share.

It’s also important to keep in mind that while there are core truths that every start-up should live by, the road to success will not be the same for everyone. Not every market wants the same thing and every market is changing constantly and adopting new interests and new wants. A start-up must always be prepared to pivot and we intend to be just as flexible with solutions tailored to each individual effort by keeping our thumb on the ever-changing pulse of industries.

At its core, start-up success lies with the early adopter, and understanding what it is that makes a particular product worthy of their attention. Once the early adopters are engaged, the process of onboarding is remarkably smoother. Word of mouth, exponential growth, and critical mass. This all stems from that first 13.5 who take an interest.

It’s from that starting point – 13p5 – that we begin our journey. We’re excited to have you as a part of it.

– ZK