‘I like doing a bit of everything but I do specifically like the people part of things — working on partnerships and networking and expanding your reach.’ – Alexandra Cote

Here’s what John got into with Alexandra this week on Ship it and Sip it:

• How should founders prioritise their marketing approach at an early stage?


• Which channel works best for early-stage startups?


• What you can do to differentiate both your brand and content 🚀


• How to measure and structure marketing experiments ⚖️

And we broke down go-to-market strategies for founders at three levels:

1. Those with a large engaged audience and deep industry expertise


2. Those with deep industry expertise but a small or simply personal social audience


3. And those with not so much expertise and no social/web presence.

No matter where you’re at as a founder, Alexandra’s advice for growth marketing can be put to use today💡



With examples from Wynter, Notion, Typescript Pitch and more 🤩

‘I'll tell you honestly, any channel can work for you. Any tactic — the newsletter, the podcast, the blog, whatever — as long you can tie it to your target audience's pain points.’



Follow Alexandra on Twitter and catch her newsletter: twitter.com/cotealexandra11

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com

"It's normal … this imposter syndrome is never really going to go away — you just learn to dance with it better." – Jasna Klemenc Puntar.  



For this episode of Ship it and Sip it, we went remote and talked with Jasna about how to make the most of e-networking and professional branding.   

Any founders (or anyone) who want #BuildInPublic can learn:  

👤 How to create an appealing profile and digital reputation

🚀 Why startup founders AND teammates help brand positioning

🤝 Where to meet people to grow your e-network  



This is part one of our collaboration with Jasna — on March 24th she'll host a webinar with us to dive deeper into LinkedIn best practices for startups, founders, and all of us.   

Get your questions ready and sign up here!



"If you never ship anything, if you never publish anything, you're never gonna get there. This is the trick — do it and think, do it and think. There's a lot of doing involved."



Visit our website to learn more about🔗:  

Paralect https://www.paralect.com/  

Paralect Accelerator https://accelerator.paralect.com/

Subscribe to our social networks✔️

Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/para...  

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/paralectcom/  

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/paralect  

Twitter    https://twitter.com/paralect

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com

"This team will be experts who can do everything on their own — essentially, founders are getting a cool service that is working better and faster." – Art Garadecky

Better and faster is Art's thing. This week on Ship it and Sip it, he and John dive into:

🤖 Sales and lead-gen automation

💡 Improving the problem and idea validation process

🛠 Building skills on internal products for our community

And what he's learned about effective outreach across a variety of channels and contexts.

"The most important part for me is understanding your target audience, why they're interested in your product. It's hard at the beginning when you have just an idea — I think it's all about the people and their use cases."

Visit our website to learn more about🔗:  

Paralect https://www.paralect.com

Paralect Accelerator https://accelerator.paralect.com

Subscribe to our social networks✔️

Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/company/para...  

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/paralectcom/  

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/paralect  

Twitter    https://twitter.com/paralect

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com

"You should understand the target audience, their psychology — how they see you and look at you as a brand." – Helen, Designer at Paralect

No matter what your startup or small business or established company sells, compelling visual design is a must-have.

This week on Ship it and Sip it, John and Helen explore the challenges and opportunities in modern brand design — find out:

🤩 Where she finds inspiration when creativity lags

💡 How new startups should create an engaging visual presence

👏 Which brands she thinks get their design right consistently

And which of today's trends she's not a fan of 👎

Helen's creativity can be seen all over our feed and her latest Bëhance project with Cinema 4D highlights the progress she's made just over the last few months 💪

Find out what drives her passion for design in the full interview!



Mentioned:

• Helen's latest Bëhance project


• DEIP World


• The Breakfast App

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com

Ever wonder how venture capital funds analyse startups and decide which ones they back 🧐

"Startups are making a lot of common mistakes … the key reasons for investing are the team, exit strategy, business model, problem they are trying to solve, and their competitive advantage is extremely important." – Michail Lapidus, Business Analyst at Paralect

John brought one of our newest team members to kick off Season 2 of Ship it and Sip it 🚀

After 5 years of analysing startups for a VC fund Michail shares his insights around:

💡 What factors VCs really focus on

🐑 Why VCs seem to have such a herd mentality

🤔 How founders without a strong VC network can get seen

And why he's excited to be working in a product team after all he's seen from the venture side 💪

Check it out and subscribe on Youtube or your favorite podcast provider to catch all the new episodes of Ship it and Sip it!



----

Mentioned:

paralect.studio 

deip.world

Startup World Cup

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com

Today's episode of Ship it and Sip it is one of the most unusual.

🗓 Firstly, this is the final episode of the first season of the show. But don't worry! Season 2 will launch in 2022 and that's right around the corner.

🤫 Secondly, in this episode, we turned the tables with a guest host and pulled questions from all the guests we've had so far in season 1.

⚡️ And thirdly, you'll get to know what John McTavish loves at Paralect and what plans he has as a Head of Content for the near future.

Listen to the new episode and enjoy🍿

Visit our website to learn more about:  

Paralect www.paralect.com

Paralect Accelerator accelerator.paralect.com



Subscribe to our social networks✔️

Linkedin linkedin.com/company/paralect

Instagram instagram.com/paralectcom

Facebook facebook.com/paralect  

Twitter    twitter.com/paralect

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com

“Paralect Venture Studio is an organization that systematically builds, launches, grows, and funds new startups, using our internal resources, network, and expertise. I think that in the near future, we will become more product-oriented, rather than just technically-oriented.” – Pavel Prata, Managing Director at Paralect

🚀 Paralect Launch Ecosystem — what does it mean?

💥 What makes Paralect Accelerator different from other accelerators?

🔜 How are we planning to improve our go-to-market campaigns?

🪄 What does the transformation to the Venture Studio mean to the company?

🦄 ProductLab. What are the interim results?

Listen to the new episode of Ship it and Sip it and learn the answers to all these questions 🙌🏼

Enjoy the show 🍻



Visit our website to learn more about:  

Paralect www.paralect.com

Paralect Accelerator accelerator.paralect.com



Subscribe to our social networks✔️

Linkedin linkedin.com/company/paralect

Instagram instagram.com/paralectcom

Facebook facebook.com/paralect  

Twitter    twitter.com/paralect

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com

What's it take to build a high-quality product?

"You should find a very good team and you should invest in building a strong relationship within the team … If you have a good team with good communication, they can solve anything." – Natalia Puzikova, Head of QA Department

This week on Ship it and Sip it, we took a deep dive into quality assurance for startup products 🔎

Natalia told us all about:

🧐 Why professional pessimism makes QAs great team members

👉 What fintech teams should do to make reliable apps from day 1

🤖 When product teams benefit from automated testing

🤝 How new QAs learn via mentorship and grow through their career

If you're keen to understand how important communication really is within a product team and what the decision-making process really looks like, this episode is for you 🙌

"We're just sitting and brainstorming together how it's better to do this feature so that everyone is happy — the developers are happy, the product owners are happy and we're happy." – Natalia

Enjoy the show 🍻



Visit our website to learn more about:  

Paralect www.paralect.com

Paralect Accelerator accelerator.paralect.com   



Subscribe to our social networks✔️  

Linkedin linkedin.com/company/paralect

Instagram instagram.com/paralectcom

Facebook facebook.com/paralect    

Twitter    twitter.com/paralect

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com

"To make it super simple, it's like building something out of constructor blocks. It’s just a game for a boy — the boy just grew up and the game has changed.” – Sergey Lukashov

👉 Want to know more about .NET development?

🚑 Or building a healthtech product?

🔏 Or understand HIPAA compliance?

Then this episode of Ship it and Sip it is just for you.

Over his 5+ years at Paralect, Sergey has led our engineering team on the health tech SaaS platform that achieved a billion+ dollar exit earlier this year 🙌

And he's grown into the leader of Paralect's .NET division.

“You’re working on a project that helps real people. By helps, I mean — it touches health. So feeling that what you’ve done may help somebody else on the other side of the sea to get healthy — to make their mental health better — is just cool.”

Grab your drink of choice and enjoy the show 🍻



Mentioned:

join.paralect.com

visxa.com

withanudge.com

ship.paralect.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com

"Unlike the current economic model where it's the capital in the center, we put the creator in the center of the model."

Meet Alex Shkor — CEO of Vedai: education crowd investing platform and DEIP — Creator Economy Protocol.

In this interview Alex told us about:

🔹the transformation from CTO at Paralect to CEO at DEIP and Veda

🔹updates and upcoming events of Vedai and DEIP

🔹NFTs and the evolution of the blockchain space

🔹his attitude to Paralect Accelerator

🔹Web3 Academy — an educational course, launched together with Paralect.

📚Web3 Academy gives young developers the opportunity to quickly onboard into Web3 spaces and finds a job among Vedai partners.

“Web3 academy is a Bootcamp we are launching in Warsaw together with Paralect. Paralect is a crucial partner for Web3 Academy because of the experience with Startup Summer” — Alex.



Links:

www.deip.world

www.vedai.org

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shipandsip.substack.com