Startup Maze

Every entrepreneurs wants to be like them and understand what's their secret sauce. Of course media loves to capitalise on this trend. In this podcast Nav and I give our opinions about how you should approach these lores, and I argue there's little you can learn from them. I believe you shouldn't try to apply the points they're making ad litteram, but see how those can adapt to your specific case. First of all, since they made it big, many things have changed and most of their lessons might be outdate. Besides, many of them capitalised on unique trends. They were at the right place, with the right product, with the right support, with the right money, with the ... well you get the idea. In his podcast I am joined by Nav Nouhi , an former colleague, a dear friend and data-oriented-no-bullshit-let's-talk-numbers kind of guy. I know Nav, from our AVG Technologies days, where as Director of Digital Advertising he managed $25M of advertising budget yielding 125% return on ad spend to the business and transformed AVG’s approach to digital advertising by pivoting to a LTV model. He is currently a digital marketing and growth adviser for early to mid stage startups, operating from the beautiful city of Prague. When he's not optimizing conversion funnels or creating digital acquisition strategies, you can find him skiing or cooking somewhere in Europe. As always, I am curious about your opinion on the podcast. So please head to itunes or where ever you might listen the show and give let us know what you think.

We've all seen the mesmerising titles that promise us to reveal the best kept secrets of the startup unicorns. From Facebook to Uber, and from AirBnB to Instagram.

Every entrepreneurs wants to be like them and understand what's their secret sauce. Of course media loves to capitalise on this trend.

In this podcast Nav and I give our opinions about how you should approach these lores, and I argue there's little you can learn from them. I believe you shouldn't try to apply the points they're making ad litteram, but see how those can adapt to your specific case.

First of all, since they made it big, many things have changed and most of their lessons might be outdate. Besides, many of them capitalised on unique trends. They were at the right place, with the right product, with the right support, with the right money, with the ... well you get the idea.

In his podcast I am joined by Nav Nouhi , an former colleague, a dear friend and data-oriented-no-bullshit-let's-talk-numbers kind of guy.

I know Nav, from our AVG Technologies days, where as Director of Digital Advertising he managed $25M of advertising budget yielding 125% return on ad spend to the business and transformed AVG’s approach to digital advertising by pivoting to a LTV model.

He is currently a digital marketing  and growth adviser for early to mid stage startups, operating from the beautiful city of Prague.

When he's not optimizing conversion funnels or creating digital acquisition strategies, you can find him skiing or cooking somewhere in Europe.

As always, I am curious about your opinion on the podcast. So please head to itunes or where ever  you might listen the show and give let us know what you think.

Great question. To answer that I had a chat with Max Tatton Brown, founder and managing director at Augur Communications. Augur is London-based communications agency which helps fast-growing “unsexy” tech companies tackle business challenges with communications strategy.

Before Augur, Max led PR for Tradeshift from Series A to Series C and has written for Wired, the Guardian and Quartz.

In this podcast you will find out:

• When is the right time to start building your media relationship

• How you should go about creating and maintaining those relationship

• The importance of focusing on your product before doing any PR

• How PR can only amplify what’s already valuable

Great question. To answer that I had a chat with Max Tatton Brown, founder and managing director at Augur Communications. Augur is London-based communications agency which helps fast-growing “unsexy” tech companies tackle business challenges with communications strategy. Before Augur, Max led PR for Tradeshift from Series A to Series C and has written for Wired, the Guardian and Quartz. In this podcast you will find out: • When is the right time to start building your media relationship • How you should go about creating and maintaining those relationship • The importance of focusing on your product before doing any PR • How PR can only amplify what’s already valuable 

Fabio is a local in Amsterdam for quite a while now, and given his passion for biking I would say this city is great match for him.

Fabio loves traveling around world, and in part that is why he wanted to launch his own business: more flexibility (and funds) to go and explore the world.

His first step in kickstarting his idea was in 2012 at Startup Weekend in Amsterdam, a 54 h event during which people pitch their ideas, teams are formed and then each team needs to prototype and validate the idea by the end of the second day.

For Fabio this was a great experience and it created the nucleus of a team that continued working on this project for months to come… in their spare time, after work, in the weekends, on vacations. And by working on it in their free time, they allowed themselves more time to further develop the product, before quitting their jobs and doing this full time.

In today’s episode we talk about the benefits of using Startup Weekend as a launch platform, the cash and sex theory, why ideas are open source and why you should ask yourself: are you building a product nobody wants?

Fabio's pro tips:

* don't incorporate your startup until you make money.

* make use of platforms such as startup weekend to validate your ideas

* mitigate your risk by work on your idea in your free time, before you quit your job and work full time

I hope you guys will enjoy the interview and as always feedback is always welcome, either here on statupmaze.com, iTunes, Facebook or twitter.

Enjoy!

Links to the stuff we talked about in the episode:

* Fabio on Twitter

* CloudMatch, the project website

* Perfect earth collector, the app that uses ...

*

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, the book Fabio recommended 

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Should I keep my startup idea secret? TLDR: No]]>

For this interview, I had the pleasure to talk to Douwe Wester and Edouard Dopper, co-founders at leanup.nl and experts in lean startup methodology, agile methodology, scrum management and innovation models for large companies.

Douwe and Edouard say that one of the most common mistakes in the startup world is to start with building a product without truly understanding the problem to be solved and the riskiest assumptions that are the foundation of your business model. So what is the a better way? Start with the customer understanding

Customer Understanding

Step 1: understand the problem you are trying to solve

Step 2: understand who has that problem, define the archetype(s) of the customer

Step 3: see if you can find more people that display similar archetype behavior

Step 4: do market sizing as a reality check

Step 5: create and iterate Influence maps

For today’s interview I had the pleasure to talk with Svilena and Mirena, two great girls that are on a mission to help others start their own business. Based out of Rotterdam, their platform combines business strategy and marketing coaching with crowd funding. So as pre-entrepreneur you get the knowhow and funding support.

While serving as an Officer in the Royal Netherlands Army, with 43 people under his command, Holger realized that this is not what he wants to do with his life. Work was good, salary was good but he just wasn’t satisfied.

So he quit, went aboard to learn Spanish and ended up working in a bar. But being a true entrepreneur at heart, he immediately spotted an opportunity. He saw a very cool looking discount pass for students and thought: “I should create one in The Netherlands”. So he came back to NL and spent 3 years building, pitching, selling and convincing everybody, including his family, that he was not crazy and this product will be successful.

For this interview I had the pleasure to talk to Lola Akinsiku, an aspiring entrepreneur that absolutely loves to work on her own ideas. With a full time job on her hands, she has to dedicate extra time so that her ideas can come to life. However, she told me this energizes her rather then draining more energy. Her product is dedicated to those that like to read in bed, like good design and hate clutter. So far she had 2 KickStarter campaigns and even though she didn’t get the funding yet, she did learn a lo from the experience. In this interview you will find out more about those key-learning points.

For the first Startup Maze podcast I had the great pleasure to interview Nick Waller, the founder and Director of Global {M}, a fast growing London based startup that aims to improve tech recruitment around the world. Nick and his team bring a brand new vision to global recruitment. Instead of finding the right person for the job, they will help their clients find the right team for the job.

Nick is full of energy, very passionate about his company and a true entrepreneur at heart. I found it very inspiring to chat with him and I hope you will also find value from listening to the interview.