Startups salivate at the prospect of entering the enterprise — and for good reason. The enterprise is rife with legacy systems and circuitous processes that frustrate employees and hinder results — and the startup has just the perfect product to fix the problem.
Too often though, the pitch to the enterprise falls flat or a promising pilot gets sidelined. Sometimes there’s a clear obstacle, like a mismatch between product and problem to be solved, an inability to scale or the loss of an internal sponsor. But more often than one would expect, the startup’s value is simply getting lost in translation.
Medium has expanded it focus from elegantly formatted longform content to dive headlong into the stream. Now users land on a page featuring an open, simpler editor up top, which lowers the barrier to entry and ideally attracts more users.
Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are often presented as competing rather than complementary disciplines. Here’s a solid explanation of why they go together.
You might want to think twice before searching for medical information online. An alarming amount of that data is being tracked and shipped to third party corporations. Not all of this use is nefarious, but it speaks to the potential risk of the widespread adoption of free tools, like Google Analytics.
Twitter has been experimenting with individual tweet analytics on mobile, and now it’s experimenting on the desktop version. Incremental, sticky user interface improvements are aimed at increasing Twitter’s appeal to a wider range of users, and to entice new ones.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
Speakers looking pensive, only mildly upstaged by Brent Grinna’s pants
If you have a startup that’s launched but needs to grow, how do you choose, apply to, and make the most of a tech accelerator experience? Monday’s Rough Draft Ventures Sketch brought together four accelerator alumni and professionals to demystify the accelerator process — the pain and the perks.
Several themes emerged:
Accelerators are competitive, and can afford to be choosy. Have your startup pitch down cold. Make your one-minute video clear and focused on business value. Know who your CEO is, and how decisions will be made.
Accelerators can unlock a broad network, so if you’re lucky enough to be accepted, make the most of the resources made available to you.
Every member of the founding team should show they are actively learning. Share new ideas and lessons learned — even when those lessons are “we chose the wrong direction, and here’s why.”
Speaking of the founding team, having a strong technical co-founder matters. A lot.
Be serious about your startup. Applicants who are merely in love with the glamorous idea of start-up life will swiftly be weeded out via a five-year grueling process of starting a business.
Don’t rule out incubators. While they don’t offer investment, they provide space, enable connections to business services, and valuable introductions to mentors. And you don’t give up 6%.
Women apply at much lower rates than men — for example, given odds that only 20% of applicants are accepted, many women will choose not to apply. In contrast, men will apply even when their likelihood of success is roughly a snowball’s change in hell. There’s an opportunity for women to step up and stand out in the accelerator applicant pool.
…women-owned firms employ just 6% of the U.S. workforce and contribute just 4% of all business revenues. Women might be making overall progress in the rate at which they are launching new ventures, but are failing to launch and build high-growth ventures.
