Tag: startups

As a founder, you are always looking for ways to better interact with your customers. Anything you can do to better establish your client relationship, while better getting to know them, is an advantage.

One of the best ways to do this is through a company blog.

Why businesses should blog

Companies that blog consistently are able to create an effective voice and brand. Customers love interacting with brands and will go out of their way to buy from them. A blog creates an open space for people to talk directly to you and about the current industry. You can use it as a platform to share company updates, industry knowledge, and timely topics.

Drive new traffic to your site

Blogging is not only a great way to engage current users, but also a means of driving new customers to your site. Content marketing efforts can all be propelled by a blog. You can use everything that you write and share your message on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Blogger, in e-mail newsletters–and the list goes on. It is free PR for your business and can keep you relevant in the conversation.

Better understand your clients

Another great benefit of blogging is it lets you understand your customers better. It gives you another opportunity to hear their ideas and comments and engage in conversation. You get insight into what they are thinking so that you can tailor your marketing efforts toward them. Blogging is a vital step in establishing a real relationship with customers.

Modern technology makes it really, really easy for anyone to start writing and sharing. Services like Medium and WordPress can get you up and running in less than five minutes. Seriously, there is no excuse to not get started.

Editor’s note: Want to get started? We are accepting contributions from students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

Once you do, there are few things you have to worry about. The first being a consistent, quality stream of content. As a business, you want to find a balance between quantity and quality. While I’d argue that quantity may hold supreme when it comes to blogging, you still want to represent your brand properly. So blog with confidence but also with awareness.

Unlock new metrics about your audience

Another thing that a lot of companies forget to do is establish metrics to measure the ROI on their efforts. Know that you must measure this in the long run to see any effect. This is not a short-term solution! Analytics programs will be able to tell you all of the relevant statistics, but you may need to go further and figure out exactly what it is you want to be looking for. This answer may be industry specific, but once you come up with your key metrics and goals, stick to them and continually improve until you get there!

Of course, focusing on what you do best — your work — is the priority. But telling the story along the way may be a good way to engage potential/current customers.

This post was originally featured on Medium and was republished with permission from the author.

The EQ headline really says it all: “Cliff Holekamp: Startup Founder, Educator, Connector, Evangelist.” Holekamp is major force in the St. Louis startup community and here at Olin. He is director of the Entrepreneurship Platform in the MBA program, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship and the pied piper for students across campus who flock to his Hatchery and CELect courses that provide hands-on experience in the business of startups. Holekamp is also an Olin alumnus, MBA’01.

Here’s an excerpt of  an interview with Holekamp by Tanya Yatzeck, an Olin Executive MBA(Class 43) alumna in the latest issue of EQ, Entrepreneurs’ Quarterly:

Talent is actually the most important. Even though I co-founded Cultivation Capital, recognized as the most active venture capital firm in the Midwest, people are actually more important than money because we can’t throw our money at nothing. So, people are number one, and that’s why my work at WashU is so important for the St. Louis community. You have to educate people to be great entrepreneurs, or to be great team members of early stage ventures. We’re lucky to have a diversified educational system at WashU with multiple schools that teach different skills because we need them all. So I’m doing my role on the business side and collaborating with the other schools to help develop the talent that we as a community need and we as a country need to be competitive to build the next generation of economic development.

My first true exposure to the real world of venture capital began when I started my internship this past semester. It has been a great, enlightening experience to see how the process works — and I’d love to share some of those insights, because I believe they are really helpful to anyone. It does not matter what industry you are going into or what phase of life you are in, these things can be applied anywhere because business is everywhere.

Be straightforward in your pitch to a venture capital firm

I cannot begin to tell you how many times entrepreneurs have pitched their ventures and left venture capitalists’ faces confused. Founders pitch their brilliant ideas using these fancy keynotes and animations and blocks of text ,  forgetting the whole point of the presentation: to explain their idea. Simpler = better. You can add all of the fireworks at a later time — in the beginning, just make sure that the person you are talking to knows what it is you are talking about!

Treat your VC pitch like an interview–be on time!

Working in due diligence, I have worked with a lot of different founders in finding information about their business model and where they see themselves in the future. This is great — I love hearing different stories about how companies get formed and so on. But, whether you like it or not, impressions are everything. And a great way to leave a disorganized impression is to show up late to a call or to deliver information late. This will, from the get go, set you back. And its not me being hard-hitting, rather its me, even subconsciously, being human. When you are trying to raise money, every little thing matters — so be on time!

Pitch your ideas to the appropriate VC

A lot of companies reach out to venture capital firms who are completely out of their cycle. What I mean by that is that seed stage funds cannot put together the money to invest in late stage and vice versa. So you should not waste the effort trying to convince a VC to do something they can’t. But you can start the conversations early and maintain a relationship with them for when you are ready!

Do your research on the VC

As a company it is just as important for you  to do your research on the VC as it is for the venture capitalist  finds it important to do research on you. You should check on their portfolio companies and see how they like their investors as partners. It is just as important that you find them to be a good fit.

This post was originally featured on Medium and was republished with permission from the author.

Many St. Louis startups launched by students at WashU put down roots here, others move away to flourish elsewhere. Dave Nicklaus reports in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on alumni who have decamped to opposite coasts but retain an appreciation for the affordable and supportive startup community in St. Louis.

Examples of Fresh Prints t-shirt designs

Jolijt Tamanaha, A&S 2015, Jacob M. Goodman, BSBA 2015, and Joshua E. Arbit, BSBA 2013 (pictured above) of Fresh Prints are featured in the article. Sasha G. Sherman, BSBA 2011, was one of the original founders of the company that makes customized t-shirts for university organizations.

“It was Washington U. and St. Louis that really enabled us to get our business off the ground,” Goodman says. “In New York, we would have been just another tiny fish in an enormous pond. In St. Louis, getting access to people and resources was easier.”

Link to Post-Dispatch article

A recent story in Philly.com also featured Fresh Prints.

Related blog post

Let’s start from the beginning.

A few weeks before coming to WashU, I noticed a post on the “Class of 2019” Facebook page by a recent graduate, Michael Fisch. He was looking to pass off a Cardinals baseball blog, Cardsblog, which he had co-founded with fellow grad Steven Hirsch while at WashU. I’ve always been big into sports and loved the Cardinals, so naturally I reached out.

After lots of back and forth and working through the details, in November, myself and Sam Pointer, another Olin freshman, acquired the blog. At the time, Cardsblog had a great domain name, a website built out with almost 1,000 articles, a program set up with Washington University that allowed students to earn credit for contributing to the site, and a list of contacts accumulated by Steven and Mike.

The issues: new content had not been posted in almost a year, the site’s appearance wasn’t up to our standards, and spring training was right around the corner.

So we got to work. Sam and I found three great writers to bring on board, redesigned the entire site, and, with the help of the team, became active on Twitter to hype up our March 1st relaunch.

The launch was a success, and throughout March we focused on drawing people to the site, growing on social media, and continuously posting good content (at a rate of two new articles per day).

Cardsblog announces a content relationship with KSDK on their website.

Toward the end of March I reached out to a variety of St. Louis news stations with our story, and caught the attention of the Digital Executive Producer at KSDK Channel 5, a St. Louis NBC affiliate. After checking out our site and content, the producer, Jordan Palmer, graciously asked if we wanted to form a content relationship with KSDK, to which of course we said yes.

Currently KSDK puts our articles up on their website and gives us credit for the writing, and we are in the process of continuing to build our relationship to benefit both sides.

So there’s all the good stuff. But there must have been some bumps in the road too right?

Absolutely. The bumps and lessons we learned are why we aren’t getting as much traffic to the site as we had been hoping, but also why we’re excited for the future of Cardsblog, because we know there’s so much we can build off of. Here’s what we learned:

1. Content is key

It doesn’t matter how good the site looks or how many people you can draw to it if what they are coming for (which in our case is to read articles) isn’t up to par. We have (especially recently), been making a very conscious effort to put up interesting, thought-provoking, and unique content for our readers.

2. You only get one launch day

There has to be a balance when launching a new product. On one end, you can’t wait for the perfect product because, A). nobody knows what “perfect” means, and B). The start date will keep getting pushed back. But on the other end, the quality is crucial because a launch will generate more hype for a company than at almost any other moment (we hit almost 1,000 page views on the site on our first day).

So setting a date to launch and sticking to that date is key, but it’s also important to do everything possible to have the best product by launch (and that part, I believe we could have done a better job at). When we launched, the site looked good and content wasn’t bad, but the site was moving slowly and we had no incentives in place to make people want to come back. We later realized the speed was a minor fix, and we are in the process of putting together an incentive and referral program to keep people coming to Cardsblog—two things we definitely could have had done by launch that would have made a large difference.

3. Social media can be your best friend 

Since mid-February we have gone from 150 Twitter followers to 788, and since launch 44% of our site views were referred via social media. Connecting with people through platforms like Twitter and Facebook can be a huge benefit, especially given that we are focused on connecting with younger audiences who aren’t as easily engaged in baseball these days.

4. You can treat anything like a business 

We run Cardsblog like a business, and because of that, it has made the experience that much more fun, serious, and educational. Sam, our original team of writers—consisting of WashU freshman Issa Cook, Perry Gordon, and Eddie Liu— and I all have official roles for the blog. Sam is Director of Outreach, Issa is Editor-in-Chief (as well as a co-owner of the blog), Perry is Director of Programming, Eddie is Director of Communication, and I am Director of Technology and Strategy. The point is we each have concrete tasks that we are expected to complete on a day-to-day basis, improving operations, allowing for more innovation, and creating a professional atmosphere that incentivizes effort and quality work. In running Cardsblog in a professional manner, and being one of the co-owners, I (as well as Sam and Issa) have learned a lot about what it takes to run a business (which I’d be happy to discuss further if you reach out).

Moving forward:

As we reach the end of month #3, we couldn’t be happier with the progress made thus far. We have added four more great writers (Jack Stephens, Matt Heiken, Tyler Brandt, and Adam Kaufman), we attended the 2016 Cardinals Blogger Day, content is improving everyday, site speed is up to par, and we’re in the process of putting together new ideas and initiatives that we hope will drive more traffic to the site on a consistent basis. Some of these ideas include a referral program, guest contributors, and getting more involved with charity organizations and local restaurants and bars in the St. Louis community.

It’s been a great learning experience thus far, and myself, along with Sam, Issa, and the rest of the team are very excited to continue working to make Cardsblog the #1 baseball blog in St. Louis.

If you have any ideas, thoughts or suggestions, or just want to chat, feel free to reach out! You can find our website here.

Thanks for reading!

Student teams in the Venture Advising Consulting Course taught by Clifford Holekamp, senior lecturer in entrepreneurship, spend 10 days in Budapest, Hungary immersed in the startup community and working on specific projects with founders. They also learn about Eastern European history and culture. Each team in this year’s course will submit a blog post about their experience and consulting project.

Szia from Budapest! Over the course of our intensive, onsite week in Hungary, we worked with a local education company that wants to expand a new kind of study abroad program to students throughout Central Europe. Our client, Milestone Institute, helps Hungarian students get into and succeed at highly selective Universities in the UK. They also look to bring these students back to Hungary to build the future generation of business and community leaders. Milestone asked us to suggest strategies to build an international presence.

Milestone Institute Mission: Our mission is to act as a national centre for nurturing, launching and bringing home talent. Rather than strike out on their own, we seek to create a community of bright young minds who want to broaden their horizon by studying abroad. Our hope is that they will return, so that Hungary as a whole will benefit from the experience and skills they have gained. In the last four years, we have thus prepared nearly 300 students for leading English-speaking universities.

A lot of our work in the education market has been informed by our experiences around Budapest. The country is relatively small, with only 10 million people. However, as Hungary is a member of the European Union, it has much stronger ties and relationships with neighboring countries. The country sees itself more as a key stakeholder in the Central European Region. This worldview impacts the value we see Milestone can provide, as their services could prove highly beneficial to other local markets.

Monday: On Monday, we got a personal perspective on Hungary’s history. Hungary is a country which shares its history with the Roman Empire: Roman Law and Roman Catholicism. However, there are cultural differences as well which encompass a free people mindset, primarily branching out from German philosophy. During the 19th century, Hungary and Austria formed the Austro-Hungarian empire, creating a melting pot for people from different cultures, which can still be seen today through the art and architecture in Budapest.

Tuesday: On Tuesday we had the privilege to meet with two of the founders of Milestone Institute. The founders had so many ideas about what to do and how to best support Hungarian startups and NGOs, while at the same time encouraging Hungarian students to study abroad.

Having a strong vision, Milestone Institute will help to put Budapest, Hungary, on the map as a leading force in the study abroad educational market as well as improving economic prospects for startups.

Wednesday: On Wednesday, We prepared for our first presentation and got advice from David, our project leader, on how we were doing. Professor Orban taught us to use a MECE tree structure to test hypotheses and formulate the problem in its entirety. We spent most of Wednesday developing this model and fine-tuning our understanding of how to tackle this project going forward.

Thursday: Our day began quite intensely, as we presented our approach for the summer to Professor Orban. Afterwards, we stopped in at our clients location for further clarification and to discuss an action plan for the summer. Following this, we continued with more preliminary research for our final presentation in Budapest.

We look forward to continuing our work over the summer and have taken much different perspectives from our time in Budapest!

By Anish Agrawal, Adam Clark, Sawyer Kelly, Lauren Rogge

Top Image: Budapest Heroes Monument, Giannis Arvanitakis, Flickr creative commons