500 Startups: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

If you’ve stumbled onto this article, it’s probably because you found us via our deluge of press on TechCrunch, The Next Web, Venture Beat, TechCocktail, etc. that Spinnakr among others have joined the most recent batch of 500 Startups companies.

500 Pirate Map

500 Startups pirate map.

And since we’re in the business of targeting web content to your audience (invite code), we’re smart enough to know you probably want some dirt on the 500 Startups experience. And there’s a lot of dirt to go around, honestly. 500 Startups is an incredible place, but also incredibly weird.

So if you’ve ever thought of moving out to Silicon Valley and living the internet entrepreneur’s life in our pad, here’s the good, bad, and the ugly of it: More…

Spinnakr Brings AngelList to Your Startup’s Website

If you want to use your website to raise money from early-stage investors, there’s not a lot of great options, for a few reasons:

  1. Company websites are customer-facing, meaning they spend more time describing their current product offering than their team and long-term vision.
  2. Contact pages are built for mass communication –An info@yourcompany.com email address, an 800 number, and lots of forms. An investor isn’t going to use any of those.
  3. Websites don’t have financials, or really any investor-related information (fundraising status, past advisors / investors, etc.).

More…

Startups: 11 Ways Your Website Can Win You Investors

Spinnakr on the wall at 500.

Fundraising has been on our minds since the Spinnakr team joined the team of 500 Startups in Mountain View, CA.

So yesterday Michael and I spoke to our 500 Startups crew in Mountain View about how to “pimp your website” to attract investors. We picked best-in-class examples from some of our group of Startups and shared our expertise on what works and doesn’t in website engagement (including a demo of our newest technology).

Here’s 11 lessons from our talk:

Show Who You Are

First of all, we told the group that you need an about page. Early stage angels are investing in your team and your story as much as your current product. As a result, your about page is the first place an investor will look when he comes to your site. More…

The Download: Can a billion-dollar tech company be built in D.C. alone?

Great coverage in the Washington Post about Spinnakr’s temporary relocation to Mountain View, California as part of the newest 500 Startups class.

Twitter Strategy: the 80/20 Rule

There are hundreds of 80 / 20 rules, but one that applies to Twitter is put especially well by Business Blogs: 80% of your social media activity should be about helping your community, and 20% should be about promoting yourself. Here’s why:

“No one cares about you.  Instead, they care about how you can help them or add value to their lives.  The key to social media marketing success is engagement and interaction.  No one will want to interact with you if all you ever do on the social Web (including on your business blog) is talk about yourself.” More…

More is Better: Respond to Traffic Spikes by Preparing for Traffic Spikes

We don’t say when because there’s something about the possibility, of more. More tequila, more love, more anything. More is better.

First, forgive me for quoting Grey’s Anatomy. [Thanks.] Second, let me point out the obvious: more isn’t always better – unless you know how to handle yourself. The case with tequila is pretty obvious. But the case with your web traffic is a bit more complicated.

What actually counts as increased web traffic? How do you measure it?

The common measures – page views and unique visitors – are valuable metrics, but they are silent when it comes to measuring the likelihood that a reader will become a return visitor. Other indicators that readers have some intent to at least continue to “try out” your content include increases in: Twitter followers, Facebook fans, newsletter subscriptions, mobile app downloads. Analytics tools like Quantcast and Google Analytics can give you detailed information about how readers get to your site and how they behave once they’re there.

What leads to traffic spikes?

According to Scott Galloway, Clinical Associate Professor of Marketing at NYU, there are three elements of viral content:

  1. Authenticity
  2. Humor
  3. Social Debate

You can hope to set yourself up for the possibility of a spike, then, by trying to satisfy those elements with the content and tone of your web presence. But a spike is a spike because it’s sudden and dramatic. It’s almost always unpredictable, and in many cases it’s receded before you’ve had a chance to react optimally.

You’re authentic, funny, and engaging in social debate. Congrats – your content has gone viral, leading to a traffic spike. Now, how do you make it easy for a one-time clicker to become an addict?

Function: [Most importantly, BE READY. That means that if you're implementing these steps after a traffic spike, YOU'RE ALREADY TOO LATE. In other words, DO THESE THINGS NOW.] Make it painfully easy for new visitors to add your organization to their social networks like Facebook and Twitter by including links to your profiles on every page of your site. Make it easy for them to subscribe to your email newsletter or sign up for your RSS feed. Clearly provide contact info (email and phone number) so visitors can get in touch. And, of course, make sure that your server can handle the load of a traffic spike. Tools like Spinnakr can help you quickly identify and coordinate your team’s response to a traffic spike, too.

Form: First, if you’re able to identify the source of your spike (say, a link from a big site), you may want to add a short paragraph welcoming your new visitors, encouraging them to explore your site and stay connected:

“If you’ve arrived here from the New York Times piece about this post, welcome! We hope you enjoy our work, and if you want to find out more about us, [do this call to action].”

You may also want to consider creating a custom landing page with your best content and using this intro paragraph to direct new visitors there. Or you could republish your best content, so new subscribers and followers will quickly learn that you’re not a one-hit wonder.

Later, continue to provide unique content that visitors can’t find elsewhere. There was probably a reason why your traffic spiked: you said something new, or said something old in a new way, or guided a conversation in a pleasing new direction. No matter how well your site functions to funnel users in one direction or another, if the substance of your site is boring or irrelevant, they’ll unfollow and unsubscribe en mass. Definitely a case where more is not better.

Why does your website suck?

It’s the modern truism: technology changes quickly. Web self-publishing service Geocities – and its amazing variety of garish color schemes with HTML enhancements – doesn’t even exist as a service any more. The internet and seemingly omnipotent smartphones have fundamentally changed our way of life. We’ve become used to getting everything we want, when we want it. Check the weather without opening a window or looking outside? Done. Send flowers to a loved one halfway around the globe? Done.

Unfortunately, human attention is a scarce commodity. There are things available on your website, and there are things people come to your site to find. If you’re lucky, those two sets of information are the same. Unfortunately, more often than not…they’re not. It’s frustrating to your visitors to discover that your site is insufficient or out of date for their purposes. But it’s likely to be more detrimental to you than to them. After all, your lost visitors can go somewhere else to find what they need. [The internet is huge, remember?!] Once they’ve left your space, chances are, they’re gone for good.

Some commentators have speculated that “attention transactions” will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system. What does that mean, exactly? Attention becomes currency. Customers spend their attention reading, internalizing, and sharing the content that they find valuable. Your investments in providing information can pay off only if someone spends more time than they would’ve by happenstance consuming your content. That return on investment multiplies every time someone thinks your content is so valuable that they share it with others (and there is little, if any, additional cost to you!).

BUT – to position yourself on the best possible way to provide valuable content, YOUR SITE CANNOT BE STATIC. Remember: people’s information needs change almost constantly. Every tick of the clock between when you last “updated” and when a visitor comes to your web space is more time that increases the information-attentional distance between you and your visitors. We all want the newest, shiniest things. Ari Herzog puts it simply:

Maybe your website doesn’t suck. But if you call it a web site, it does.

In other words, if your focus is simply on producing the best homepage or “about us” page or even on keeping the whole thing “up to date,” you’re probably missing out on a lot of opportunities to capture visitors’ attention and turn it into a meaningful relationship. The goal isn’t just to get a visitor to come to your website, but to keep them there and want them to return. [Think about it like this: when you invite a lot of people to your party, you don't want them all to show up and leave shortly thereafter...you want everyone to hang around, having a great time, invite their friends to crash, and tell everyone else about it the next day!] By making your site dynamic – meaning, personalized to different groups of visitors, according to their expected needs – you can make sure you don’t miss out on the opportunity to compete for visitors’ precious, limited attention.

The End of Demographics: How Marketers Are Going Deeper With Personal Data

Psychographics look at the mental model of the consumer in the context of a customer lifecycle. Amazon.com has long been a leader in this space, through innovations like “recommended products” and “users like me also bought.” Its algorithms have learned to predict its users, and what they are interested in. And now, there are a number of tools that any business can use to leverage psychographics.

(via Mashable)

Can Using LaunchRock Kill Your Startup?

Your first goal when starting anything, whether it be a company or a campaign, should be connecting with supporters who feel strongly about what you’re doing – your evangelists. Your evangelists can help spread the word about what you’re doing, provide valuable, detailed feedback and become your early adopters. But these dedicated supports won’t just show up on their own. They need to feel special and unique. Above all else, they need to feel you’re approached them deliberately and authentically. Which is why notifying the world about your new startup using LaunchRock is the worst thing you could possibly do.

More…

The Big Revolt: Is a Tweet Uprising in the Cards?

angry mob by AC Wraith

Things that won’t be happening anytime soon:

  1. The Spinnakr team having any kind of social life
  2. Or successful relationships
  3. A twitter uprising because of in-stream advertising

 

The introduction of in-stream advertising (Forced! about topics I don’t even like or want!) is a bunch of b.s.  I’m personally very irritated that some of my potential followers will be scared off;  I’m irritated that  instead of great content I’ll be getting ads for whitening strips and carpet cleaner.

But what difference would complaining make? None.

And furthermore, am I going to stop using Twitter? No. More…