Recently we spent some time chatting with Rackspace’s Robert Scoble. Read his article about Spinnakr on Building43 and watch the full interview below:

We’re super excited to announce that Spinnakr won first place at the Data 2.0 Startup Pitch competition April 3!

Michael presenting for Spinnakr at Data 2.0 Summit

We were honored to compete alongside fantastic companies at the 2012 Data 2.0 Conference.

The Data 2.0 Conference is an annual event that explores the importance of data in our business and everyday lives. Its goal is to explore the next decade of the data ecosystem, including personal data, the web, and open data initiatives. Led by Jonathan Pasky and Geoff Domoracki, the conference has featured very smart companies and speakers including Twitter, Crowd Flower, Amazon, and Palantir. Some of the panels we were most excited about during this year’s event included

1. The “How Open is the Open Web?” panel, about ideas of data ownership in the post-web 2.0 world and how the web can move towards more open data accessibility and standards, and

2. The “Real Time Data Stack” panel, which explored how businesses can deploy real-time software stacks to shuttle data between web clients, mobile clients and various servers.

Of course, our favorite event was the startup pitch competition. We competed alongside these startups

	A word-of-mouth marketing platform
	Business Intelligence for small businesses
	Mapping the business web
	A web service for indexing the blogosphere
	A cloud business disrupting the credit bureau monopoly on credit and trust
	Big data platform as a service
	Using the social web to generate quality restaurant data for commercial and consumer use
	A universal API for customer data
	Cloud-based infrastructure to store, enrich, and analyze big data.

All ten of us presented before judges from True Ventures and Right Ventures in prelims the day before the main event.  Wishery, HG Data, and Spinnakr were chosen as the three finalists, so we pitched again during the main event before judges Matt Ocko from the Data Collective; Ethan Kurzweil from Bessemer Venture Partners; Bipul Sinha from Lightspeed Ventures;  and Vivek Mehra from August Capital.

We’re happy we won and very glad to have presented with such terrific companies.

Congratulations to our friends at Wishery and HG Data for great presentations and high-quality businesses!

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

• Company websites are customer-facing, so they spend more time describing current product offerings than team and long-term vision,
• Contact pages are built for mass communication, but most investors won’t want to use a 1-800 number, contact form, or info@yourco.com email address to get in touch with you, and
• Websites don’t have financials, or really any investor-related information (fundraising status, past advisors / investors, etc.)

Partly as a result of these problems, online communities like AngelList are an amazing resource for startups and early-stage investors, because they’re a place where all that unique communication can openly take place. But that doesn’t solve the basic problems that when investors come to your website (on their own or from your AngelList profile), they’re not finding what they’re looking for. In other words, your website can be used another way to make a really tough process much easier.

Spinnakr is in the business of bringing unique messaging to your website. We built a way of integrating with AngelList to deploy this messaging on your website only when an investor arrives: 

The impact:

• Instead of a blank contact form, the investor sees a “Get an Intro on AngelList” button,
• Instead of your latest tweet, the investor sees the traction figures you just updated,
• Instead of the typical social sharing options, the investor sees a call-to-action to follow you on AngelList, creating a meaningful connection that can help your next round of financing.

In other words, if you have an AngelList page, Spinnakr can make your website work better for investors, and you don’t have to do anything. Your work is already done—we bring Spinnakr to your website and do the targeting for you. We’re very proud of this technology, since nothing else like it exists.

So far we’ve deployed this technology to ten startups from the 500 Startups community and have another twenty on the waiting list.

If you’d like to use our product, shoot an email to adam@spinnakr.com with the Subject “AngelList User Group.” Adam will hook you up.

Spinnakr on the wall at 500.

Fundraising has been on our minds since Spinnakr joined 500 Startups.  In fact, fundraising is on lots of minds in the Valley, and everyone in our class at 500 wants to maximize their chances of raising capital. Since we have some expertise about what works and doesn’t in website engagement, and a tool that can be used to give investors different messages than other visitors, Michael and I presented “How to Pimp your Website to Attract Investors” to the 500 crew yesterday.

Here are 11 tips from our talk:

Show Who You Are

First of all, 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.

Tip 1: Make Your About Page Easy to Find

Your investors’ eyes will immediately scan for an About button or link. So put a link or a button on the homepage and make sure it says the word “about” in it. In addition to being easy to find, your About page should describe the vision of your company and what you are trying to accomplish.

Tip 2: Sell the Dream

Your company story should sell your dream. 500 Startup GoVoluntr describes themselves not just as a platform for tracking volunteering hours, but as “a whole new way to be a do-gooder.”

Tip 3: Place Yourself in Your Vision

If you don’t think you have some great story behind how your company was founded, a great way to get started is with what brought you to found a startup in the first place.

The Fitocracy  story is a great example—the founders admit that they were one-time skinny nerds who traded their addiction to video games for weight-lifting and then decided making fitness addictive for others could be a business.

The Fitocracy team tell the story of their company through their own lives.

You might think your story is less obvious, but something is pushing you down an extraordinary life path. Don’t shy away from telling that story—pimp it!

Your story shows commitment. Any investor who considers you is going to be asking himself, “are these kids going to want to be doing this in five years?” If you can completely disqualify that fear by showing this is the inevitable next stage of your life, then you’re one step closer to closing.

Tip 4: Team – Make a Connection

When you do talk about the team, include photos. For startups, more memorable and expressive pictures are best. The Zerply photos are a great example because they let the investor get to know the kinds of people they’ll be betting on.

The Zerply team's photos give a sense of who they are that makes you want to meet them.

Also consider highlighting your technical stack if it’s relevant, since lots of early-stage investors have technical backgrounds. Including other advisers, incubators or investors on your About page (something that isn’t done enough) can be helpful too, since they illustrate how you’re connected to a wider network of supporters, give context for your company vision, and sometimes overlap with investors’ colleagues and networks too.

Show What You Are Doing

Second, even if your website is beautiful, when an investor comes to your homepage he is probably asking himself,  “is this site dead, or is there a community of people using it right now?”  Show investors that your site is alive with a constant stream of activity.

Tip 5: Show Activity Streams on your Homepage

Consider mirroring Redeemr and featuring your latest Twitter update on your homepage. If you’re stressed about updating your Twitter feed constantly, check out Timely, which will let you plug in a bunch of Tweets and automatically tweets them when they’ll have the most impact.

Redeemr's activity stream on their homepage.

Displaying tweets is an excellent way to get a visitor to follow you. But it’s even better to give different visitors different information. For example,  display your Twitter feed to customers and your AngelList status to investors. Spinnakr can help your website do that .

Spinnakr allows startups to display their AngelList status to investors when they reach your site.

Tip 6: Make Your Social Sharing Options Specific

For your Facebook and Twitter links, keep in mind that specific calls-to-action convert better. So instead of “Follow Us on Twitter,” tell them, “Get Our Weekly Discounts from Twitter” or “Track Our Progress on Twitter.” That way you give the visitor a reason to follow you.

Also, your Facebook like button should be linked to your Facebook page, not your homepage. That way, when an investor “likes” your page, he will also get your company’s Facebook updates to show up in his feed.

        Tip 7: Pimp Your Blog

Include a clearly marked way to get to your blog from your homepage. Blogs were sorely underrepresented in our class. High Score House,  has a beautiful and active blog, but it’s very hard to find.

The High Score House blog is beautiful, but too hard to find from their homepage.

Blogs show an investor that you have expertise in the space, and that you can do inbound marketing and community building effectively. If you don’t want blog posts on the homepage, consider posting just the titles of the recent posts or numbers of posts and comments—just the activity will be impressive to investors.

Show How You Are Doing

When you talk about your product on your homepage, there are two things that tend to convert investors: (1) testimonials and (2) traction.

Testimonial logos

Tip 8: Aim High with Testimonials

If someone has something nice to say about your company, ask for a testimonial. If you can, court testimonials from marquee customers and big brands. Their logos are instantly recognizable, so they scan well on the page, and  a big company customer signals you’ve passed due diligence and overcome sales friction at big firms.

Tip 9: Place Your Testimonials in a Perspective

That said, some of the best testimonials can be from small customers, especially if they are placed in the perspective of one of your ideal prospects. This signals that you’ve identified a target market and a representative customer has a genuine problem you are solving. A good formula for such a testimonial is: as an X, your company helps me Y, where is X = your ideal customer and Y is a big problem being solved.

Highrise's customer testimonials follow the powerful formula, "as an SMB owner, Highrise saved my business."

Tip 10: Pick the Traction Metrics that Make you Look Best

When you report traction, keep in mind you control how your own success is defined, so pick a definition that frames your success well and is understandable.

A company like OPower has amazing kilowatt hour savings, but  since those can be obtuse, they also show a timeline that reports hockey stick-like growth since their founding.

If you don’t have great growth numbers, you can copy Tumblr and put a live counter with your best stats. DC startup FastCustomer does a great job of this using a free JQuery plug-in called Flip Counter, which can be deployed quickly and easily.

OPower and Tumblr use very different metrics to brag about their traction to a visitor.

Show How to Take Action

After you’ve done your job convincing an early-stage investor that you’re worth talking to, consider how easy it is to use your website to get in touch.

Most website contact information isn’t well-suited to investors.  Gizmo has an amazingly robust contact page, but  an investor isn’t going to fill out a form or email your info@gizmo.com address. The contact page is great at convincing an investor you’re for real, but does little to make it easy for him to get in touch.

Tip 11: Target Your Contact Info

We built a way of deploying targeted contact info so that when an investor is on your page, he sees buttons to contact you via AngelList or your personal info, without it being visible to the general public.

Gizmo's contact info is much more relevant to an investor if they use Spinnakr to deploy an AngelList button.

How Spinnakr Can Help

After our talk, we were mobbed with requests to put investor-related messaging on websites, so we signed-up ten (!) companies from our class for our service.

In the words of one of our colleagues, it was a no-brainer . If we help them use their website to deliver a few more follows, shares or intros to them on AngelList, that additional interest will translate into a tangible impact on their bottom-line funding and ultimate valuation, making it well worth a monthly investment.

This was great feedback to hear, because it speaks to our core vision. If we can help you deliver targeted content that impacts the conversion of your visitors (and it does!), then we’ve created real value.

The Spinnakr website when an investor arrives.

It feels great to know our 500 team is as excited as we are about that value .

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/the-download-can-a-billion-dollar-tech-company-be-built-in-dc-alone/2011/10/06/gIQAFRsfYL_story.html

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

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.”

This is sort of an unspoken rule of social media engagement – if you follow a big brand, you should expect to hear something other than why you should buy their product. Here’s some of the 80/20 best social engagement practices brands follow:

1. Customer Care – responding to people who have a problem with your service, to either enforce a positive impression or mitigate a bad one. Example: Dominos, who spend most of their time responding to people complaining about 16-year-old employees bathing in their sinks and the moldy pizza.
2. A Personal Face – Illustrating to your customers that your company is made up of friendly, witty people who are up for a good chat. Example: Ford, who tweet almost exclusively through their social media guru Scott Monty, a happy-go-lucky guy whose job it is to humanize the gargantuan car company.
3. Content Curator – sharing news about their industry, or better yet, the industry of their consumers. Example: Flowtown, who use their Twitter feed to provide remarkably on-point commentary on social media marketing from around the web.

a typical complaint response tweet from Dominos

If you do the 80 percent right, the idea is the you can get away with a lot more because you’ve built up a lot more goodwill. You can ask your customers to buy from you, give you feedback, or even be a bit shameless in using Twitter to just push ads out.

Try it – you’ll be surprised how much more responsive your customers are when you give them a reason to like you, rather than just demand they do.

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.

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.

http://mashable.com/2011/06/30/psychographics-marketing/

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)

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.

That’s not to knock LaunchRock, per se. The company, after all, provides clever viral marketing tools in a fairly polished package. Other’s have noticed, and in huge numbers startups have begun to use LaunchRock to create their initial “coming soon” pages. But the popularity of these pages has become the single biggest reason to avoid LaunchRock.

There are two major ways in which LaunchRock’s ubiquity really hurts your ability to cultivate strong relationships with your early adopters.

• People Don’t Take LaunchRock Seriously

  By now it is well understood in the tech community and beyond that literally anyone can setup a LaunchRock page in a few minutes. Many have signed up on LaunchRock pages and the experience is consistently negative. Few startups ever follow up (prompting one developer to launch a parody where your email slips into a black hole), and fewer still ever end up launching a real product. Many are left wondering if the few minutes it takes to put up a LaunchRock pages is more or less the total amount of time you’ve put into your startup.

  As a result, users are reluctant to signup and when they do, they’re likely to rate low the odds of the startup being a serious product. This is certainly not the best first impression to make if you’re hoping to recruit passionate supporters.

• People Don’t Feel Special Using LaunchRock

  One of the most powerful elements of a “coming soon” page is the sense that you’re standing on the egde of something new and special. Creating this intrigue requires the user believe the founders have put a lot of care and thought into the product, and that it is the result of a very particular vision.

  But the generic nature of LaunchRock pages sends the opposite signal. Instead of believing someone is working hard to craft a specific solution to a problem, or a innovative new experience, users walk away struck by the fact that the founders couldn’t even find the time or motivation to create their own coming soon. This is hardly an inspirational experience, and thus the user isn’t likely to be excited about the relationship.

Establishing a credible and unique online presence is extremely important when introducing your idea to the world (and, indeed, when doing any social media marketing or brand development). Unfortunately, the popularity and uniformity of LaunchRock pages communicates the opposite. Will this kill your startup? In all likelihood, something else will first. But if you can’t get people excited about what you’re doing, you have a serious problem. The good news is there are easy ways to create an experience that seems more tailored and deliberate (including using the LaunchRock API), something I’ll cover in a future post.