Gabriel Aldamiz-echevarria spoke to us today about his experience with tech-start ups and PR, however, he provided valuable information about his journey with his recent start-up Chicisimo. Chicisimo came about from a simple idea that Gabriel and his wife stumbled upon.
A protoype of the idea was then implement within a week. This is something I found surprising because it goes against most of the things in which I have learned throughout my MBA, such as, one must first fully develop one's idea, market assessments and competitor analysis must be completed etc. However, it seemed as if he suggests that an idea can be developed through trial and error by finding the community in which you are targeting and then bringing value to that community.
He feels that it is good to start with a little bit of money because it helps you to focus. I agree with him because most of the time if one has a lot of money to work with then you do not focus your idea and money is sometimes spent unnecessarily just for the sake of it. This was a common recommendation found with our previous lectures (Weblogs and Coaches) they both started with little money and developed over time.
In terms of PR Gabriel offered the following advise:
1) Its all about building relationships
2) You must know that PR is time consuming
3) Get to know the person that you are contacting
4) Learn who influences who within the company that you are contacting
5) When sending an email anticipate the method in which they will be viewing the email eg. Desktop or iPhone
6) Subject lines are important
7) write something personal about the company in the email
8) Go to a lot of events
To shed further light on the subject, I found an interesting article written on PRNewser called "Five things Tech Startups should know about PR". Its an interesting read about an event held in New York called Demystifying PR for startups. Here is the link: http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/five-things-tech-startups-should-know-about-pr_b9775. But in summary the five things that were stated:
1) PR is not just publicity
2) You should not always speak to the press about your direct competitors
3) PR is not based of algorithms aka There is no guarantee
4) Fact matter, opinions don't
5) The purpose of a press release is not to generate press
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A question in which I have for Gabriel is: What did the first prototype look like? When/How did you find out it was not useful? and what information did you base the decision to create a new version on?
First of all, thanks Laurie for taking the time to write this and for your questions.
ReplyDeleteAbout time to market and how much analysis you should make... you'll always get different views from different people, depending on the context and experiences and who-knows-what. My strong opinion is that, if you are launching a consumer internet play, and if you are not google, you need to launch as soon as you can, get feedback from users, iterate... , that's the only way to understand what you need to build. its very unlikely that you build the right thing at once. You could wait months or years to be get the "right thing", very unlikely though. Today there was a nice post about this on TC: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/9-women-cant-make-a-baby-in-a-month/
The prototype was ugly, but as soon as we had it we were like: "wow, we should also do this, its obvious!", when we saw the prototype, got feedback, we understood what next step was. We never realized if was not useful... we improved it until what you see today. New developments are based on what impact they'll have on the community. We have something cool in the kitchen that comes from observing users, from observing what's working well on the web (not on fashion), and from having a vision of where we want to go.
hope i'm responding to your questions, thanks again!
Thank you Gabriel. I love this article. I completely agree with the fact that as a start up you should not over fund. One needs to test the market as was stated on this blog! Great recommendation!
ReplyDelete