how to finance your (startup) dream

ideas on how to finance your startup dreams, proposed at the barcamp vienna 2010.

how to finance your (startup) dream

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"get a free portrait!" & more practical guerilla marketing examples

marketing budgets are a scare resource for every startup. finding innovative ways to reach more customers with less money therefore is key. "guerilla marketing", a concept introduced by conrad levinson in 1985 can be one answer.

wikipedia describles guerilla marketing as "...an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget." so much about the theory, but how to put that in practice? let´s have a look at three recent examples.

the first one is from the last barcamp vienna 2010 (thanks to the organizers rolf & max and the sponsors by the way!). when everyone was invited to post their proposed sessions, young photographer christian lendl put up the following "portrait photo for a link for a link" to his homepage.

by spending one hour of his time, he reached around 60 barcampers, almost a third of the attendants. now for marketers, that is a extremely good conversion rate! 60 people remember his name and will put links on their blogs, so his own website will rise in the search rankings, without one euro spend on adwords.

what about riding on the hype wave of someone else, to gain customer attention?
in this case it was the company ifixyouri using the apple ipone 4 hype to demonstrate their dedication towards their business: repairing iphones. the upcoming ihpone is supposed to use a 30 times more flexible front cover then used in the iphone 3gs and should therefore be less prone to breaking. at their company blog they published a post "iphone 4 glass - will it break?" to check that out. so they took a new iphone 4 an threw it on the floor. the glass broke at the third try.
disproving the impression the one could get from apple´s presentation, that the new glass would be much more durable, brought them plenty of attention. cost? approximately 30-40 us$ (they sell the iphoen 4 glass repair for 69 us$, so their actual costs will be much lower).


considering the ranking on techmeme and the respective discussion following, that was much more attention time then they would get for 40 us$ worth of printing standard marketing folders. p.s. that they maybe got inspired by "will it blend" does not make this guerilla marketing any less effective.

let´s move on to a third example, graffiti style guerilla marketing. regardless if one considers graffiti as art or daub, they are everywhere and the are a provocative in every way. using graffiti in the public space form marketing purposes remains illegal though(at least here in austria).
although sometimes graffiti are used without raising too much attention of the city authorities, this example of using graffiti style advertisement of telering, a local austrian mobile phone network operator, did not go unnoticed.
as telering was not allowed to spray the advertising message all over vienna the just thought different. why spraying colour on those walls which is forbidden when you can clean the walls - which is perfectly legal? so they did some selective cleaning, whileprotecting a dirty brick wall by a stencil. and that was the result:

again, the cost of the idea and "cleaning" their message on the walls showed true guerilla spirit and was in perfect relation to the attention gained.
that were three examples of great creative approaches to marketing. so what´s the guerilla marketing campaign for your start.up?
p.s. if the guerilla style sounds interesting, why not checking out another idea of conrad levinson´s book "guerilla marketing": "5 words to describe your business".

all about "start.up competitions", fresh from barcamp innsbruck 09

ahead of the upcoming in depth look at the barcamp innsbruck 09, which took place last weekend on the 25-26th april, the slides of the session "start.up competitions" are already online.

startup competitions

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barcamp innsbruck 2009 & 25 start.up competitions now on the start.upICT finance mindmap

barcamp innsbruck april 2009 is happening this weekend (25.-26. April 2009 ) in tyrol (AT) and i am glad to join. i propose to discuss the topic of start.up competitions. any inputs are welcome.

in preparation of the upcoming barcamp , the start.up finance mindmap has gained plenty of updates on the area of start.up competitions: there are 25 now on display.

furthermore the interviews with andraz tori and christoper clay as well as the series "six steps to venture capital" can now also be found in the ever growing topic map of the start.upICT blog.

the popular finance mindmap as well as the topic map can now be accessed directly through the top links on the right of the blog in the "START.UP FINDER" section.

barcamp salzburg 2008 round up - part 3/3

start.up financing and concluding remarks

with my talk about start.up financing i was well in line with the bandwidth of topics. only some barcampers already had some experience with financing topics. therefore common financing language like „venture capital“, „business angels“ and the like were probably as easy to understand for most of the barcampers as some pure lines of C to me. the discussions afterwards gave me the impression thought that i could bring some core financing messages across:

* there are plenty of funding opportunities out there,
* they are challenging though &
* there is a place to look them up.

friendly people, interesting topics and too less time for everything. thanks to the organizers and the sponsor. the barcamp salzburg definitely was worth the journey.

barcamp salzburg 2008 round up - part 2/3

or why barcamps are the consequence of self organization

ever been fascinated by „swarm intelligence“, heavily entertained and slightly afraid by the novel „prey“ or michael crichton?
i definitely was and still am. alex baumgartner outlined the laws and determinants of „self organization“ (see presentation here). then, using the program netlogo he showed live, how the seemingly intelligent behavior of birds, ants or fish occur.
50 to 100 lines of code are sufficient for the simulations. that made me wonder - somewhat of topic - what military research will bring upon us in the near future with swarms of armed drones.

barcamps, per definition un-organized events, also form structures and patterns by themselves (or are a consequence of them). they are somehow a similar phenomena as the elegance of moving swarms of birds. there are simple rulesets which lead to great results.
there are some formal rules like active participation, blogging about the barcamp or voting with ones legs. and there are less formal ones. being open and friendly to each other. share your insights with the others and not use the barcamp as a sales ground.
the results are easy communication with the other barcampers. information flows well and people looking for business are not often seen twice.

there is a tipping point - one of the essential elements of self
organization as well, where the numbers of barcampers reach a certain number, such that more and more people the event. barcamps are now an established elements of the austrian netculture, from salzburg, bodensee, klagenfurt, graz to vienna. and while on a micro level every barcamp appears to be somehow different on the macro level, the show a high degree of similarity.

in following part 3 of the salzburg round up, there will be three core elements of my start.up talk outlined as well as my concluding remarks on the barcamp.

barcamp salzburg 2008 round up - part 1/3

the scope of the june 2008 barcamp salzburg was wide. from media culture and internet history, right through modern programming approaches. game programming and the laws of self organization where there as well as a slot from me about start.up financing. around 20 people - i will call them barcampers - gathered at the arge kultur „studio“.

read in part 1 about or why presentations including actual programming code should not make one afraid. the upcoming part 2 explains what self organization has to do with barcamps and 3 part finishes off with thougts about the start.up presentation and concluding remarks about the barcamp salzbug 2008.

starting around two o‘ clock in the afternoon and personally having to leave for vienna already at six p.m. it was an intense experience. the „studio“, a regular site for concerts and theater plays is located in the cellar and is all painted in black . that definitely pushed everyone in the topics. the „bunker“ feeling made it easy to not get distracted and a missing wlan connection for the first half of the sessions kept everyone focused on the topics presented.

the wide array of topics made this barcamp interesting and (positively) difficult for non programmers like me. this forces one to think outside of the normal paths which is a worthwhile and fruitful exercise already by itself.

presentation lines like „“ do not make my attention wandering away, neither do details from michael raidel about the open id authentication protocol (presentation found here). on the contrary. besides the sheer beauty of well written code this would have made me missing organizational developments around programming like „scrum“.
scrum forgets about the old heavily specification focused programming towards a result driven approach. thomas r. koll, recently back from working as a developer in london, where they "lived" scrum obviously enjoyed the experience. not only were they more productive as a team but also had more fun on the way. see his presentation here.

the talk of brigtitte jellinek about internet history in salzburg even gained the interest of the ORF. brigitte digged back casual style into the roots widely undocumented past of austrian internet history. it was only around 1991 when the first IP connection was established in salzburg. in these days the then european backbone was powered by a 256kb connections.

start.ups where somewhat missing at this barcamp. martin herfurt was the exception. he planned to present the challenges of his start.up toothr after i headed back to vienna.

read why the barcamp is the consequence of self organization in the upcoming 2nd part of the round up.

social entrepreneurship

enjoy the barcamp vienna january 2008 presentation on "social entrepreneurship".
please note that thanks to valerie there are now even more interesting books in the link list.

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warum zum barcamp?

also: ich bin in der öffentlichen hochtechnologiefinanzierung tätig. interessiere mich für spannendne technologien jeder art. möchte gern mal das barcamp nutzen, um zuzuhören, was sich so alles in wien dazu tut.

möchte und kann auch gerne meinungen zur finanzierung und den stolpersteinen im bereich der start.up phase austauschen.

nachdem das mein erstes barcamp wird, bin ich mal gespannt, wie es wird und freue mich schon drauf.

barcamp vienna juni 2007

nachdem barcamp nach einem blog verlang, soll es so sein.