Saba Says | Startups, Growth & Marketing
By Saba Karim
The podcast has multiple themes:
– Marketing Tidbits
– Startup Founder Lessons
– Pitching Advice
– Twitter Tricks
– All About Clubhouse
– Clubhouse Recordings
Tweet me twitter.com/sabakarimm or reach out via sabakarim.com/contact
Saba Says | Startups, Growth & MarketingMar 10, 2022
Startup Founder Lessons: Idea, Team, Time
What is the ultimate combination that you need?
Startup Founder Lessons: Growth and Marketing
Please pardon the audio quality as it was recorded live on Twitter Spaces.
This is a conversation between myself, Saba Karim, and Adam Soccolich (twitter.com/BestLiveAudio) on growth and marketing. At first, we riff on what marketing channels we like the best, how to reach out to people - and then bring up founders from the audience to tell us about their current growth plans as we offer them ideas on how to get their next customers.
Startup Founder Lessons: Help Me Help You
On this episode:
- Three things to avoid when reaching out for help
- And how to craft the perfect email:
- Connection
- Identification
- Admiration
- Question
- Introduction
- Reiteration
- Appreciation:
Pitching Advice: Now, Grand Vision, and the Dots In-Between
Explaining what you do now is relatively easy. Most people also know what their grand vision. Listen to this to get better at connecting the dots.
Startup Founder Lessons: From Tweet to App Store in 30 Days
Listen how, a marketer by trade, not a software engineer, got this done.
Clubhouse Recording: 30,000 Data Points Debunks Myth of Successful Founders
Ali Tamaseb recently wrote Super Founders, a book that uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false.
Ali spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more.
Clubhouse Recording: Navigating the Idea Maze
A discussion on ideation, validation and passion – with Andrew Hutton, CEO and Co-founder of Day One, and Heather Hartnett, CEO and Founding Partner of Human Ventures.
Clubhouse Recording: Naval Ravikant | 28 Feb 2021
Naval gets asked questions from the audience and covers an array of topics like: Happiness and life, Curiosity and education, Life's most important decisions, Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, blockchain, decentralized systems, NFT's, Building communities, social media, and media, Investing in Clubhouse, Work, leisure and entertainment, Simulations, Pineapples on pizza, and much more.
Read the full recap here: https://www.sabakarim.com/blog/2021/4/27/recap-of-naval-ravikant-on-clubhouse
Pitching Advice: ClearPitch42
Startup Founder Lessons: Foundational Fundraising Resources
Lean Canvas - Business Plan – leanstack.com/leancanvas.
Pitch-Deck - Template Guide – sabakarim.com/pitchdeck.
Crunchbase - Company Insights Platform – crunchbase.com.
FounderSuite – Investor CRM – foundersuite.com.
Paperstreet - Investor Updates – paperstreet.vc.
EXTRAS
Investor pipeline workshop – toolkit.techstars.com/build-your-investor-pipeline.
Venture Deals – venturedeals.com.
SAFE Notes – upcounsel.com/safe-notes.
FAST Agreements – fi.co/fast.
Carta – carta.com.
Startup Founder Lessons: Six Habits for Success
Free your mind from worries.
You’ve all heard the saying.
Time block to do things.
Surround yourself with mentors.
Say thank you.
If you’re not having fun, stop.
Pitching Advice: 10 Things You Shouldn't Put In Your Pitch-Deck
<li>Exit strategy</li>
<li>Trillion dollar market</li>
<li>Company valuation</li>
<li>We don’t have any competition</li>
<li>We know everything</li>
<li>The first company that buys into our platform will dominate their industry</li>
<li>We are going to be the next “Facebook”</li>
<li>This is revolutionary</li>
<li>We plan to be the Theranos of X industry<br />
</li>
<li><em>Not telling, because the best founders know what to leave out.</em></li>
</ol>
All About Clubhouse: My Golden Rules of Moderating
8 suggestions to keep in mind to run a great event.
All About Clubhouse: Setting Up Your Profile
Pro-tips to ensure you look good and can be found
Twitter Tricks: Various Types of Posts
Don't just promote. Also:
- educate
- inspire
- connect
- provide insight
- entertain
- show you're human
- throwback
- engage
+ one more type of post that made me go viral over the weekend.
Twitter Tricks: Finding Your Voice
So what do you know better than anyone else. Write about that.
Startup Founder Lessons: Steps to Launch Your Startup
Pitching Advice: Investor Meeting Tips
Mistakes to avoid when getting on an investor call.
Marketing Tidbits: 10 Ways to Get 1000 RSVP's in 10 Days
Startup Founder Lessons: Top Reasons Startups Fail
<li>No market need</li>
<li>Ran out of cash</li>
<li>The team</li>
</ol>
Marketing Tidbits: Email Drip Campaigns
How to set up your email drip campaign sequences.
Startup Founder Lessons: Gratitude and Appreciation
Marketing Tidbits: Understanding Unit Economics and Market Segmentation
WTF is LTV, CAC, CPA, ROI? Read this.
What about TAM SAM and SOM? Here you go.
Book Review: Hacking Growth - How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success, by Sean Ellis
In my opinion, the number one growth marketing book of all time. Listen to the quick review and then go ahead and order online.
Marketing Tidbits: Common Marketing Mistakes
The best marketing is a good product - don’t overthink, over analyze and try to over optimize your marketing. Sometimes you just need to launch when the timing feels right and the iron is hot.
Marketing Tidbits: There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, Get Out and Talk To Your Customers
Marketing is a three dimensional function. Certainly more than just running ads, handing out flyers or doing cold outbound emails.
On this episode I am going to cover one of the core areas of market research - which is customer interviews. Because, before you can do marketing execution, you need to know who the customer is, and then understand how they speak about the problem.
Marketing Tidbits: Customer Service Matters
A little story about my experience in buying a scooter over the weekend.
Startup Founder Lessons: The Importance of Education and Curiosity
Learn, learn learn, test, test test, fail, fail fail, win, win, win.
Marketing Tidbits: 7 Ways to Get Customers for Under $500
A founder called me the other day and asked me "how can I best spend $500 to get myself customers?". In providing him my solutions, I realized a lot of the things you can do actually won't even cost you anything. So, here they are - alongside some things to avoid.
Startup Founder Lessons: Top Two Traits of a Great Founder
Leadership and Vision
Marketing Tidbits: Your Customer are the Heroes, Not You
For your startup messaging, your user or buyer is the #HERO in the narrative – not you.
What I mean by this is that when you’re launching a product, service, startup, business, anything, really.
You have to ensure the narrative is about the end-audience.
Marketing Tidbits: How to Land Gigs via Social Media
Don't just reply "ME", take your time to show enthusiasm, interest, availability, your expertise and make it easier for them to reach out to you.
Marketing Tidbits: Cold Emails for Marketing
The length of the email is not as important as the subject line and the ask.
Marketing Tidbits: Marketing is a Four Dimensional Function
1. You have to do research to find out the WHO
2. Plan and strategize to figure out best HOW
3. Then execute to motivate the YES
4. Check the data, figure out WHAT happened
Startup Founder Lessons: Your Idea Is Not Your Business
<li>Why are you building this?</li>
<li>Who is your target audience?</li>
<li>Have you spoken to some people in your target audience? Do they say they need this? How many of them?</li>
<li>When do you launch? What else will it do?</li>
<li>Who are your competitors? Why are you better?</li>
<li>Who’s working on this with you? What else have they built?</li>
</ul>
Marketing Tidbits: Create Multiple Subscription Types for Your Mailing Lists
Good mailing lists are like face-to-face conversations. Don't send your users or leads crap they don't want.
Pitching Advice: Bonus Points for your Pitch Deck (For experienced founders)
<li>Start with an interesting hook/fact</li>
<li>Have a nice design</li>
<li>Have a different deck for different audiences</li>
<li>Make me laugh</li>
<li>Make it less than 15 slides</li>
<li>Make it easy to access</li>
</ol>
Pitching Advice: 11 Core Elements of an Effective Pitch Deck
What is the problem you are solving?
Talk about the team
Solution/demo
Vision
Traction
Projections
Business Model
Market Opportunity
More on the team
Go to market strategy / Marketing
The ask
Marketing Tidbits: Basic Marketing Tips for Startups
Know your customer, experiment with various marketing channels, learn to vapor test, don't make your website vague, tell a story - don't just sell, and have a clear ask
Marketing Tidbits: Don't Round Up or Estimate How Many Customers You Have
Your business is made up of numbers. You have to know them back to front, otherwise you're setting yourself up for failure.
Pitching Advice: Pro-tips for Interviews
What to do when you're asked a question, didn't understand the question, don't know the answer, or are asked "what questions do you have for us?"
Saba Says Introduction
Why you should keep your introduction pitch short and simple.