This week marked the 15th year anniversary reunion of the launch of the Business 2.0 magazine (first issue July 1998). As their first columnist, I was involved with Business 2.0 during the planning stages, leading-up to the first issue’s release, and working with the founders and original editors and writers. If you are young enough not to remember the magazine, Business 2.0 chronicled the transformational power of the Internet on business, hence the name Business 2.0, and the name came out of a conversation between Chris Anderson (Business 2.0 founder who later purchased TED) and Jeff Bezos at TED. Jeff apparently blurted it out.
One of the staples of that first issue was a seminal centerpiece titled “10 Driving Principles of the New Economy”. A small group of 29 advisors that included me, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Halsey Minor, Kim Polese, Steve Jurvetson and others, helped Business 2.0 develop these principles that became the foundational thesis of the magazine’s content for several years ahead.
Tag: value proposition
The “thin edge of the wedge” is a popular analogy in startup development to explain how you first need to hook your users with a sharp feature that’s easy to try. If you don’t, customer acquisition becomes a lot harder, if not impossible.
The same metaphor applies for your communications efforts when you’re trying to explain what your company does. The right words matter a lot. Yet, I see many startups not being clear enough with their messaging, in part because they don’t approach it from the point of view of how it all fits together, and often for not applying the rigors of simplicity.
I’m sure there is more than five things that startups botch up. But I’m going to focus on these five marketing activities, because they can make a difference in propelling a company further ahead.
The following five themes become increasingly important the more a startup matures and develops, whether they are growing their users or revenues, or both.
Let’s dive into them.