After a fun-filled, beer-fueled, internet-disabled afternoon topped off with thai food and a test-drive of Danielle’s techkaraoke concept, I put together the following Stephen Colbert-style takeaways from Seattle Startup Weekend part Deux. Hats off to the event organizers for gathering such a committed and talented group of people for a marathon of a weekend.  Noting my own personal disappointment that Raising John Stamos was 86′ed, that I don’t have an iPhone, and that evidently twitter is the ringtone of 2009 when it comes to spawning startups, I enjoyed my 6-hour drive-by of the 54-hour event.

• Tip of the hat: Eating your own dogfood. When it comes to creating value in the marketplace, you have to ask yourself if “the dog will eat the dogfood.”  The most compelling elevator pitches I heard Saturday afternoon were delivered by passionate team members who represented their own target market– or who could clearly articulate the company’s benefits from the perspective of their customers. Internal consistency is also a good thing– walking the walk of your value proposition. If you’re starting a green company and drive away in a Humvee, or represent a branding company with a lackluster presentation, your street cred is shot.

• Tip: Show vs. tell. If you can capture your audience’s attention and imagination with an engaging before-and-after scenario, that tends to be much more effective than delivering a lecture on features and benefits.  Slight cautionary tale (not a wag-worthy offense):  one brand marketing company put together a text-heavy presentation explaining their value proposition, but what was truly compelling was the imagery of a client’s website before they engaged the firm, and the subsequent reimagining of the site afterwards (also see: dogfood discussion above).

• Tip: Be flexible. One common element of a nonprofit organization and a startup is that the vision and mission gets you out of bed every morning and keeps you up at night. It is absolutely critical to your success that you passionately believe in your mission, but you cannot become so obsessed by your own vision that you ignore what the market wants.  One of the greatest attributes of a startup is the ability to be nimble and turn on a dime; some of the best commentary I heard from the Startup marathoners was how much their ideas evolved over the course of the weekend. The 150+ participants were the microcosm of the marketplace, and the savvy companies listened to this proxy for the market.

• Wag of the finger: The chicken-egg dilemma. I spoke with more than a handful of Startuppers whose companies were predicated on user-generated content. One of the challenges they face is that to get content, they need users, but to keep users, they need content (no site visitor in their right mind would likely return should they seek content and find nothing).  This need not be the death-knell of the startup; founders need to think creatively about how to seed their site with content before they’re ready for prime time user acquisition.  Some combination of partnerships and licensing data can help create customer stickiness.  Check out CultureMob for just one example– this site is designed to to help users “discover, share and promote events.”  As the CultureMob team goes to market in each new geography, they launch with pre-populated data from publications and venues, and the experience is further enriched with user-generated content.

• Wag: The fumpany. A term coined by my former colleague Kevin Kirn, this describes the age-old “it’s a feature not a company” concern.  You just may be a fumpany if you’re constantly getting asked “why doesn’t facebook/ twitter/ sharepoint/ insert-company-name-here just add that enhancement themselves?”

Thanks again to John Smilgin, Nathan Kaiser and the gang for inviting me to crash the party.  Already looking forward to Seattle Startup the Third.

Full disclosure: Rebecca Lovell, Executive Director of NWEN, has a deep and abiding love for John Stamos.  For those nonbelievers, check out the actor’s star turn on General Hospital as Blackie Parrish.  No one puts Blackie in the corner.

Tags: business planning, startup advice

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Events, Pitching, starting a company. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.