Big brands have a lot of things that they can learn from start-ups that have marketing budgets of zero and focus on engagement and community. These are some of the most important lessons.

1. Start up school 101:
Lessons for big
brands
Confidential and Proprietary © 2012 Gravity Partners Ltd. 1

2. Digital networks - Except for how marketing & advertising agencies
market products and build brands
have changed
everything

3. ...and Companies are struggling
“ Marketing is a $450 Billion industry, and
we ...mak[e] decisions with less data and
discipline than we apply $100,000 decisions in
other aspects of our business. Instead they
repeat old plans, depend on TV, hand off the
planning process and focus on reach rather than
behavior and intent
Peter Stengle
GMO Procter & Gamble

4. Start Up School
101

5. Successful start ups do things differently
“ Earlier in your start up, you need to
acquire your customers for free
Fred Wilson
Union Square Ventures

6. Thus requiring a completely different
approach
Confidential and Proprietary © 2012 Gravity Partners Ltd. 6

7. Lesson #1 -Focus on the value of every
customer interaction

8. Since start-ups don’t have marketing budgets, they
don’t have to put focus on decreasing the cost of
customer acquisition ....
move from traditional to experience-enabled
marketing view marketing view
decrease increase
the cost the value
of customer of each customer
acquisition interaction

9. How would your business
change tomorrow, if your
call centre wasn’t
considered a cost centre
but a relationship centre?

10. Lesson #2 -Build your organizational
structure from the
community out

11. Start-ups focus on community as their core blurring the
lines between PR, customer care and marketing,
allowing community managers to deal with all three
Public
Relations
Community
Engagement
Customer Marketing
Care

12. “ You don’t start communities.
Communities already exist. They are
already doing what they want to do. The
question you should ask is how you can
help them do that better
Mark Zuckerberg
CEO Facebook

13. If you helped and supported a
community from the beginning rather
than it being an after thought, how
could you work with that community
to build your brand, products and
services?

14. Lesson #3 -Don’t just build a product,
build an ecosystem

15. Start-ups try to enable and facilitate ecosystems by encouraging
the connections between customers, creating open API’s so others
can help grow their systems, and watching for emergent
opportunities on an on-going basis
Confidential and Proprietary © 2012 Gravity Partners Ltd. 15

16. If you believed that you were
actually part of an ecosystem
rather than outside it or managing
it, how would your organizational
philosophy change?

17. Lesson #4 -Your customers are your
creative team

18. Customer feedback, community forums, beta groups, behavioural
data - given to you freely by the world’s least expensive creative
team, your users

19. If you saw your customers as part of
your creative team vs. an army of
free word of mouth marketers, how
would your advertising efforts
change?

20. Lesson #5 -Make connections between
people not products

21. Consider how your products and services could create
connections, not only to your products and services but between
your customers

22. oh and refer a friend?...
doesn’t count

23. If your brand enabled connections
between people, how could it
leverage that knowledge and
information to grow and nurture
deeper relationships with customers
over time?

24. Lesson #6 -Getting it right is better than
getting it

25. With community and customer at
their core, successful start-ups
focus on the overall user experience
above all

26. On dropbox’s popularity
“ After I left Syncplicity, I ran into the CEO of Dropbox and
asked him my burning question: "Why don't you support
multi-folder synchronization?" His answer was classic
Dropbox. They built multi-folder support early on and did
limited beta testing with it, but they couldn't get the UI right. It
confused people and created too many questions. It was too
hard for the average consumer to setup. So it got shelved.
Issac Hall
CEO of Simplicity - a Dropbox Competitor
source: now deleted comment from Quora

27. We only use about 10% of our brain,
and funnily enough, we tend to only
use 10% of features built into most
software. What if we only focused
on being brilliant with the top 10% ?

28. Lesson #7 -Make people happy

29. It sounds almost too simple – make people happy – but if you
have them engaged, if they feel they are being listened to and if
you focus on the things that make what they are doing
seamlessly easy, they will be happy

30. On why Wesabe lost to Mint
“ Mint focused on the user doing almost no work at
all...and giving them immediate gratification whenever
they could... Instead, I prioritized trying to build tools
that would eventually help people change their
financial behavior for the better....Changing people’s
behavior is really hard
Mark Hedlund
Founder Wesabe
Source: http://blog.precipice.org/why-wesabe-lost-to-mint

31. What if happiness was part of your
business model?

32. Lesson #8 -Focus

33. Trying to be all things to all people
means you end up being nothing to
anybody.
Facebook didn’t start as the social
network for everyone, it was the
social network for people with
harvard.edu addresses

34. How much focus does your
organization have? How would
things change if you didn’t try to be
all things to all people and instead
you were brilliant for key groups?

35. Lesson #9 -Everything you (think) you
know is a hypothesis

36. There is an overwhelming desire to
‘have all the answers ’ at big
organizations. Start-ups are often a
best guess and ‘beta it and see’
cultures. It opens themselves to
emergent opportunities on an on-
going basis

37. “ The two fatal guesses for startups on day one is….I
know what the customer problem is, I know what
to build
Steve Blank
Author & Entrepreneur

38. What would change if you
accepted that you don’t have all
the answers? What kinds of
processes and people would you
need to be open to the constant
possibility of change?

39. Lesson #10 -Culture drives everything

40. Many VC’s and entrepreneurs don’t
put much stock in the concept of
brand. But some of them are the best
at building them. Why? they focus on
creating culture at the heart of their
DNA. It starts with Founders vision
and is built one decision at a time.

41. “ The culture of a company informs every decision
that a business makes. Once that culture takes root
--- its values, folklore, principles, savoir-faire, style,
manners, consideration, work ethic --- every
decision thereafter is colored by that culture
JLM
Entrepreneur & AVC Community Member
Source: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/05/first-time-vs-serial-
entrepreneurs.html#comment-195329057

42. How would you characterize your
corporate culture? Do you believe
it supports where you want to go
as an organization and brand?

43. The Recap
1. Focus on the value of 6. Getting it right it better
every customer interaction then getting it
2. Build your organizational 7. Make people happy
structure from the community
out 8. Focus
3. Don’t create products, 9. Everything you (think) you
create ecosystems know is a hypothesis
4. Your customers are your 10. Culture drives everything
creative team
5. Make connections
between people not products

44. Final thought
“ A point of view can be a dangerous
luxury when substituted for insight
and understanding
Marshall McLuhan
Media Theorist

45. The start of something that changes everything
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