3 things my startup is doing on this list of 5 things not to do…

Came across an article today titled 5 Money-Wasters Your Startup Does Not Need and 3 of the 5 items are things we’re doing at Jungle Disk that I believe are important for a startup.

1. An Office : We have an office and you should get one too, right away — Get a professional space with professional meeting rooms and facilities. Eliminating rent (a lease) doesn’t eliminate the rest of the overhead as described (i.e. utilities, furnishings, insurance, etc.). You still have a desk somewhere, a chair somewhere, an electricity bill to power your computer, etc. The actual “office space” these days is not a major cost. Start out in a co-working space such as Geekdom in San Antonio where you can begin at $50/month with access to conference rooms, coffee, and most importantly a professional social group.
2. Face time : “In-person meetings are just not necessary anymore” — False. Now, this doesn’t mean fly all over to every prospect that shows up asking to learn about your product. I do believe you’ll learn much more quickly and iterate your product, the way you communicate the value of your product, and you’ll create an army of promoters faster using local face to face meetings multiple times each week — even as the CEO (or solo Founder). Sitting down with a potential customer over lunch (that you were going to take the time to eat anyways) for the cost of a reasonable lunch ($10–20) is the least expensive marketing and market research you’ll be able to do. You’re getting an hour of that person’s time for next to nothing — and they may even become a customer and then pay back that lunch 100x over.
3. Business cards : If your business card just has your name, email address, office address (see #1 get an office), and phone number on it the card is a waste. Use your business cards as marketing — a couple of examples: (1) Put a promotional code on the back of the card offering something of value only available through the card; or (2) Test out new messaging, i.e. with Jungle Disk we talked about “The backups where you keep the key” a few years ago (referring to customer controlled encryption keys) and as we evolved the business we’ve changed that tagline message to “The only backups for business with Data Threat Protection”. Those iterations came through trying out different taglines on business cards — it is cheap, easy, and creates a conversation when you hand the card over.

He mentions two other items: Conferences and Billboards. With “Conferences” the way I interpret what he says is, “Do not spend time on low value high cost activities.” — This is much bigger than just conferences. As a startup you have to be ruthless with your prioritization saying no and not doing many things — conferences will just be one of them. The second “Billboards” paragraph says to me, “Don’t spend marketing dollars inefficiently”. A Billboard might be the best way to reach your target audience or it might be a huge waste of money — plan, measure, and understand how your marketing dollars are converting into revenue. We’re not doing inefficient marketing though we could have a billboard at some point in our future.