Feedpresso — Second month at StartupYard

This is the third post about my and Feedpresso experience during the participation of StarpupYard accelerator.

The second month of StartupYard was mostly workshops in various areas relevant to the life of a startup. Namely:

• How to do PR?
• Landing Pages
• User Personas
• Selling to businesses
• Paid Advertising
• Storytelling
• How to do marketing?
• Azure Cloud
• Business Model & Financial Projections

All of these workshops were extremely relevant to us. However, I‘ll describe just a few that stood out the most.

Business Workshop

There were many great tips about the way we should talk with businesses. We covered things like how to push businesses to close the deal, how to price your product accordingly (apparently, if you are too cheap, nobody will buy anything from you 😉).

I feel that it is important to mention the books that Cedric recommends to read:

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
• Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
• The New Solution Selling: The Revolutionary Sales Process That is Changing the Way People Sell
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers

Unfortunately, I’ve been stuck with Crossing the Chasm for now as I haven’t been reading enough :-(.

Storytelling

A great workshop that was given by Lloyd. The biggest takeaway here was that everybody cares about your story. Your users, your clients, and even your investors.

If you cannot tell a story about your startup and yourself, then you are basically nothing. A bit of exaggeration but it is a serious business 😊

However, when you make a story, you shouldn’t forget to make it relevant to the consumer of it.

We have explored how stories are made (apparently, there are just 6 main arcs) and that each of them should have a: character, setting, conflict, plot, and theme.

Azure

This workshop was probably relevant just to me personally. Actually, in the beginning, I even thought that it‘s going to be a waste of time since we’ve been using Azure Cloud for more than a year now so there is little chance that I am going to learn anything useful as it felt that it was tailored more for beginners.

I was completely wrong. We went to the offices of Microsoft for the workshop which lasted an entire day. Before we started it, guys spent some time figuring out our level and ditched their initial agenda to make it extremely relevant personally to us.

I got a chance to clarify many advanced details about the way the Azure works. DocumentDB, Azure Function, Blob Storage, and Queues. There were many details that still weren’t clear to me and the guys from Microsoft helped me out a lot.

Paid Advertising

We had an opportunity to learn from Marketa Kabátová. There is a saying about AdWords that no person can learn everything there is to learn about AdWords. Apparently, Marketa might be the one that got there.

There was a lot of to take in from that session and I felt that I missed out a lot by not being experienced (I have run just a few campaigns) enough to make the best use of her knowledge.

However, one thing definitely struck into my mind and probably many do not know that — whenever bidding for phrases, use the quotes as otherwise the bid is made on two separate keywords — not a phrase. It is really not obvious and can save a fortune for the CPC.

Conclusion

In the end, I was really surprised with the quality of the workshops and I was really impressed how relevant all of them are to the startups.