Startup Blender is about strategic marketing and leadership for startups. Neatly organized into topics, most of the content is presented in a logical order, rather than the order it was published. It's a work in progress, so come back often to see what's new.
October 10, 2011

The Case for User Development

With Steve Blank’s seminal book Four Steps to Epiphany and the growth the ideas in the lean startup movement championed by Eric Reiss, startups are starting to understand the ideas behind customer development (The process that you use to identify customers and figure out how to market and sell to them.)

Unfortunately, in the new found fervor for customer development, the needs of users have been left out of the limelight, so I’m proposing we should be as focused on “user

October 10, 2011

PR Messaging Brief Template

Download PR Messaging Brief

Solid messaging for PR, including working with the traditional media and with bloggers, is critical. The best coverage comes when you are “on message.” A consistent message across all your communication for any announcement will help make sure the story you want told is effectively communicated to the journalists and bloggers who are writing it.

I’ve used this template for more than ten years across a broad range of announcements from product releases to crisis communications. The template is

October 10, 2011

Who Should Do Strategic Marketing?

A question that often comes up for startups is who should do the strategic marketing / business strategy? (See What is Strategic Marketing? for an explanation of this work.)

The answer is probably you. But the nuance depends on the stage. From inception through growth the responsibilities for different aspects of developing a business strategy will shift between people, but in the end everyone in the company should feel responsible for contributing to the creation and ongoing evolution of a company’s

October 10, 2011

What is Strategic Marketing?

Strategic marketing goes by a lot of other terms: business strategy, customer discovery, business planning, etc. But regardless of what you call it, the fundamentals are the same.

One way to dive into the question “What is strategic marketing?” is to think simply define marketing. The American Marketing Association defines marketing as:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

To

February 10, 2010

The First Signs of Spring | MBA Internships

As winter descends on us in full force, I’m already seeing the first signs of spring: MBA students have started reaching out to talk about summer internships. (MBAers are not the only interns itching for work in startups — more on that later in the article.)

For MBAers and startups, the summer internship promises many glories. I’ve definitely caught myself daydreaming about the amazing work my new summer interns will get done at a fraction of the cost of actually hiring