Startup Grind Conference 2020, Downtown Redwood City, CA
This is my first year attending the Startup Grind Conference held in Redwood City, CA. I’ve heard of this conference before but it did not register at the time. What drew me to it were the CXO speakers and an opportunity to be my curious-self and learn about new products out there helping businesses and consumers.
The conference turned downtown Redwood city into a university-like experience, where attendees sat and listened in to talks in theater style (literally sitting in a theatre) as if we were watching our James Bond or Star Wars movie, with long lines getting into each talk. The two-day agenda had layers of topics catered to every audience segment, from marketing, storytelling to entrepreneurship and VC funding.
I attended a few talks and wanted to share out my David Letterman’s TOP 10.. If you prefer a short version, watch this clip. Or, read the long version below.
1) Heidi Zak, CEO, ThirdLove: The reason her company is called “ThirdLove” is because she wants to give women a third option for love.
2) Jaya Kolhatkar, Chief Data Officer, Hulu: Define your business purpose first, then decide on the data that you want to gather and build around it. You don’t collect data for data sake.
3) Amazon’s Building Product the Amazon Way: Most start-up companies go out and build their MVP first before they get enough feedback from customers. Amazon does the opposite before they build their MVPs. They put out a press release talking about what the product is so consumers can respond to it. By getting feedback from customers before their MVP build out, they have a better idea of what they are building, and this could shorten the MVP development cycle.
4) Jennifer Tejada, CEO, PagerDuty: In addition to investing in technology, to make it, your company should invest in your people. When you have highly-engaged people who build, sell, and market your product, you have it made. People problems are harder to solve than technology problems.
5) Daniel Seigel, MeetUP CEO: Tesla uses their employee community to learn about their products very effectively.
6) Andrew Dudum, CEO, Hims and Hers: Experiment with your product early on, e.g., on product naming. Hims and Hers reviewed 33 names for their company before they settled down with “Hims and Hers.” When choosing your company name or things that are important, don’t rush into it. Make sure it feels right and means something to you.
7) Andrew Dudum Continued: Every touch point builds trust. Consumers don’t want to be told to feel good about your product. They want to experience it through their senses, such as Hm…it smells good when they sniff it. Hm…It feels heavy when they put it in their hands.
8) Kirsten Green, Investor, Forerunner Ventures: Building an emotionally-resonate brand is multi-dimensional. It takes more than marketing. It’s the experience and everything around that’s going to make your brand resonate with your customers and develop affinity with it over time.
9) Amy Elisa Jackson, Head of Content Marketing, Glassdoor: When you do a post, you are telling a story. Storytelling can take many different forms, such as blogs, success stories, emails, podcasts, etc.
10) Jory Des Jardins, Head of Global Startup Marketing, Amazon Web Services (AWS): As an early-stage startup, your vision needs to mean to a few who will embrace it. Once you have early traction, then broaden it to include other relevant customer segments.
These bullets sum up my David Letterman’s TOP 10! Hope you’ve enjoyed them?
