Kishin Manglani

Startup Marketing: How to Attract Customers

As a student, I get a lot of free stuff. Today I got a free dinner to a Stephen Starr restaurant in a city. Why? Because I am a student. I got to enjoy whatever I wanted on the menu, their special drinks, amazing dessert, all without having to worry about the steep bill the Starr restaurants bring. So why would they give a broke college student an excellent meal for free? Because they are counting on me telling my friends about it. 

The best marketing is word-of-mouth, everyone will agree with that. Your customers are your greatest marketing tools. However, when you are just starting out, you don’t have any customers. What you need to do is build hype, but how?

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Philly Tech Meetup

Yesterday was the first Philly Tech Meetup. Seven startups presented: 

• AppNowGo - easy web app builder
• Campus Sponsorship - get sponsorship money from big brands for your Fraternity, Sorority, Sports Team, or Club
• CloudMine - archive media rich files into the cloud 
  
• Jawaya - find better search results faster
• LaunchRock - create a viral “Launching Soon” page in minutes
• MeepMe - brings text-flirting to bars
• Superfluid - makes collaboration in social networks fair by enabling members to trade favors using a virtual currency

My favorites were AppNowGo, Jawaya, and LaunchRock. That is not to say the others were not good, but I just particularly liked thse ones. Overall, it was a really good turnout and event. I have already signed up for next month’s.

Entrepreneurial Advice: My Meeting with Jack Abraham

Through Wharton’s Entrepreneur in Residence Program I was able to set up a one on one meeting with Jack Abraham (@jackabraham), Founder and CEO of Milo.com. He was a Penn student also and created his own concentration in Technological Entrepreneurship, which is quite fitting given his entrepreneurial success.

Overall, meeting with him was a great experience. He was a pretty cool guy. I did not go in with any sort of business plan or ideas, just my passion for technology startups. I asked him for his advice, and he gladly offered what he could. His answers were very straight forward, honest, and helpful. Below are a few of them:

How did you decide to take on this huge task of creating Milo.com as a college student?

Jack said he is very ambitious. He does not want to climb hills; he said he wants to climb mountains. Given his competitive nature and the competitive environment at Wharton he wanted to do something big. He described some of his earlier entrepreneurial endeavors and how each one led to the next. By learning what did not work and what did, he was able to ultimately build a great company.

He ended the point with a word of advice he was once told, “If you shoot for the moon and miss, you might end up in Europe. And Europe is a good place to be. But if you shoot for Europe and miss you might end up in the Atlantic.” Shoot big was his point.

What sort of experience do you think is valuable to an aspiring entrepreneur?

• He immediately said either start a business or join a startup. The experience that can be gained from joining a startup is invaluable. One point he highlighted was that with startups products are constantly changing, whether it be new ideas, roadblocks, or competitors, startups are dynamic whereas larger companies have a steadier flow.
• Learn to program. After he said join a startup, he said don’t just do anything; try to program and build products. Jack specifically mentioned that python was among the most worthwhile languages to learn because of its simplicity and power. He also commented on the Django framework’s strength and potential.

Any last bit of advice?

• Start sooner. If you keep shooting your “probability of success is 100%.” He said very emphatically that every successful person failed many times, but they learned from their experience and continued.
• Learn to sell. I knew he was going to say this as I read many of his interviews, but it is still worth mentioning because it is easily the most important aspect of any business. A product doesn’t sell itself. He also said that the ability to sell yourself is invaluable to a young entrepreneur.

Overall, meeting with him was an incredibly rewarding experience, as Jack is both experienced and incredibly smart.

Social Media Revolution

I saw this interview on the Wall Street Journal with social media expert Clay Shirky (WSJ) discussing the impact social media has had on politics. It is fascinating how websites like Twitter or Facebook are essentially helping bring about political change in some nations. The internet is essentially allowing people with similar ideas to collaborate. Two really interesting points he made are:

1. The internet allows for larger coordination at lower costs
2. A country that shuts off its internet and cut off its mobile service is choosing to opt out of the economy

It will be interesting to see how the situation in many of these countries plays out.

Entrepreneurial Advice: Why It’s Easy to Make It Big

Electronic Arts has been producing top selling video games for as long as I can remember. However, they just reported yet another loss. Why? Because newer development companies are taking over. Microsoft used to dominate the personal computer market, but in five years Apple has made a solid dent. Nokia used to dominate the mobile phone domain, but in less than two years Google’s Android has taken over.

Just look at how Facebook has grown. In less than seven years it has reached what some claim to be a $75 billion valuation. Then look at how fast Groupon has grown: $15 billion in two years. My point is that it is really easy to grow quickly. Why?

There are three main reasons why it is easier than ever to make it big:

1. Herd marketing
2. The Internet
3. Low Startup Costs

Herd marketing: Everything is social now. Buy something and post it on Facebook or Twitter. New gadget? Write about in on your blog. Product information has become viral. 

The Internet: Herd marketing is possible only because of the internet. We are all always connected. This one is obvious.

Low startup costs: I started my first business in middle school, with zero capital, other than my computer. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook with nothing but a computer. Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com out of his home. Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google out of a garage.

It is pretty amazing because markets are as dynamic as ever. If it is easy to go ahead and win over a market share in a few years, it is just as easy to lose. It is a simple Machiavellian principle: Power easily won, is easily lost.