This is a follow up on a few things Chris Schultz mentioned here: The season’s over, let’s get back to work.It’s time for traction.
You’ve spent a shitload of time prepping pitches, working on financials, and projecting awesomeness throughout New Orleans. You’ve been networking your face off. You made some good connections and established relationships with potential partners and investors. You got mentioned in nola.com, Silicon Bayou News, INC or Forbes. Way to go. The NOEW PR train only goes so far.
Overall, I think this was the best NOEW yet. Most of the people I spoke with had a solid experience, but how much did it really impact your company?
The past few weeks will be a blip in the roadmap. You will be the founder of a short lived startup if you don’t execute and get traction. The next few weeks and months are where real impact happens. You must gain traction. As Chris said…
Make sure you’ve made something happen because next time you pitch, people are expecting major progress.
We’re not in the valley. VC’s aren’t stroking checks too often in New Orleans yet. Angels are coming out of the woodwork swamp, which is awesome, but its not going to be enough. It’s time to shit or get off the pot.
Chris asked…
“A year from now are you going to be looking for a j-o-b or are you going to have paying customers, employees and a growing company?”
I was going to tell a story here, but Gabe’s over at Upshift is better and outlines solid tactics for sales hacking.
Tools and Tips
It’s time to pound the pavement. Get the meetings, close the deals. The only people you should be listening to are your customers.Throw all the feedback you get from me, friends, advisors, mentors and investors into an document until you hear the wants and needs of your customers. Track your customer feedback in something like uservoice. Interact with intercom. Build the products and company your customers will love.
Here are a few more tools that could help:
- Tout, Pipedrive and Insightly are great for tracking conversations with potential customers and your sales pipelines.
- If you run a SaaS product processing payments with Stripe, use Baremetrics. And read Josh’s post on ReTargeting.
- Automate things with IFTTT.
- Checkout Buffer for social sharing.
- Submit your startup everywhere you can.
- If you are struggling with a financial model use Foresight.
- Work efficiently and effectively. Dial in whatever GTD-style system works for you.
Feel free to add tools or post any questions in the comments. All the tools in the world won’t help you unless you hustle like you never have before.
I’ll end this with a quote from Paul Singh
“Every city believes they are the best place to be—that’s natural, I think the challenge is … it seems like a lot of the ecosystems in the South suffer from a lack of urgency.”
I can promise you he isn’t the only one thinking that.
There is a fire under your ass. Run.