SF Startup Marketing Meetup Group

I attended a Mozilla Labs meetup event a few months back and loved the format. About 6 startups each presented for 10 minutes on how they scaled their applications. Each one presented a great story on the tools and technology they used and how the team worked together to build great products. 

SF Startup MarketingI started thinking about connecting with other marketers in a similar fashion so went looking for other meetup groups with startup marketers, but I couldn’t find any. Sure, there were marketing groups about all sorts of interesting topics, but none specifically focused on the challenges we face as startups. Thus, the SF Startup Marketing meetup group was born.

Traditional marketing sucks! No budget, no resources, just pure creativity and innovation is what startup marketing is all about. You love it. You thrive on it.

Join the SF startup marketing meetup group and share your successes (and failures), how you executed them and what you learned with the group.

Each meetup we’ll pick a new topic and have marketers present their stories. Topics might include acquiring customers, demand creation, blogging, analytics and measuring marketing effectiveness, social media marketing, optimization, search engine marketing, building an affiliate program, viral marketing, community building, and generally how to do more with less.

Both B2B and B2C marketers are welcome. It’s definitely an “in-the-trenches” kind of meetup group where it’s not just about trends and strategy, but how marketers are actually executing and the technology we’re using. 

If you want to meet other marketers like yourself then join the meetup group and help us plan our first event!

Insights On SaaS From The $32 million HubSpot Mega-VC Round

HubSpot, my former employer, just announced a 4th round of funding from Sequoia, Google, and Salesforce. It’s great to see that the company I believed in from the start is getting this kind of market validation. Congratulations!

…a thin line separates the temperament of a promising entrepreneur from a person who could use, as they say in psychiatry, a little help. Academics and hiring consultants say that many successful entrepreneurs have qualities and quirks that, if poured into their psyches in greater ratios, would qualify as full-on mental illness.
Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs, New York Times

Marketing Resources for Startups and Entrepreneurs

The other night I drove up to Sonoma to present to an MBA Entrepreneurship class on inbound marketing and how to scale a new venture. It was a great experience and very eye opening. The students are working to build their business models and develop business plans, yet none have their own blogs and only about 4 of the 30 are on Twitter. As Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah point out in their webinar, Everything We Wish We Learned about Startups (but didn’t at MIT), marketing a critical factor in the success of a new startup. It’s important to engage and build your community before you even write a line of code or hire an employee.

Here are a few marketing resources that I think every entrepreneur should check out.

Books

  • Art of the Start - the time-tested, battle-hardened guide for anyone starting anything
  • Blue Ocean Strategy - how to create uncontested market space and make competition irrelevant
  • Crossing the Chasm - marketing and selling disruptive products to mainstream customers (the revised technology adoption lifecycle)
  • The Long Tail - why the future of business is selling less of more

Blogs

Community and Events

  • Stanford / MIT Venture Lab - events promote the growth and success of high-tech entrepreneurial ventures by connecting ideas, technology and people in Palo Alto 

Free Tools

  • Website Grader - A free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of your website
  • Twitter 101 for Business - Tips from Twitter to get started, learn the lingo, and build your business presence on Twitter
  • Marketing Hubs - links to articles, free webinars, guides, and kits for business blogging, social media marketing, search engine optimization and more

Know of other great resources for startups that should be added to the list?

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