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MenuHow would you go about finding your intial target market/user group for a business social network?
What sites/groups/communities would you target and how would you target them?
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I have to ask: Did you already develop your product? The best advice, which I love, is from Seth Godin. He said something along the lines of "Don't find customers for your product, find products for your customers."
Always start with a customer you want to be in service to, and look to solve their problems.
In-person networking is great. Online also works well. We've gotten good results with https://www.getlittlebird.com/ where you can search for relevant topics and they do the tough work of identifying who is actually influential and who is simply calling themselves an "influencer" "guru" etc.
your target market is determined by your product or offering. you select your target customers based on your product and then you can choose demographics to reach potential clients keeping in view the income and age group. for example the focus of an interior designer will be homeowners within target income range. to divide market further you can divide your product in various specialized categories. for example for a furniture and fixture company the target market will be determined by various categories of furniture and fixture like home furniture and office furniture or kitchen or toilet fixture. once you have determined your target market you can then go and research specialized social media groups or websites and blogs for marketing your product to customers within defined target market. if you have website you can submit that to search engines by carefully choosing keywords that you can choose by researching how people find your competitors in the product space on search engines. for social media you can use hash tags to reach your target groups and to generate leads.
Network + speak at the following events...
Chamber of Commerce
E-Women's Network
Expos + Conferences related to your target niche.
Look at proven, recent examples. There is no one size fits all solution... it's different for every product and launch. Your ability to sniff out the solution to this will be a major factor in how successful your product is. Paul Graham used to ask "how will you get your first 100 users?" in YC interviews... if you couldn't answer it, you probably weren't getting in.
This depends on the market you are in. For example a b2c market is totally different than a b2b market. I would set up a clear plan to research these channels and then have a strong prospecting strategy in place to reach out to them.
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How can I become an idea person, as a professional title?
One word: Royalties This means you generate the idea and develop it enough to look interesting to a larger company who would be willing to pay you a royalty for your idea. This happens all the time. Rock stars, authors and scientists routinely license their creative ideas to other companies who pay them a royalty. Anyone can do it. Your business, therefore, would be a think tank. You (and your team, if you have one) would consider the world's problems, see what kinds of companies are trying to solve those problems, and then develop compelling solutions that they can license from you. You have to be able to sell your idea and develop a nice presentation, a little market research and an understanding of basic trademark and patent law. The nice thing about doing this is that if you develop enough cool ideas you will have royalties coming in from a lot of different sources, this creates a stable, passive revenue stream that requires little or no work to maintain. Start in your spare time and plan on the process taking 3-5 years. Set a goal to have a few products in the market that provide enough revenue (royalties) to cover your basic living expenses. Then you can quit your day job and dedicate more time and increase the momentum. A good idea business should have dozens, if not hundreds of license contracts generating royalties. It's possible to pull this off. And it is a fun job (I'm speaking from experience).MM
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What is the average series A funding round at pre revenue valuation for a enterprise start up w/cutting edge tech on verge of our first client.
With all respect to Dan, I'm not seeing anything like that. You said "pre-revenue." If it's pre-revenue and enterprise, you don't have anything proven yet. You would have to have an insanely interesting story with a group of founders and execs on board with ridiculous competitive advantage built in. I have seen a few of those companies. It's more like $3m-$5m pre. Now, post-revenue is different. I've seen enterprise plays with $500k-$1m revenue/yr, still very early (because in the enterprise space that's not a lot of customers yet), getting $8m-$15m post in an A-round. I do agree there's no "average." Finally, you will hit the Series A Crunch issue, which is that for every company like yours with "cutting edge tech" as-yet-unproven, there's 10 which also have cutting edge tech except they have customers, revenue, etc.. So in this case, it's not a matter of valuation, but a matter of getting funded at all!JC
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For every success story in Silicon Valley, how many are there that fail?
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