Recently I had the honor and pleasure to be invited to hold a keynote speech for Alumniportal by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).
I spoke a bit about five things I wished that I had known before starting out as a startup founder.
Here they are – in no particular order.
ChatGPT’d screenshot from the online event
About the DAAD:
The DAAD is the world’s largest funding organisation for the international exchange of students and researchers.
Since it was founded in 1925, around 3 million scholars in Germany and abroad have received DAAD funding. It is a registered association and its members are German institutions of higher education and student bodies. Its activities go far beyond simply awarding grants and scholarships. The DAAD supports the internationalisation of German universities, promotes German studies and the German language abroad, supports countries in the Global South in building and improving their higher education systems and advises decision makers on education, foreign science and development policy.
Recently I was invited by students at the prestigious (often ranked as #1 for business degree universities in Germany) private university of WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Vallendar, Germany to mentor at their 3Day- Startup (sorf of a Startup Weekend clone) event.
And the winner was… Team Care Screenshot
I’ve also been working with WHU in Düsseldorf for some years now, mentoring at their accelerator program, but I had not been to WHU Vallendar since I was invited to Idealab in 2013, so it was nice to be back again.
After a little hiatus post-pandemic, we were finally back with the popular Rheinland Pitch Winter Finals format, this year in KOMED, Cologne!
The Rheinland Pitch was founded in 2013 and grew to become Germany’s largest startup pitching event. It is open to all startups (for free) and a public audience on a regular basis.
Recently I was invited to hold my “Sales & Marketing for Early-Stage Startups” workshop at the University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf (HSD) for participants in their “Gründerzeit” program.
Spoiler alert: Sales & Marketing at the early stage of a startup isn’t what you think it is(if you are thinking it’s just like the kind of activities with the same types of goals that larger more established companies are doing, just with much less money and much less people).
If this sounds interesting to you for your educational institution or startup support program too, why not get in touch?
The Sales & Marketing Masterclass for Early-Stage Startups was created in 2017 and has been evolving ever since. It addresses the need for Early-Stage Startups, Students, and Startup Support Programs to better understand how and why sales and marketing for an early stage startup is radically different from the sales strategies and advertising methods of established companies – why what you learn in college or university do not readily apply to early stage startups.
This full day workshop consist of a theoretical part, a hands-on work & coaching part, and a presenting with feedback (peer review) part.
The Masterclass has been designed based on the fundamental practices from the startup world of today and has been evolving and maturing – constantly being updated with input and experience from participating startups.
The Sales & Marketing Masterclass for Early-Stage Startups goes into detail about how and why the things that work for established companies doesn’t work for the first years of a startup, why you’ll be hard pressed to become successful by copying what established companies do or by blindly implementing what you learned in school.
For both B2C and B2B startups, it describes an additional 18 channels for getting attention, customers, and traction – besides that of just paid advertising, and it provides a framework – a repeatable process – for continuously deciding, running and testing experiments to build and improve traction.
For B2B startups, the Masterclass also goes into detail about how to get your first pilot customers and how to treat the whole sales process fundamentally different from that of an established company and in ways that may at first sound counter-intuitive.
The primary goal for our customers of this Masterclass program is to make startups understand how to create traction for their startup, to prepare them with the knowledge and skills to control their fate with their own hands.
The secondary goal is to create awareness about what successful sales and marketing (aka getting traction) for early-stage startups actually looks like, to make first-time startup founders understand how it is different and why.
The thirdgoal is to help early-stage startups (if applicable) further refine and develop their plan and strategy on their actual sales & marketing, by getting critical expert feedback on their contents of the deck, their strategies, and their thinking behind them.
Recently I had the honor to be invited back as a juror at the Demo Night for Ignition+ support program for early-stage startups in Düsseldorf. At the Demo Night, the jury decides who will get the next funding.
And the winners were… The team I just happened to coach in this batch, Osphim!
And the winner was… OSPHIM! The team I just happened to be coaching in the same batch. (I swear I didn’t have to bribe the other jurors much… Just kidding – they would have won with or without my vote, it was that solid).
