Start Up Meet Up
Yesterday I attended the McCombs Entrepreneur Society’s inaugural Start Up Meet Up. It was a one day event at the UT alumni center with 2 keynote speakers, Brett Hurt, CEO and Founder of Bazaarvoice, and Ingrid Vanderveldt and Kenneth Losch with Advanced Green Innovations. There were also 4 panel sessions, Market Validation, Entrepreneurial Law, Marketing in the Digital Arena, and Capitalizing a Start Up. McCombs professors led the panelists in discussions before opening it up for questions. The audience consisted of about 200 people, 75% were McCombs students and 25% were professionals.
I attended the Market Validation and Marketing in the Digital Arena panels. The Market Validation panel discussed their experiences with launching products and companies both performing validation the correct way and wrong way. The takeaway was that the steps for doing the validation are straightforward, but they require a lot of hard work that most people don’t like to do. It is recommended to talk in person to at least 100 people, not friends and family, that would be potential customers. This does not mean email, either, but phone or face-to-face conversations. Another great tip was to end every conversation by asking who else you can talk to. If they don’t give you any names, that speaks volumes for what they really think of your product.
In the Marketing in the Digital Arena panel, the big takeaway was to be authentic. The panel mostly discussed rating and reviews and other user generated community involvement. When communicating with users and customers, be truthful and up front about the product and their concerns. Don’t just ignore or delete negative comments, since users can tell if comments and genuine or not.
Brett Hurt’s keynote speech was very inspiring. He discussed his history and attention to culture. The main theme I felt was to aim big with your goals and be passionate about them. In the second keynote, Kenneth Losch described his green energy business and how he looks for cones, pitfalls, and waves. Cones are the selling opportunities, pitfalls are the cost savings opportunities, and waves are the current industry environment. A great bit of advice that I took away was that for any goal or project, ask yourself 10 reasons why this will fail. Once you work out a solution to each of those 10 reasons, the project will not fail.
Overall, it was a very great day. Thanks to the McCombs Entrepreneur Society for the hard work in putting this on.