IPitch Articles Archive
Startup Profile: Customer Underground
By Gareth Rose on Thursday, October 28th, 2010
IPitch: What problem is your business trying to solve?
Customer Underground: Consumers are barraged with a vast and ever-changing array of businesses to choose from, but have little beyond advertising and friends’ experiences to sort the wheat from the chaff. Who do you trust? How do you stay in the know? Customer Underground helps those who want to find great businesses fast by tapping into the wisdom of an entire community of customers.
IPitch: How long have you been in business for?
Customer Underground: Since 2009; site went live in June 2010.
IPitch: Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
How to find and attract a co-founder
By Gareth Rose on Monday, October 25th, 2010
A Guest Article by Andrew Birt.
Andrew Birt, is the founder of StartUP Marketing and works with a wide variety of online and offline startups.
As an active member of Melbourne’s startup community, Andrew teaches marketing at Melbourne University and recently founded Snowballer.com.au
You can read more about StartUP Marketing and Andrew’s other projects at www.andrewbirt.com
If you don’t have a co-founder – get one. That is the advice from Paul Graham in his essay, “Why Not to Start a StartUP” Graham states it’s more important than anything else when starting, and that single founder startups rarely if ever get funded.
It’s sage advice from the man who funds hundreds of startups as the brains behind Y-Combinator.
Yet in Australia, many of us tend to ignore this advice and go it alone as the sole founder of a web business.
10 Ways to Assess Demand for New Products, before Launching Them
By Gareth Rose on Thursday, October 7th, 2010
A Guest Article by Andrew Birt.
Andrew Birt, is the founder of StartUP Marketing and works with a wide variety of online and offline startups.
As an active member of Melbourne’s startup community, Andrew teaches marketing at Melbourne University and recently founded Snowballer.com.au
You can read more about StartUP Marketing and Andrew’s other projects at www.andrewbirt.com
Launching a new product or startup is a daunting process that’s often tackled through a “suck it and see” approach to product testing. In this approach the founder comes up with an idea and moves quickly from development to launch in rapid succession, often without the upfront homework required to understand the needs of their intended buyers.
This is a common scenario and leaves the founder with a new product but then wondering “who should sell this to now?” or “how do we attract people to our site/store/product/service etc?” once the product is “complete.” This is the classic, we’ve built it, so why won’t they come scenario that we all make as we get swept up in the excitement of a new idea.
