Ideaforge

The harsh truth: Some of the advice you read about marketing is incorrect.

While not always intentionally misleading, you’re often absorbing content written by:

• Marketers without a breadth of experience: People who’ve marketed a single product and have a limited — or biased — view on a channel.
• Non-practitioners: People who’ve never run experiments, but pass along (sometimes outdated) marketing insights that they’ve read online.

After running thousands of experiments for brands like Microsoft, Segment and Perfect Keto, here are 10 significant lies we’ve realized you’ve been told about marketing (on email marketing, ads and referrals).

1. “Send a welcome email immediately after signup.”

It’s better to avoid sending emails right after people sign up on your site. We’re used to getting generic, unimportant welcome emails every time we sign up for anything online. So most people will reflexively discard your welcome email as spam.

Instead, try delaying your welcome email by 15 to 45 minutes.

The delay removes the subscriber’s mental connection between signup and your email, bypassing the reflex to ignore.

As a result, you’ll likely get more opens and more engagement.

2. “Only highlight your best product reviews.”

For context, reviews are a big deal:

• 93% of consumers claim product reviews impact purchase decisions.
• The social proof of having 50+ product reviews increases conversion. Shoppers trust peers more than they trust brands.

But imperfect reviews can generate more sales than five-star ones. How?

When a partially negative review weighs your cons versus your pros and concludes that the product was worth purchasing anyway, that sounds authentic and honest.

In contrast, strings of flawless five-star reviews don’t signal authenticity. Psychologically, they’re less likely to sink in as positive social proof.

Here’s what you can do:

• Make sure your post-purchase email flow contains a request for reviews. The more reviews you have, the better.
• Don’t bury slightly negative reviews. If someone leaves a four-star review and offers a fair (and insignificant) critique, showcase it toward the top of your product page.

3. “You have to send a newsletter every week.”

Most newsletters shouldn’t be sent weekly. This goes against what most creator economy entrepreneurs suggest.

But high cadences force newsletter writers to rush and publish lower-quality information to hit self-imposed deadlines.

Instead, consider only sending when you truly have value to add. At a minimum, consider setting a more reasonable cadence like once or twice a month so that you’ll have enough time and content to consistently hit a high-quality bar.

Source: Tech Crunch

Virtual reality did not turn into the ultimate office replacement telepresence machine during the pandemic — and it wasn’t for lack of trying — but some startups focused on employee training in VR have found added validation in the past year as professionals across industries were forced to access institutional knowledge in remote settings.

Osso VR, a San Francisco-based virtual reality startup focused on medical training, has piqued investor attention as they’ve bulked up on partnerships with medical devices powerhouses like Johnson & Johnson, Stryker and Smith & Nephew during the pandemic. The startup tells TechCrunch they’ve recently closed $27 million in Series B funding led by GSR Ventures with additional participation from SignalFire, Kaiser Permanente Ventures and Anorak Ventures, among others.

CEO Justin Barad tells TechCrunch that the pandemic “created an intense level of urgency” for the startup as customers found new demand for their platform.

Osso VR is looking to upend modern surgical instruction with a virtual reality-based solution that allows surgeons to interact with new medical devices in 3D space, “performing” a surgery over and over on a digital cadaver from the comfort of anywhere they have enough room to stretch out their arms. Osso’s efforts are particularly useful to its medical device customers who can use the platform to boost familiarity with their solutions while helping surgeons gain proficiency in implanting them.

One of the startup’s broader aims is to bring video games’ multiplayer mechanics into the virtual operating room, allowing surgeons and medical assistants to collaborate in real-time so they not only know their responsibility but how they fit into the whole of each operation.

“It’s a lot like a symphony, everyone has a different role to play and you need to communicate with each other.” Barad says.

It’s a process that needs virtual reality’s spatial breadth, Barad notes, though instruction is always supplemented by text and videos as well.

Barad calls the startup’s aim “something unambiguously good,” a quality which has helped the team poach talent as it has scaled to some 100 employees, which includes what he claims is the world’s largest team of medical illustrators. That team has helped scale the platform’s content to more than 100 modules spanning 10 specialties.

Virtual reality founders have struggled in recent years to coax investor attention as consumer and enterprise uptake has proven slower than the early wild ambitions for the technology. In its stead, investors have looked more towards bets on adjacent technologies like gaming and computer vision that don’t require the specialized head-worn hardware. Osso VR’s platform runs on Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 headset through the company’s Oculus for Business program.

Source: Tech Crunch

This Thursday and Friday, TechCrunch will host Early Stage – a virtual bootcamp for early stage founders. After the success of the spring event, on Friday, TC will feature 10 phenomenal early-stage startups to on the virtual stage. Hailing form around the States and the globe, founders will pitch on live, for five minutes, followed by an intense Q&A with our expert panel of judges.

The judges for this pitch-off will be Ben Sun (Primary Venture Partners), Doug Landis (Emergence Capital), Leah Solivan (Fuel Capital) and Shardul Shah (Index Ventures).  Unlike last time, there will be no final round. Each company will only have one chance to impress the judges and the audience!

Alright, alright. I know you want to see who made the cut. Join us on Friday, July 9th to watch the second ever TC Early Stage Pitch-Off. Let’s take a look:

Session 1: 9:00 a.m. – 9:50 a.m. PDT

Mi Terro (City of Industry, CA, USA) – “The world’s first advanced material company that partners with food companies and farmers to create home compostable, single-use plastic-alternative packaging materials made from plant-based agricultural waste – this is a first-of-its-kind approach.

Press Sports App (Atlanta, GA, USA) – A lifelong sports social network for athletes from all levels and sports. Their deeply engaged community is creating system of record starting at the amateur level that has never been built before.

Snowball Wealth (San Francisco, CA, USA) – Provides personalized guidance to pay off debt and build wealth for the 30M women+ in America with student debt. Snowball provides users with a free student loan plan, which helps users save an average of $6K. They’re expanding to include a financial roadmap that’s community-driven and personalized so women+ can build wealth even as they pay down their debt.

My Expat Taxes (Vienna, Austria) – MyExpatTaxes is the leading U.S. expat tax software that guides users through the tax filing process faster and more affordable than any other competitor in the industry. It automates international tax treaties and expat tax benefits, helping U.S. expats stay compliant and claim thousands of dollars in refunds.

Speeko (Chicago, Illinois, USA) – AI-powered feedback on your voice in areas like pace, fillers, inclusivity, conciseness, and enunciation. Based on your speaking style, you’re matched with interactive exercises, courses, and vocal warm-ups. It’s like a gym membership for your voice, where you build muscle memory for speaking clearly and confidently.

Session 2: 10:10 a.m. – 11:05 a.m. PDT

Universal Prequal (Marlboro, NJ, USA) – Helps construction companies effectively manage risk by enabling them to find and vet qualified project teams capable of doing the work. Instead of the paper-intensive, time-consuming, expensive approach that exists throughout the industry today, our solution is online, easy-to-use, and cost-effective. Customers will know us as the national resource for managing risk based on comprehensive, reliable construction information.

T2D2.ai (New York City, NY, USA) – Provides continuous AI and computer vision-driven monitoring of buildings, bridges and other infrastructural assets. The T2D2 portal and dashboard gives asset owners and managers a detailed picture of all visible damage conditions – rank ordered by severity and geo-tagged for location information, so they can focus preventative maintenance efforts and avoid higher downstream repair costs as well as potential safety issues.

Boomerang (Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil) – A marketplace for consumer goods rental. We connect retailers, brands, and rental stores with customers that just want to use a product instead of owning it. For suppliers, Boomerang is a plug-and-play rental platform offering logistics, insurance, and online payments solution.

Stash Global (Wilmington, DE, USA) – Turned the most damaging cyber-attack of all, ransomware, into just another business problem that can be solved with the click of a button – without paying a cent (or cyber coin) of ransom. The No Ransom Ransomware Solution does it all: restores files; prevents access of frozen file content by attackers; eliminates ransom extortion.

Vyrill (San Francisco, CA, USA) – With the most powerful AI driven, in-video search, Vyrill is a fan video discovery, insights and content marketing platform enabling brand marketers to supercharge brand awareness and revenue with fan led content such as video reviews, unboxing, how-to videos and more. Vyrill is a Google for fan video and creators, capturing who, what, where and when –inside millions of videos.”

Winner Announcement: 11:30 a.m. PDT

Source: Tech Crunch

The increasingly intense heats bearing down feverishly across the globe are accelerating the number, scale, and complexity of disasters worldwide. Just in the past few weeks, we have seen record heat in the United States Pacific Northwest that has led to hundreds of deaths — with more heat on the way.

Heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, typhoons and many other types of weather-related disasters create huge challenges for infrastructure providers like energy utilities and telecoms, who have to keep uptime as close to 100% as possible for their customers even in the midst of some of the most challenging environments humans have ever witnessed.

To that end, Verizon (which, as a reminder, is the ultimate parent company for TechCrunch for now) announced today the first demo unit of what it dubs its THOR vehicle, for Tactical Humanitarian Operations Response. Designed on top of a Ford F650 pickup truck chassis, THOR is designed to provide highly mobile and resilient connectivity to frontline responders and citizens through wireless technologies like 5G Ultra Wideband and satellite uplinks.

Verizon’s THOR vehicle can deploy wireless technologies like 5G and satellite uplinks to rapidly deploy connectivity to frontline responders. Image Credits: Verizon

The company developed the prototype in partnership with the Department of Defense’s NavalX and the SoCal Tech Bridge, and unveiled the prototype last week at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, just north of San Diego.

In addition to wireless connectivity, THOR can also potentially deploy a variety of drone capabilities. For instance, a vehicle could deploy a drone for search and rescue operations, or to help augment firefighters with intelligence on how a wildfire is developing over time.

As I discussed a few weeks ago, telcos like Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are increasing spending on a variety of resiliency initiatives, ranging from the rapid staging of mobile wireless equipment to novel solutions like AT&T’s FirstNet One, a dirigible capable of flying near a disaster zone to offer wireless services.

DisasterTech, as I have been dubbing it, has been gaining more attention of late from investors and companies both big and small as governments, the private sector, insurers, and individuals have to confront and respond to the intensifying nature of storms globally.

Source: Tech Crunch

There’s a lot wrapped up in a name: feelings, emotions, connotation, unconscious bias, personal history. It’s an identity — it gives something meaning and importance.

In leading marketing and brand at High Alpha, I think about naming quite a bit. As a venture studio, we co-found and launch five to 10 new software startups every year. It is my team’s responsibility to create and build out the brands for all the new companies we start, including everything from naming and domain acquisition to brand identity and websites. Over the past five years, we’ve named more than 30 software startups at High Alpha.

As a soon-to-be first-time parent, the idea of naming has taken on a whole new meaning and importance in my life. Even though I help name new companies for a living, I now fully understand the paralysis that often comes when faced with the task of deciding the name for someone or something that’s especially important to you.

Because of this, I’ve always tried to take an objective, pragmatic approach to naming a company with our CEOs and other startups. Naming is an incredibly difficult and nuanced process. It’s fraught with subjectiveness and personal preference. And to top it all off, most founders have zero (or very little) experience in naming.

The truth is that business names fall on a bell curve — you have a small number of outliers that actively contribute to your success and a small number of outliers that actively impair your ability to succeed. The vast majority, though, fall somewhere in the middle in their impact on your business.

So, how should a founder go about effectively naming their baby startup and not picking a name that will hurt them? I’m sharing my own criteria and lessons for how to go about naming your startup, how to evaluate a company name and what makes for a good company name.

Is the name ownable?

As a founder, one of the first criteria to look at is ownability and URL availability. Nowadays, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a name where the .com is still available. I oftentimes will look at .io, .co, get_______.com, or _____hq.com as my top alternatives to a .com, but I always still prefer if the .com is potentially attainable in the future. It may be parked by a domain investor or someone asking a ridiculous price, but that’s always better than an established business using your .com. If not, you will always be fighting a search battle with some other brand that owns your .com.

This goes much further than just the availability of the coveted .com domain, though. You should evaluate the competitiveness and search congestion around your branded keywords. A company named “Apple” or “Lumber” is going to have a really hard time competing for search placements, even if they don’t sell computers or building supplies. An established name and word is also going to come with existing connotations and previous experiences in your audience’s mind. You want a name free from as much baggage as possible so you can easily build your own connotations and memories.

Source: Tech Crunch

After several years of fighting and jockeying for position by the biggest cloud infrastructure companies in the world, the Pentagon finally pulled the plug on the controversial winner-take-all, $10 billion JEDI contract today. In the end, nobody won.

“With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps,” a Pentagon spokesperson stated.

The contract procurement process began in 2018 with a call for RFPs for a $10 billion, decade-long contract to handle the cloud infrastructure strategy for The Pentagon. Pentagon spokesperson Heather Babb told TechCrunch why they were going with the. single-winner approach: “Single award is advantageous because, among other things, it improves security, improves data accessibility and simplifies the Department’s ability to adopt and use cloud services,” she said at the time.

From the start though, companies objected to the single-winner approach, believing that the Pentagon would be better served with a multi-vendor approach. Some companies, particularly Oracle believed the procurement process was designed to favor Amazon.

In the end it came down to a pair of finalists — Amazon and Microsoft — and in the end Microsoft won. But Amazon believed that it had superior technology and only lost the deal because of direct interference by the previous president who had open disdain for then-CEO Jeff Bezos (who is also the owner of the Washington Post newspaper).

Amazon decided to fight the decision in court, and after months of delay, the Pentagon made the decision that it was time to move on. In a blog post, Microsoft took a swipe at Amazon for precipitating the delay.

“The 20 months since DoD selected Microsoft as its JEDI partner highlights issues that warrant the attention of policymakers: When one company can delay, for years, critical technology upgrades for those who defend our nation, the protest process needs reform. Amazon filed its protest in November 2019 and its case was expected to take at least another year to litigate and yield a decision, with potential appeals afterward,” Microsoft wrote in its blog post about the end of the deal.

But in a statement of its own, Amazon reiterated its belief that the process was not fairly executed. “We understand and agree with the DoD’s decision. Unfortunately, the contract award was not based on the merits of the proposals and instead was the result of outside influence that has no place in government procurement. Our commitment to supporting our nation’s military and ensuring that our warfighters and defense partners have access to the best technology at the best price is stronger than ever. We look forward to continuing to support the DoD’s modernization efforts and building solutions that help accomplish their critical missions,” a company spokesperson said.

It seems like a fitting end to a project that I felt was doomed from the beginning. From the moment the Pentagon announced this contract with the cutesy twist on the Star Wars name, the procurement process has taken more twists and turns than a TV soap.

In the beginning, there was a lot of sound and fury and it led to a lot of nothing. We move onto whatever cloud procurement process happens next.

Source: Tech Crunch

Following on from mid-June when first-time buyer mortgage lending startup Generation Home raised a $30.4m Series A round and a £300m loan facility from NatWest, it’s now adding to its board.

Although known for becoming an Angel investor since leaving Monzo, the challenger bank startup he co-founded, Tom Blomfield hasn’t joined any startup boards.

That changes today with the news that he is joining Generation Home.

The startup launched last year with radically a different model for home buying – effectively allowing relatives to become co-equity holders in the properties their children bought, and go along for the ride.

Generation Home founder and CEO Will Rice says the platform, therefore, unlocks far larger amounts of capital from ‘the bank of mum and dad’ than normally happens when money is loaned or gifted to the next generation.

The UK property problem is acute. According to the English Housing Survey 2020, the average U.K. renter spends 35% of their income on rent compared with 18% for homeowners paying a mortgage. High rents inhibit their ability to save and house price inflation locks more people out of homeownership.

Using Generation Home, parents can contribute deposits as an equity loan. Generation Home then takes responsibility for the repayment of funds to the parents upon a sale of the property or remortgage. Repayment of the loan can also be triggered once the homeowner’s equity in the property reaches a pre-agreed level, and the value of the loan can reflect changes in the house price. Plus the loan can be converted into a gift at any time, through the Generation Home platform.

Speaking to TechCrunch about his move to join the board, Blomfield said: “I met Will last year and what really excites me was the product. I think it’s so relevant, and it hasn’t really been covered in the mainstream press much. The problem with first-time buyers, trying to get a mortgage, is that they almost invariably rely on help from their parents or sometimes their friends to help. I’ve had experience with this and a lot of people actually mean it as a loan and they intend to get that money back. But mortgage lenders make you sign a piece of paper saying this is an absolute gift. So hundreds of thousands of parents around the country are basically committing a – well-intentioned – fraud to help their kids get on the property ladder. So what I loved about the Generation Home product is that they’ve got this new legal structure where parents can effectively lend that money towards the deposit, but it’s structured as a loan if they want it to be. They have the right to get their money back eventually without having to lie. So that’s one thing that really really attracted me to the company. It’s just so so relevant to everyone, and people are just kind of blind to this problem.”

I asked him if he thinks there’s a “Monzofication” of FinTech business models in FinTech, as suggested by the success of Monzo’s model, where the user is put front and centre?

“There’s certainly a lot in common between what we do at Monzo and what Generation Home is trying to do. Big mortgage lenders focus on the mortgage product and the customer is like an inconvenience. As a customer you have to fit with whatever the mortgage provider will offer you and it’s totally inflexible. It’s very similar with Monzo – we tried to flip it around, and focus on what customers really want and care about every day. Simple stuff like notifications when you spend money or alerts before you go into overdraft – those are now commonplace and they weren’t, five, six years ago. I think Generation Home is doing the same thing which is focusing on the stuff that customers really, really care about, and then providing that flexibility and more features to meet their needs, rather than just raming everyone into the straitjacket of what a mortgage is doing,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch