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    Be More Popular
    Be More Popular
    Be More Popular
    Ebook109 pages1 hour

    Be More Popular

    By Lee Schneider

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    About this ebook

    The world's most successful startups all share one quality. They started out being known only by a passionate few - their superfans who spread the word about them and pushed the new company to fame and fortune. In this book, you'll receive valuable marketing tips and techniques to build your startup’s culture from the inside out. The author shares the steps you need to take to develop your community of customers and fans. You’ll learn what engagement tools and techniques to use, be they in advertising, writing blogs, posting social media, or speaking appearances. Part One of the book is foundational, clarifying the concepts you need to recognize, develop and spread your company culture. Part Two is a step-by-step guide to turning your first one hundred users into a thousand true fans, and then leverage the interest of those early adopters into your next ten thousand fans and beyond. The areas covered include:

    How to define and deploy your company culture
    How to win fans who become customers
    Hacks for building a vibrant online community
    Techniques for leveraging social media marketing
    How to use email marketing lists
    Facebook advertising tips
    Using blogs and podcasts to build your user base
    How to go from one hundred true fans a thousand to ten thousand and more

    If you launch a startup without creating a social culture around it or connecting with an existing social culture, your startup will drop like a rock in the ocean and will never be seen again. Read this book, and you’ll never have that problem. You’ll build your company culture into an engine to attract and retain users, creating a feedback loop to keep you on the right track.

    Praise for Be More Popular

    Be More Popular is the first book I've read that gives practical advice on how to create a culture. It is an easy, enjoyable, quick read and a great companion for your next flight. - Kevin Dewalt, founder, ScribbleIQ

    This book provides a huge value. The author covers the concept of culture for start ups, which may seem vague or hard to understand but he makes it concrete. It's a great book for any business whether you are a start-up or a well-established organization. One of the most valuable points I got is that your business will have a culture whether you are intentional about it or not. - Michele Christensen, business strategist

    Great advice on culture, community, and marketing for startups. Lee clearly knows his stuff and shares it all in this book. Be More Popular is packed with actionable strategies and tactics. I highly recommend this book if you want to learn more about culture building for startups. - Mike Fishbein, entrepreneur

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLee Schneider
    Release dateMay 6, 2017
    ISBN9781370316472
    Be More Popular
    Author

    Lee Schneider

    Lee Schneider is the owner and communications director of Red Cup Agency in Santa Monica, CA. Red Cup has reimagined communications for startup and enterprise businesses, building online networks, managing content, developing media, and creating PR campaigns. He has taught media and crowdfunding for the USC School of Architecture, where he is a member of the faculty, and has taught business marketing at General Assembly in Los Angeles. Married to a goddess, he is the father of three. Find him on Twitter at @docuguy. He is the author of Be More Popular: Culture-Building for Startups, Chronicle of a Startup Town: Los Angeles, Powerful Online Message Delivery - Free and Low-Cost Platforms for Creative Companies and Individuals, and The Angel Playbook, a guide for entrepreneurs and investors. Factoid: He was a writer for the iconic cartoon series ThunderCats.

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      Book preview

      Be More Popular - Lee Schneider

      Be More Popular:

      Culture-Building for Startups

      By Lee Schneider

      Copyright © 2014-2017 by Lee Schneider

      All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Drill icon, in the public domain, downloaded from The Noun Project.

      First Edition, 2014

      Second Edition, 2017

      Published by Red Cup Agency

      Santa Monica, CA

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter One: Building Culture from the Inside

      Chapter Two: How to Deploy Your Culture

      Chapter Three: How to Get Them Talking

      Chapter Four: Pathways to User Adoption

      Chapter Five: Focus on Your Best Channels

      Chapter Six: The Fast Way to Community Building — Buying Friends

      Chapter Seven: The Slow Way to Building Community

      Chapter Eight: The Value of Creating Media Over the Long Term

      Chapter Nine: What to Do About the Competition

      Chapter Ten: Your Next 10,000 Users and Beyond

      Chapter Eleven: Social Media Support

      Chapter Twelve: Home Pages and Landing Pages

      Chapter Thirteen: Mailing List Management

      Chapter Fourteen: Custom Service and Its Lifecycle

      Chapter Fifteen: Become Habit-Forming

      Chapter Sixteen: Summary

      Chapter Seventeen: Hack Yourself

      Chapter Eighteen: What to Do Next

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      Why Do You Need This Book?

      What is culture-building, and why do you need to build a culture around your startup? Good questions, simple answer. If you’re launching a startup, and you want users, you have to speak to a culture. Your community drives your success.

      If you launch a startup without creating a social culture around it, or connecting with an existing social culture, your startup will drop like a rock in the ocean and will never be seen again.

      Culture, the core values of your company, is the best expression you have of what you're all about. Advertising can help spread it, but company culture is not the advertising itself. Media you create can express culture, but that media needs a delivery system to help your customers and users find it.

      Company culture is a living expression of a promise your company makes to customers and users. Think about the fast rise of Uber – how it powerfully tapped into an urban hipster culture, and then fell on hard times as it company culture corroded from within with allegations of misogyny, workplace discrimination against women, and unfair and exploitative attitudes toward its drivers. The behavior of its boss, Travis Kalanick, has changed how people see the company. Consider Snapchat – how it has attracted a market of younger people who like images that they can transmit instantly and delete almost as fast, and consider how it has had to change from a company that transmits quickie images into company that sells cameras and longer form stories. Company culture doesn't stand still; it's a garden you have to tend.

      Apple has its culture, Microsoft another. Dunkin Donuts has a culture, Starbucks another. You can play this game with wine, with toys, with cars (Mini Cooper vs. Lincoln, Dodge vs. Tesla), and you have to do it with your startup. Your culture is the language you use so that people will come to know you, deeply, in their bones, even without putting words to it. The number of consumer choices are huge. There’s a lot of noise for your signal to push through. Deploy your culture and the right people will come to you.

      This book is about how to do that.

      It takes you through the process of understanding the power of your startup culture, how to deploy it, and the effect your culture will have on building your community. You’ll encounter a series of steps you can take to begin building your culture from the inside out, and how to extend that culture into the community you need to reach. I’ll give you the tools and techniques required to discover a community of your true fans, and how to communicate effectively with them online. Throughout the book, I’ve placed use cases involving real-life startups.

      What Will This Book Teach You?

      In this book, you’ll learn:

      How to recognize and grow your startup’s culture.

      When to take the steps you need to grow your community.

      Which engagement tools and techniques build community.

      How to combine your culture and community into an engine to attract and retain users.

      How to create a feedback loop to keep you on the right track.

      Is This Book for You?

      If you are a startup founder who has 100 users for his or her product and wants to get the next thousand, and the next ten thousand after that, or if you are an entrepreneur heading up an early-stage startup that has seen growth but has become stalled, this book is for you.

      Be More Popular: Culture-Building for Startups is for:

      Startup founders

      Entrepreneurs

      Marketing teams

      Developers and programmers who want a path to successful entrepreneurship

      Creative media makers who want to reach a bigger audience

      How is This Book Organized?

      This book is organized in two parts.

      Part One is foundational. You’ll receive the concepts you need to recognize, develop and spread your company culture. Your culture is your company’s reason for being, more so than any product. It is the expression of your unique value proposition and the promise you make to customers and users.

      Part Two is a step-by-step guide about how to deploy your culture to turn your first thousand users into a thousand true fans. It is about leveraging the interest of a few early adopters to create your next ten thousand fans and beyond.

      About Me

      When I founded my documentary production company, DocuCinema, back in 1997, there were two parts to the work. The first part was producing the film. The second part was culture-building around the film. Our documentary about Harley motorcycles needed to attract motorcycle people. Our documentaries about movie stars had attract fans of show business. We didn’t call it culture-building (we called it marketing and promo), but culture-building was exactly what it was.

      When I founded Red Cup Agency in 2010 and Digital Fundraising School in 2013, my work had become all culture-building, all the time. Whether I was part of a campaign to educate people about organic wine, growing online communities around education apps or medtech, or boosting consciousness around healthy food and food tech, with Red Cup I was building culture around people, labels and brands. When I started Digital Fundraising School to help crowdfunding campaigns reach their community of fans and raise more money, I was teaching culture-building specifically. Every movie I ever worked on was a startup, every crowdfunding campaign was a mini-startup, and in this book I bring all my media skills to the table to help the startup community.

      Read it, and you will receive actionable, result-driven ideas to create success for your startup, building your user base around a culture, and using that culture to build a community. There are no formula for success, but there a proven method. You hold it in your hands.

      How will you define success? I will go with the idea that you will provide value for your users, show value to your backers, angels and investors, and

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