Cheating Death

TechLab, BudapestJan 4 2016

Aki BaloghBackground• Developer• Management Consultant: Diamond• Venture Capital: OpenView Venture Partners• Sales & Marketing: InfiniDB

MarketMuse• Enterprise Content Planning for Content

Marketers• Seed-Stage, Early Growth• Product-Market Fit

Assumptions• De-Risk, Don’t Optimize• Target a Massive Market

– Probably US, maybe China– $1Bn+ market (with competition)– Fragmented market– My preference is B2B vs. B2C– Fix a problem that you have personally

experienced• Mistakes that Kill Startups

1. Building something that nobody needs2. Running out of money3. Founder divorce

Words of AdviceBefore Starting• Do a startup when you have lots of free time• Write code• Start as young as possible• Move to Silicon Valley, NYC, Denver or Boston

After the Plunge• You’re in a race against time. Keep a low burn

rate• Focus on building and selling (90% of your time)• First build a prototype, then get paying

customers, then raise• It’s a grind. Guard your mental health

Reading ListRequired• paulgraham.com• The Founder’s Dilemmas (Wasserman)• Four Steps to the Epiphany (Blank)

Optional• Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert)• How to Win Friends & Influence People

(Carnegie)

We’re Hiring• Contractors (5 – 20 hours/week)• Front-End: Angular• Back-End: Scala / Java• Competitive Pay (enough to bootstrap on)

aki@marketmuse.com

Appendix

Google has transitioned from keywords to topics“Related terms, high semantic density and relevance of the text are much more

important than keywords.”– SearchMetrics Research

Enterprise Content PlanningDirected by You“How do we more effectively serve ourclients’ content needs?”

“Our major revenue-producing opportunity is in this topic area. Is there a way to grow our authority and traffic to more effectively dominate this niche?”

“How do we take advantage of our powerful and active community to grow our product/corporate sites?”

Directed by OpportunityMarketMuse has identified that these pages are extremely powerful and a reference content package within this topic will perform extremely well.

Directed by Topic Gaps or Thin-Content Risk AreasMarketMuse has identified that we are missing these key topics or not covering them comprehensively or competitively

Premium Offerings

Topic Intelligenc

e

ContentPlanning

CompetitiveAnalysis

ContentOptimizati

on

Customized reporting that summarizes all of

the insights found with MarketMuse’s

topic modeling technology. Can be directed to focus on

customer goals.

MarketMuse works with your team to develop directed content plans and

opportunistic content plans that achieve the

highest possible potential.

Evaluation of competition and explicit content

marketing, planning and optimization

strategy to improve positioning versus target competitors

Semantic content optimization

recommendations give your team

guidance on adding coverage,

repurposing and thin content remediation.