MARTIN OMANDER: Hi, my name is Martin Omander,
and I welcome you to Google Root Access,
the show featuring actionable startup advice.
My guest today is Nathan Beckord.
Welcome on the show, Nathan.
NATHAN BECKORD: Thanks for having me.
MARTIN OMANDER: So you're a co-founder of Foundersuite.
And could you tell us about your startup?
NATHAN BECKORD: Sure.
Foundersuite is a collection of productivity tools
for entrepreneurs.
We have five web apps and a collection
of about 80 templates, spreadsheets,
documents for entrepreneurs.
And the way it came about is for the past 10 years
or so I've been consulting with start-ups, usually
in a finance or biz dev capacity,
and I saw common repeating mistake start-ups were making,
common needs start-ups needed.
You know, I worked with about 150 companies
and just saw a lot of patterns of success and failure
and built spreadsheets and templates
to help them through common operating and financial
activities.
And then from that, turned that into what
we have today, which is Foundersuite.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh great.
So you are a startup for start-ups, a meta-startup,
if you will.
NATHAN BECKORD: Yeah.
MARTIN OMANDER: How's business?
NATHAN BECKORD: Business is good.
Yeah, we launched in June of 2013
and we're up to over 4,500 start-ups on the platform now.
We're adding about 20 to 25 start-ups a day,
so things are rockin'.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh great.
Congratulations.
So you say that you've seen many,
many start-ups and you've seen things that work and things
that don't.
What's one of the main challenges that start-ups
could do better at do you think?
NATHAN BECKORD: Yeah, you know fund-raising is the perennial
challenge of strat-ups--
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh, indeed.
NATHAN BECKORD: One that a lot of entrepreneurs
do poorly or wrong.
And you can actually hurt yourself if you do it wrong.
I see a lot of start-ups that take the spray and pray
approach, right?
They put together a pitch or sometimes a business plan,
and they just blast it out to every VC email
address they can find.
Or they're pinging people through LinkedIn
that have no relevance to what they're doing.
The spray and pray approach doesn't work.
Not only is a not going to get you meetings.
It's completely ineffective, but it could actually
come back and hurt you.
If you do eventually find a warm introduction to an investor
and they see that they've added you to their spam filter
before, you know it could be a signal that you really
don't know what you're doing, that you didn't take the time
to learn how the fund raising process works,
and that you were just spamming investors.
So instead, we really champion a very laser focused,
targeted approach to fund raising.
This means finding the right investors
by geography, location, and stage.
It also means finding the warm connection into those investors
that you've identified.
As one example, in our investor CRM tool,
we have a LinkedIn plug-in, a plug in to engines API.
So if I'm trying to reach Mark Andreessen,
he's on my targeted list, I can see
who can connect me to Mark Andreessen.
So that's one example of how people do it wrong
and how they can do better.
MARTIN OMANDER: Do it better.
Great.
So you said-- you mentioned sort of the Trinity of location,
stage, and industry.
Could you tell me a bit more about that?
What's the right way to think about those
if you're in startup?
NATHAN BECKORD: Yeah, you know.
This is pretty common sense stuff,
but it's still something that a lot of entrepreneurs
in their hunger to raise money do wrong.
First is industry.
Right, this should be pretty intuitive,
but if you're a fin tech start up
you should be looking at investors
that have a stated preference for financial technology.
If you're a mobile app or a social, if your to B to B or B
to C, obviously if you're in medical devices or something
else, you should really be filtering out
any investors that don't specifically
play in your space.
That's the industry.
The stage is something that I see people do wrong sometimes.
They'll identify a fin tech investor
but that fin tech investor does B or C rounds, later
stage investing, whereas they're really at the C or A round.
You know, they might take a meeting just to kick the tires
and hear what you're doing, but it's
very unlikely they're going to investment in you,
because their fund has a charter to invest
in a certain stage of business.
So getting the stage right, whether it's
C series A or later is important.
And then finally location.
Most investors are pretty specific about this.
If you're in Boston and New York,
you invest in start-ups in your local area.
Silicon Valley holds true.
Some investors will play outside their sandbox,
but a joke I heard yesterday at a conference, actually
I can't claim credit for this, is
that most investors want to invest
within one Tesla charge of their office.
MARTIN OMANDER: That's great.
NATHAN BECKORD: That's getting the location right.
MARTIN OMANDER: I see.
Yeah, it's funny.
I remember in the late '90s the pundits
were talking about the death of distance.
Distance wouldn't matter.
But you're saying it matters a lot.
NATHAN BECKORD: Still matters a lot, yeah.
MARTIN OMANDER: Still matters.
So this is really helpful as far as finding investment.
Does this, what you just mentioned about industry
and stage and location carry over
into other parts of what a startup does?
NATHAN BECKORD: Yeah it certainly does.
I think media relations and PR is very analogous.
If you're looking to get people to write about your startup,
you're looking to get coverage, you're
looking to get attention as most entrepreneurs are,
you know again, doing it wrong is
finding a list online somewhere--
and you see these published sometimes--
of email addresses of journalists,
and blasting a press release out to all those lists.
You're going to piss them off.
Journalists hate it when they get spammed.
And again, they know when they're being spammed.
A better, more appropriate way to do it
is to find journalists, to find publications
that cover your space, and then to narrow down
further to the journalist whose beat it is to cover your space.
And then ideally, if you can also figure out
what they're currently writing about,
their editorial calendar, that's golden.
We try to enable some of that with our media CRM tool.
We pull in their Twitter streams, right?
So if a journalist is putting out to their followers
that they're looking for an expert in security,
or internet of things, you know that's a great time
to pitch if that's what you're doing.
So kind of tracking and following--
MARTIN OMANDER: So they actually tell us
what they're looking for.
NATHAN BECKORD: They often do.
Yeah.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh that's great.
NATHAN BECKORD: And so that's perfect.
That's the exact right time to be pitching them.
And then finally one other little bit of advice there.
To the extent you can pay it forward to a journalist
and build a relationship in advance of pitching them,
that's great too.
If you can give them a scoop, some breaking news,
I mean that's what they live and die for.
If you can get them a tip or anything
you can do to help them out in advance of pitching
will go a long way when it's your time to pitch them.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh I see.
Great.
So we are here in the middle of Silicon Valley,
and a lot of your start-ups are in Silicon Valley.
Many of our viewers, perhaps most of our viewers,
are not here.
What should you do if you're not in a place where there's
a lot of media outlets or investors,
or if you find that there's nobody covering your industry?
NATHAN BECKORD: Yeah.
If there's no uncovering industry or there's no nearby,
obviously you could pivot.
You could change what you're doing.
I don't necessarily recommend that.
You could move, of course.
We see just a flood of U-hauls coming
into Silicon Valley in recent years,
and I'm sure you've seen that too.
Or what I see a lot of start-ups do, especially ones that maybe
are based abroad, in Australia, or Europe,
or elsewhere, or Asia, they'll have one or two people here
to really be the scout in the Valley, right?
To be the one that's going up and down Sand hill Road or 2nd
Street corridor in San Francisco talking to investors.
You know, with journalists I don't think location matters
quite as much, but it's still always great
if you can ping a journalist and invite him
to coffee or something.
I did that two weeks ago and got a guy, a writer from Inc.
to come out and meet for beers at Thirsty Bear.
It was great.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh, great.
Yeah.
NATHAN BECKORD: And then finally,
if you can't find anyone who's really covering your space,
or investors that declare their interest in your space,
that's not necessarily a bad thing.
If you're doing something really so
unique that no one's following it yet,
that could be a huge advantage.
Journalists and investors are always looking for the outlier,
right?
They're looking to break news.
They're looking for that unique different thing, not the nth
iteration of a social photo sharing app, right?
So play to your stengths.
If you have something truly unique, that can go a long way.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh great.
Well thank you so much for coming in and sharing
your experiences with us today, Nathan.
NATHAN BECKORD: Thank you very much for having me.
Appreciate it.
MARTIN OMANDER: We hope you found something
you can use in your startup.
Your input matters.
Please leave your comments below.
We read everything you write.
To learn how Google can help your startup,
go to developers.google.com/startups.
If you would like to be a guest on the show,
go to bitly/applyrootacces.
That's it for now.
See you next time.