Pioneers Festival in Vienna Austria

This week’s Pioneers Festival in Austria was a great surprise (I wasn’t sure what to expect).  It’s very hard to make time for events, but I’m really glad I did for this one.  Stepping back from day to day execution helps with perspective on my startup – especially when it’s with a bunch of other startups in a 300 year old castle in Vienna Austria!

Forbes compared Startup Pioneers very favorably to Le Web:

Pioneers Festival is what LeWeb used to be and by the talk at the event from investors, start ups and journalists, it’s surpassed LeWeb in terms of quality of speakers, venue, networking and topic matter you can sink your teeth into.

Fortunately for everyone who couldn’t attend, Startup Festival provided professionally produced videos of all the speakers.  I highly recommend checking out this video of Alexander Osterwalder‘s presentation.  Here’s the recording of my presentation. Skip the first minute or two of crowd pumping up exercises…

Finally, if you just want the slides from my presentation, here they are:


New Book on Startup Marketing

I recently worked with Hyperink to publish a collection of the most enduring articles from my blog. We carefully curated and compiled the articles that will remain relevant to startups into the future.

This book builds on the original goal when I began blogging about startup marketing. At that time I couldn’t find books that offered useful guidance for a resource-constrained startup striving to achieve hyper growth. I knew I had many valuable lessons to share that I learned growing two startups to IPO filings and taking several more startups to market that are now worth billions of dollars collectively.

The book won’t give you a single silver bullet that makes success easy. Growing a startup is hard and the odds are stacked against all entrepreneurs. But this book will help you understand key growth principles and prioritize efforts needed to build a foundation that supports long-term sustainable growth. And when necessary, it will help founders hire the right kind of person to lead their growth efforts.

What makes a startup scalable? Why is product/market fit so important? What defines a “must have” product? What 3 common optimization failures can lead to a startup’s downfall? What’s the best business model for a startup’s goals? You’ll find the answers to these and other questions all in the book.

It is now available on Hyperink, which provides DRM-free copies in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats; Kindle; and Nook .