„If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on public relations.” Bill Gates

In one of my earlier posts, I referred to a street art in Reykjavik, which basically had the intention:
“It’s about the way you climb a mountain and not the size of the mountain what makes it to a unique experience!”

People don’t want to hear the story about how many summits you reached, they want to hear how you reached them – the story behind! Everyone who takes off to the challenge decides to find his own path up to the summit and that makes every story unique. That’s what the PR wants to hear from you, the stories how you became an entrepreneur, how you came up with the idea, found the right co-founder, managed the first pitches, raised the first money and so on…

“Story is everything! It makes you different!” Paula Gould

If you listen to successful people, you’ll notice that they talk about their story like a storyteller. They came up with their ideas by coincidence – e.g. “There was this international convention that took place in San Fransisco (…) all the hotels were sold out (…) we decided to turn the house into a bed & breakfast for the conference (…) we pulled three air beds out of the closet and called it …” a sort of Brian Chesky tells his story about Airbnb.

Making the people curious and wonder is one thing, you also have to differentiate yourself from the competitors. Do not just tell them that your product or service is ten times better, tell a lifesaving story where people can see themselves.
Once again, PR is about network, so get connected to the people around you who have the power to influence certain blogs, magazines or twitter and develop your network to come to light in public.
If you think you can’t handle this or you are not the networker, try to find a co-founder who fits this position or get a PR firm.

“Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like”
Brian Chesky

Here we are again on the frequently –probably- most asked questions when talking about startups: “How do I get started?” & “How to raise money?”

It seems like the lectures start to repeat themselves, but these are the starting points most first-time entrepreneurs are struggling with. However the lessons learned are:
Keep things easy and manual as long as possible, e.g. have a simple landing page for your business where people can see what you offer and how they can reach you. Stay in contact with your first customers and make them happy, build a relationship and listen to them!

They are worth more than millions of page likes, because they know your business and how you might improve things. As I mentioned in the blog post last week, these are tasks, which don’t scale in the first place. The value of a relationship is not scalable.


Concerning the topic raising money for your venture, I’d like to keep it as short as possible.
Bootstrap as long as possible and avoid unnecessary capital from people you don’t know.
With every Dollar you get you share or sell equity. That simply means pressure on your shoulders. The more people get involved the more effort for you, because they are interested in the process, reports, status and how their money is doing – basically the whole business! In addition, remember you are running a marathon not a sprint…

In the end, I just want to share one statement with you which I found inspiring. Many successful entrepreneurs and business people talk about it and everybody got this feeling already in his life. Some more, some less. Maybe this talk helps you to find yourself closer to the ‘more’ part:
Getting lucky is a skill!