The Real Reason Why The Future of Marketing Is Mobile

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Smit Patel — 2 Comments ↓

I’m a person who likes to think ahead and be at a place now where most people will be in the next few years. Something that’s been itching me for a while is the future of marketing. Blogging, social media etc are all great but they will get crowded and noisy in a few years. What will come after?

This week I had the pleasure of meeting Hiten Shah. I look upto his achievements and admire his thought process towards marketing and entrepreneurship. I decided to ask him my pressing question: “What’s next in marketing?”

Hiten pulled out his iPhone and said “this is what’s next.”

Everyone says mobile is next so I thought what’s new about his answer.

Then came a statement from Hiten which blew me away. He said “mobile is intimate.”

The only other platform which allows a marketer to have a personal interaction with a customer is email. An email comes right into your “personal” inbox. It’s great when something says “Hi Smit……” It feels personal.

Mobile is the next platform where a message can be delivered right to the customer. Explicitly speaking, when you download a mobile app, its on your “personal” phone. It’s intimate.

So why is “intimacy” so special?

Think about it for a second. Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Ads are all public. On most of these platforms, when you share a message, it can been seen by all or most of your followers.

On social networks like Facebook and twitter, you can engage with a specific person but it’s still public. Direct messaging on twitter or private inbox messaging on facebook may be intimate but it’s not scalable. You cannot go and DM all your followers or else they will hate you. In fact if a brand directly messaged me on facebook, I’d feel uncomfortable.

You may say that ads can be targeted. Sure, but you cannot target them to a particular person. The closest it can get is filtering people by interest, location etc. Something that comes close are targeted messages or CTA’s provided by HubSpot or companies like Spinnakr. You can customize your message by IP address.

The growth of companies like LocalResponse or Adelphic is only a testimonial to this “mobile intimacy” factor. For eg. If you go to a CVS, Local Response will identify your location and offer you a coupon for CVS. This is much more personal than the flyers they send to every CVS card holder or the coupons in the newspaper. In fact, it’s even better than receiving coupons in the email because they are irrelevant until you need to buy something or you are at CVS.

We’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg in mobile marketing with companies like LocalResponse. Working at an enterprise company, I’m very curious on how to use mobile to reach enterprise customers.

Mobile is intimate and it’s a huge distribution channel given the number of mobile devices round the world. What are your thoughts? Tweet me @thesmitpatel.

Posted in Marketing

Buying Fake Twitter Followers Isn’t Worth It

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Smit Patel — 2 Comments ↓

Buying twitter or facebook followers has become a huge problem for social media and also a big pet peeve of mine. I have been noticing startups and twitter users who claim to be “twitter celebrities” by having hundreds of thousands of fake followers. Before buying them, think for a second. Its not worth it:

They are fake: The followers are not humans, duh. They are purely accounts made by a bot.
No engagement: A big part of twitter’s value proposition is interaction and engagement. Fake accounts don’t engage with you! They won’t retweet you or reply to you.
Doesn’t help the bottom line: If you are trying to leverage social media to bring in leads or conversions, the fake followers will not become a lead or buy your product.
No, its not social proof: When your *real* followers see that you have hundreds of thousands of followers but there’s only two people who are engaging with you, they will be smart to realize that something is fishy. And the people who are buying fake twitter followers for personal branding, it is very easy to align your follower count with your actual achievements by a simple google search. Don’t underestimate the smartness of people on the internet.
Hurts your brand: If your *real* followers find out that you buy fake twitter followers, it will hurt your brand reputation and you might even end up losing the real ones. Mitt Romney got huge backlash for buying followers and inevitably hurt his brand.
It’s illegal: The last thing you want to happen is to get your twitter account suspended. Buying followers is very much against Twitter’s terms of service. Play by the rules.
Waste of money: Why spend money on being fake? How about using that money to buy better tools/services or hiring someone to write and tweet good content that can attract *real* followers?

At the end of the day, buying fake twitter followers boils down to how ethical you are and the way you do business or build a personal brand.

It’s better to have a thousand real followers whom you can actually interact with. If you really impact them via your tweets or content, they will have trust in you. That’s what will really get you that lead/conversion or establish a personal brand.

Play the long game, your follower count will not jump overnight (unless you become famous overnight). Whether you want to gain customers or build a personal brand, if you start engaging and use the best practices, it will grow organically.

Tip: Next time you come across a serial entrepreneur/guru or a startup whom you’ve never heard of, use this tool to check how many of their followers are fake to unveil if they are actually what they claim to be. Don’t blindly follow someone

Posted in Marketing

I’m not Zuckerberg

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Smit Patel — 22 Comments ↓

Being a teenager passionate about startups, you want to start the next “hot” startup.

When I first started getting involved in the startup scene roughly a couple years ago when I was 17/18 , I wanted to start my own company. I was inspired by the entrepreneurs around me and wanted to get my hands dirty.

I was working on an idea for a Twitter stock market game called Cashtag (which I now realize was stupid).

Then came an epiphany….I’m not Zuckerberg. I realized that I was trying to start my own company for the sake of starting it. I just wanted to “do my own thing.” I just wanted to have control over my destiny. I was brainstorming ideas to start anything that made some sense. Eventually I woke up. I wasn’t solving any problem!

While interning at Flightfox, I saw the daily ups and downs of starting a company. I saw the founders up all night to fix that bug or to make that one customer happy.

During my time at HubSpot, I got a lot of advice but one that really stuck to me was from Christopher O’Donnell. He said “Work on your craft. If you have skills you’ll succeed.” I found a mentor in Chris and kept talking to him and the more I talked, the more I realized that I needed to change my life strategy. I realized that I’m not Zuckerberg. I’m just a 19 year old kid from India trying to chase the dream.

When you are starting a company, all the odds are against you. The only thing in your control are your skills and yourself.

Now, I live everyday with the fact that I’m not Zuckerberg or some other celebrity teenage entrepreneur. I need to be always doing, learning, and building relationships. So, when I do come across a problem that I’m passionate about and decide to start a company, perhaps my chances of success might be higher than doing it with no skills to start with.

You might be a Zuckerberg, but you have no way of knowing. Even if you are (which probably isn’t the case) it is a better strategy to act as if you are not.

The only way to succeed is to keep working hard, hustle and acquire skills. If you keep persisting you WILL create opportunities for yourself. Like most good things in life, nothing comes easy.

p.s I want to thank all the people who’ve helped me me in my startup journey. Its a long list so I cannot name them all here but you know who you are. If there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know.

Like what you read? Tweet me @thesmitpatel.

Tagged with: advice, career, entrepreneur, startups
Posted in Career Advice

Full Stack Hustler

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Smit Patel — 4 Comments ↓

I’ve been really fascinated by the current craze of “Growth Hackers.” People like Noah Kagan, Hiten Shah, and Dan Martell who are really exceptional at it are a big inspiration. I realized that there’s more to all of these people than just being a Growth Hacker. I found a few qualities in common between all three of them which led me to create a new term called Full Stack Hustler (inspired by full stack marketer and full stack programmer). In basic terms, a full stack programmer can code everything including front end or back end. To be a good non technical startup founder one day, you need to become a Full Stack Hustler which consists of the following qualities :

Sales- No matter what business you’re in, being a good salesman is the backbone of being an exception founder or CEO. You will always be selling or should I say ABC- Always Be Closing. Whether it’s pitching to investors or talking to customers, you’ll need to know how to sell.
Building Relationships- I hate using the word “networking.” Business is about relationships. Building genuine relationships with people will lead to business, jobs, intros, learning, advice and even friendships.
Marketing & Distribution- Noah, Hiten and Dan are all kickass marketers. They understand the future of marketing and concepts like Inbound. All three of their businesses Appsumo, Kissmetrics and Clarity do a brilliant job of producing great content and marketing people love.
Thought leaders- They are all thought leaders about startups and marketing. Their following is massive and their social media engagement proves that.
Ahead of the curve- All three read and tweet a great amount of technology and startup news. Clearly they are updated about the latest in tech and their respective companies prove it. Kissmetrics believed that marketing was going to be data driven before most people did. Appsumo became a distribution channel for digital goods long before services like Gumroad and Ribbon arrived. Finally, Clarity.FM is making it easy to get access to top notch experts like never before.
Understand technology- You need to be able to understand the basics of coding. I understand html/css and have dabbled a bit into rails. While coding may not be my passion, knowing enough to be able to talk to coders is important especially if you want to build a software company. All three of them have done well for themselves so I can assume they have a good basic understanding of coding/technology.
Givers- This is the quality that I really strive to keep and get better at i.e giving back. Hiten is seen mentoring startups and founders all the time at events while Dan’s created a whole service for it and also offer’s mentoring himself. Noah’s business indirectly helps startups as well along with his often keynotes at conferences.
Hustle- At the end of the day, they are all successful because they work hard and persevere aka hustle. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, there’s not substitute to hard work and there’s opportunity cost to becoming successful. There’s no work/life balance when you’re starting out. Ask any of these three people if they had a work/life balance when they started, I bet that the answer was a NO.

To summarize, a Full Stack Hustler can sell, market and understand technology. Instead of being a Growth Hacker, everyday I’m striving to learn and become a Full Stack Hustler. IMHO, this is what makes a great startup founder and work well with a technical founder.

Thoughts? Questions? Tweet me @thesmitpatel or email smit [at] smitpatel.com

Posted in Career Advice, Hustle tips, Marketing

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Advice to Young People Today

Posted on January 20, 2013 by Smit Patel — 5 Comments ↓

Today I had the pleasure of talking to one of my idols, Gary Vaynerchuk. For all who don’t know about him, he started a social media agency called VaynerMedia and a successful wine business, WineLibrary. I wanted to get advice from Gary for young people today like myself. Here’s what he had to say in 10 lucky minutes:

Q: What areas excite you in the next 3-5 years to start a business in?

The web is still growing and possesses a large amount of opportunity to start new businesses especially in media and mobile. The cost of starting a web business is very cheap.

Q: What’s the biggest reason startups are failing?

Gary says that a lot of people like him are throwing around money on the wrong people. The people who cannot execute. There’s a lot of people who talk and don’t know how to DO.

Q: What are a couple skills you think one should acquire to become a better startup founder?

Selling is very underrated. That’s something you have to know. Another skill is knowing how to make money. Some people just do not know how to make money.

Q: What’s your advice for young people who want to join a startup?

Focus on providing value by knowing what your craft is. Don’t go to the place who pays you the most money, go where you can get the most learning and mentoring.

Q: How can young people today build a brand online?

Two things: 1) Talk about something you really know well. 2) Keep working really hard on it.

Overall Gary thinks young people today have a lot of opportunities but he’s afraid they’re not all hungry enough. If you just want a job and a decent salary then going to school and doing the normal is fine. If you want to succeed and start your business, you have to give up everything. Whether it’s family life, social life, you just have to HUSTLE. There’s no substitute to hard work.

Thoughts or feedback? Tweet me @thesmitpatel or email.

(Me with Gary V at Inbound 2012)

Tagged with: business, career, gary vaynerchuk, hustle, internship, marketing, social media, twitter
Posted in Career Advice, Hustle tips

7 Tips For Networking Inside a Large Company

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Smit Patel — 3 Comments ↓

In September, I was pumped to accept an internship offer from HubSpot. It was a dream because I was huge fan of the founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan. My goals were to add value, learn a ton and build lasting relationships. With over 400 employees, I needed to figure out a way to meet as many people as humanly possible in my part time working there. This is how I hacked the process:

Start early: Don’t wait until your first day at the company to get to know your co-workers. I was following some HubSpot employees on twitter way before I had applied for an internship. This gave me a head start on having a list of people I can possible meet at the company. Another way I got ahead was by attending the massive event that HubSpot organizes called INBOUND. I met a lot of HubSpotters at the event who ended up being one of the first people I had lunch with at the start of my internship.
Ask for Referrals: Naturally and subconsciously, I ended up using a classic sales technique: referrals. When I was having lunch with someone, I asked for recommendations of people who I should have lunch with. This way I was getting a pulse on who the rockstars at the company were and made sure to have lunch with them. Another reason why this technique works is context. I could ping the recommended person without hesitation and tell them that “Chris recommended that I get lunch with you.” This made it almost impossible for them to say no
Be creative: I thought that the normal “Would love to grab lunch with you” might not scale at a 400 person company. So, I decided to eat HubSpot’s own dogfood i.e “inbound.” The company has its own ‘wiki’ utilizing Atlassian’s product called Confluence. I created a page on the wiki called “Smit Patel’s Lunch Hustle” (keeping the hustler brand intact ). The page was a small introduction of myself and was going to list all the folks I had lunch with and what I learned from them. This hit two birds with one stone. First is I started getting inbound requests for lunch from folks instead of me asking them. This way I met people I might have not known about otherwise. Second thing the page achieved is it helped me show how much I really appreciated the people’s time. To show that I actually learned something from them made them feel special and show that their time was well spent.
Think scale: Whether its business/startups/marketing, you always need to think about scale/distribution. Using the company wiki helped to amplify my goal to possibly the whole company which would’ve been impossible (unless I had told every person in the company about it). Another channel that helped was the company newsletter. Looking at my hustle, my page was featured in the HubSpot weekly internal newsletter which helped to spread the word as well.
Meet a variety of people: Make sure to meet folks from different departments to get a sense of how each department works. It helps to understand what each person’s impact on the company is and appreciate their job. As an intern, it can be really useful because if you want to learn something new, knowing people of different skill sets can help you get there. When you are lunching with different folks, don’t forget to get on the calendar of the influencers i.e executives. I had lunch with the CEO, CMO, VP of Business Development and VP of Sales. They are really busy people so ask them early to get a time couple weeks down the line.
Don’t be afraid: This is quite possibly the most important part of the puzzle. A lot of people heavily understimate the value of “asking.” I saw our CEO Brian Halligan in the office couple weeks after I started the internship and went up to him and asked him to grab lunch. He was more than happy to say yes. When you are young, this helps you to look different and show your hustle. The worst case is they will say no and you won’t be kicking yourself that you never tried. As human beings, we usually like to talk about ourselves so when you ask someone, say something like “I’d love to get lunch with you and hear your story.” I met over 30 people despite working part time.
Do your homework: This applies to any meeting or sales situations in life. When you are meeting or talking to someone, do the research. Google them and look at their linkedin, twitter, blog, website etc. You want to have context when you meet them to start the conversation. “So Mark, how did you go from being an engineer to running sales teams?” sounds a lot better than “So Mark, lets hear your story.” It also shows the other person that you did some research on them which is how you knew that they have an engineering background. Small things do help.

Instead of networking, I would say that I built relationships at my company. Networking as a word sounds very selfish and as if you are only trying to meet someone to get something out of them. Business is about relationships. If you genuinely care about learning and hearing people’s stories, you will build a relationship with them. Once this exists you can ask for something from them or vice versa. But remember, its a two way stream.

There are several benefits of building relationships inside your company. First is it will help you to meet people from all walks of lives and hear really interesting stories about their lives and learn from them. Second is it will help you to build a brand inside the company. Now we all know how important that is to grow professionally. Third is you can have an impact on the company culture. After looking at my lunch hustle, HubSpot officially started a lunch roulette program where the company would pay the tab for having lunch with 4 employees from different teams. Lastly, you can make new friends. I can proudly say that I have made a lot of new friends in a short period of time and it would have not been possible without my “networking” aka building relationships.

Any thoughts or questions? Tweet me @thesmitpatel.

Follow @thesmitpatel

Tagged with: career, context, hubspot, internship, networking, personal branding
Posted in Career Advice, Hustle tips, Internships

Don’t Ever Talk To Someone New Before Following These Steps!

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Smit Patel — 2 Comments ↓

This week I attended Inbound 2012 conference. It was packed with marketers and people aspiring to be better ones. One of my idols Gary Vaynerchuk had a keynote and the point that he hammered in people’s head is that *Context is God*. Context creates an opportunity to be able to talk to someone. Its not anything new. When your grandparents used to go to the Butcher’s shop, he knew their whole family and asked them how they were doing as soon as they walked in. That, my friends is context. I bet the only reason they went to his shop was because he knew about them i.e context. Fast forward to our times; We have endless opportunities to create context! Let me show you how to do so.

Let’s say you’re going to be meeting me (I wanted to take someone unfamous for reality ).

GOOGLE! Get this hardwired in your brain. Always google the name of the person first.

Oh wow look so much context!

Website: The next step is to look at the person’s website(if they have any). In my case the about.me page shows up. This will give you an overview of who the person is.

Blog: This is a gold mine of context. If the person blogs, it will give you so much context to talk about. You can ask them questions regarding a particular blog post or give them your views about it. This will really make the person feel good that you took the time to read what they wrote. Also you will get a feel of their personality through their writing.

Twitter: Hands down my favorite tool as you may know. This will help you understand what they do day to day. Maybe they hate comcast and you do too. There’s context! Make sure to follow them after your meeting as they will see your face again and instantly remember who you are.

Linkedin: There is a high chance that the person you are meeting is related somewhat to your future aka your career. Make sure you look at their linkedin profile and their experience. Maybe they went to the same college as you and that creates a strong alumni context to talk about.

It is insanely stupid in the age of iPads and Androids to talk to someone without googling them once. Whether you are a business developer, entrepreneur, recruiter, college student or anyone, this is highly important. And don’t worry this is not stalking. I don’t want to brand it as hustle either. This is just Business 101. When you go to a meeting or take that phone call with a person knowing so much about them, it will leave a lasting impression.

Also here are two tools to help you do the above even faster: Rapportive & Summer.

Read the article? Now you’ve got context to talk to me! Tweet at me to talk

Tagged with: career, context, entrepreneur, meetings, social media, twitter
Posted in Career Advice, Hustle tips

What I Learned From My Internship at a Y Combinator Startup.

Posted on August 4, 2012 by Smit Patel — 5 Comments ↓

Note: This post was cross published on Bostinno.

I recently finished an internship at an awesome Y Combinator/500 Startups company called Flightfox. Putting it in perspective: it has taught me more in 2 months than I did throughout the whole school year. Here are few things that I learned that will make me a better startup founder:

Have Empathy: A few months ago, I had tweeted to Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot asking him three qualities he thinks a non-tech founder should have. One of the qualities he mentioned was empathy. Fast forward to my internship, Flightfox founders Todd and Lauren both were empathetic. Small things like taking me out Go-Karting for my birthday or having a going away dinner for me makes a huge difference. If your employees love you, they will love your company.
Work hard: The founders were working hard and very focused. They would stay up late at night and take very few breaks. In fact they barely cared about if they ate or not. Not to mention, Flightfox was preparing for demo day so there were specific goals to hit by then. None of this is healthy for the body but this is what it takes to run a startup and especially when you are in the product/market fit and growth stage.
Drool over metrics: In the apartment that we worked out of, we had put white boards all over our work area. They had important metrics like sales, engagement, net promoter score etc. Every few hours we would look around and knew exactly what we were working towards. There was no need to have meetings everyday. Measuring everything you do helps to know what works and what doesn’t. Knowing what works helps to focus your energies in the right direction.
Trust your employees: One of my biggest experiments was to show the founders that social media can create buzz for the company as well as bring in conversions. They trusted me and let me experiment and by the end of the two months, a good chunk of the conversions came from social media(fb+twitter). When the boss believes in you, the employee feels empowered to show results and work hard to help the company.
Be Transparent: At an early stage startup, there are very few people on the team so there is no reason for the whole team to not know all about the company. I knew everything about Flightfox from the investors to the valuation to what were the plans of the future. Heck, I even edited one of the company’s pitch decks to send investors. Transparency helps to create a trusting culture and removes any reasons of doubts and misinformation.
Talk to customers: This is one of the biggest parts of starting a company. The more you talk to customers, the easier it is for you to know what they like about your product and how you can improve their experience. Luckily, I got to handle a lot of customer development as well as support via email and Olark. Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes can help you realize if your product really provides them any value or not.
Learn from mistakes: As a startup, you are always experimenting and due to this you are bound to take decisions that are not always successful. At Flightfox, we had some fails on a few strategies but that is fine because we realized that it was a mistake and we learnt from it. The most important thing is that the founders were honest on what worked and what didn’t. Being open about mistakes is what makes them learnings and not mistakes.

These were just a few major learnings amongst many others. Getting an internship or a job at an early stage startup purely puts you through that sweat lodge where everyday is not big numbers but it is a step closer to getting to it. Have any questions or thoughts? Tweet to me @thesmitpatel.

Tagged with: career, cold email, founders, internship, marketing, personal branding, social media, startups, twitter, ycombinator
Posted in Career Advice, Hustle tips, Internships

How I landed an internship at a Y-Combinator Startup.

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Smit Patel — No Comments ↓

Note: This post was cross published on Bostinno.com.

I bet when you read the title, the first thought that came to your mind was “oh, this is just another post with a bunch of advice on getting an internship.” Guess what? It might be or may be just an awesome story to get inspired and learn some tips from.

March was here and I decided to immerse myself completely in finding the right internship at an early-stage startup so I can get hands-on experience building a company from ground up. I started by creating a list of some Boston startups that I was interested in mainly because of their idea or the team. I wanted to have focus and these startups were my focus. I either cold emailed the founders or applied through a jobs page. My advice is always cold email the founders since the job page emails are filled with plain resumes. I landed some interviews and was rejected by all of them. These interviews were not all in the same week so it took up almost a few weeks to get through them. I didn’t give up. Here’s where the real story begins:

I made it my full time job: As soon as I woke up, I would start searching for internships. I would go to sleep at 2am and most nights I would put my computer to sleep with a jobs page on the browser so that I could apply for jobs first thing in the morning. I cannot even count the hours that I’ve spent searching for an internship and I don’t want to. It’s the opportunity cost of finding something you like.

Cold email works: If there is one reason I got an internship, it was cold emails. Don’t worry if you are nobody or don’t know anybody. Just email the founder or the head of the department you are trying to get an internship with. Here is a great tip, download a tool called rapportive. It shows you the social media profiles of a person when you type in their email into the “to:” field. When you are cold emailing, you probably don’t know their emails so you are going to be guessing. Thanks to rapportive, you can now turn those guesses into validation. The most obvious guess is the founder’s first name at the company.com. If the email is right, then rapportive will pop up their social media profiles, i.e LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Now you can be assured it will end up in their inbox.

As far as the email itself goes, make it short. The first couple of lines should be you and your background. Next paragraph should be talking about their company and what you admire about them. Last paragraph should be the “ask”. Tell them that you want to intern at their company and why you should be the one. Feel free to email or tweet me and I would be glad to help and provide some samples.

Hustle: No, I am not putting the word here to sound fancy and hip. Let me tell you how I really hustled. I went on VC firms’ websites and trolled through their whole portfolio list and tried to find any companies I liked and then visit their jobs pages to see any internship openings. It came time that my browser would freeze since I had so many tabs open for different company pages. The most popular one is 500 startups. I am a huge fan of Dave McClure so I decided to go through the whole portfolio list and see anything of interest for me. Not to mention I even thought of cold emailing him but I heard he doesn’t reply to emails.

I am very active on twitter and kept a close eye on my twitter stream every few minutes for any tweets that had the word “intern” in them. In fact, I was the first one to apply for an opening I had found through a tweet. Make sure you follow founders and VCs as they are always tweeting for help, either for their companies or someone they know. Being the first one to apply can make an impression. I also used http://search.twitter.com to find internships with specific hashtags or keywords like “intern boston.” Most of them were not at startups, so it wasn’t a huge help for me, but it could be for others. I even got intros to a couple companies through twitter from friends who knew I was looking for internship and saw someone looking for an intern.

Human interaction is important as well. I still kept going to events to meet people to see if anyone was hiring and to let people I knew know I was looking for internships.

Job boards don’t work much for finding early stage startup internships but Simply Hired, Indeed and VentureLoop had a few interesting openings sometimes. Make sure to use the filters to only find new openings since your last visit so you can save time and aren’t looking at the same ones again. I visited those websites at least twice or three times a day as well. Some other websites I visited were Startuply and Startuppers. Intermatch seems to be another good one as well. They have a great list of west coast startups and I actually interviewed for one that I applied through them.

DON’T GIVE UP: It was end of May, I still didn’t have an internship. My parents were worried about me and told me that I should just find any internship but I kept on the hustle to find an internship at a startup. The common pattern for most of my rejections was, “We love your passion and young age but you don’t have enough experience.” My biggest skill was my passion and a young age of 18, so I tried to use it as my selling point.

It was last week of May so I increased all the hustler activities and above all cold emails. But now it was time that I try my luck west. I had always wanted to go to the valley but I wasn’t so focused on it, as I wanted to stay in Boston if I could. I emailed my friend Cecilia to ask her if she could help. She suggested a few companies and I got in touch with one but it wasn’t a fit. It was May 31 and June was about to begin but I wasn’t going to give up. I decided to cold email a few Silicon Valley founders that day. I ended up hearing back from most of them. Among these, was a company I had seen on techcrunch called Flightfox. The idea seemed very interesting and compelling to me. They had raised money from great angels and were currently in Y Combinator. I immediately researched the company, went on linkedin to find the co-founders’ names and then guess their emails to cold email them.

I actually ended up hearing back from one of the founders, Todd, the next day. He said they weren’t hiring but was happy to talk shop. I did a brief phone call with him and then he told me to send a few ideas over the weekend. Seemed like they liked most of them as they aligned to their vision and thus he invited me to do a skype call on Monday. I got an offer email at 1am that night and I was more than happy to say yes.

Here I am now in Mountain View excited for a great opportunity and to fulfill the expectations of my founders Lauren and Todd. I want to work hard, learn and make the most of the valley. If there is one thing you want to take away from this post, just remember “don’t give up.” It sounds cheesy and all but you don’t get stuff in life without working hard. Some people do but unfortunately you are not one of them. And make sure you surround yourself with people who believe in you so you can keep talking to them to explain how you search is going and even share your frustrations with them. In my case it was Marsh, Jesse, Jonah, Ali, and Rohan, not to forget my friends and family who supported me. Make sure to build somewhat of a relationship with the founders that you got rejected from so you don’t feel awkward the next time you see them or most importantly so that they respect you and might actually hire you in the future for being professional.

Tagged with: career, cold email, internship, marketing, social media, twitter, ycombinator
Posted in Career Advice, Hustle tips, Internships

Twitter: An Entrepreneur’s Swiss Knife and some of my hacks.

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Smit Patel — No Comments ↓

Twitter has been a major part of my startup life. I have always wanted to write a post about how its a very powerful tool especially for all you hustling entrepreneurs out there!

I want to share how I have used twitter to its full potential and how these hacks can help you:

Screw the twitter ratio: Yes, I know there is a whole theory that if you have more followers than people you follow, you have a higher chance of getting more followers. I don’t disagree with this. But, when you are trying to start a business or gain knowledge, just follow any amount of *interesting* people or as many *thought leaders* as you can. Knowledge>Popularity.
Use twitter as your rss/google reader: See why I told you to follow as many interesting people? When you follow thought leaders, they always post awesome articles including their own blogs. Guess what? Now you don’t have to filter anything or go follow a million blogs. These thought leaders will only post relevant and useful articles meaning you know that these are worth reading. A great example of a thought leader is Hiten Shah from Kissmetrics.
Listen more than you talk: I am guessing that most of you reading this are either starting out or not thought leaders quiet yet. So, just read and follow what others are saying. No one cares if you don’t like Comcast or your lunch sucked unless you have a million followers
Engage in conversations: I know I said talk less but I never said don’t engage in conversations. If someone you follow posts an interesting article or thought that you want to share your opinion on, then tweet back to them with what you think. Don’t be shy! Twitter is a conversation tool. When you talk, people start noticing you especially if you have something *interesting* to say. If someone tweets a question and you know the answer, reply back and help them out. Chances are you might become twitter buddies.
Its your live calendar: Remember how I said following a lot and the *right* people is important? If you do, then you will be updated on what’s happening in the startup scene. Guess what? You might even hear about events which no one knows about just because you follow certain people in the community. I am not just talking about Boston events. I hear about events throughout the country. A couple days ago I came across Hackatrain. Its a hackthon inside the train. How cool is that? Infact the organizer Tom reached out to me yesterday to come. This only happens on twitter! I’d even like to mention another cool event called Hollywoodhackday organized by Rahim.
Find opportunities: Jobs? Internships? Did I just say the two of the most needed things for people? Yes, I did. Using twitter, you will get exposed to opportunities that you would never find on the boring job boards. Infact chances are, that you might even go viral. Take James for example. A tweet from Chris Sacca inspired him to create facebookipodayclosingprice.com where people predicted the much hyped Facebook’s closing price. Guess what? He got over 2000 people to use the site in 4 days. Not bad huh? I am sure he got a lot of attention and maybe some job offers as well?
Market Research: Yes you heard it right! Twitter can serve as a great tool for research and finding some customers. If you don’t already know about twitter search, you should! Its like a pandora’s box if you are in a business that is going to leverage social media. You can search topics to see if people are talking about or give a crap about it. Eg. If you want to open a pizza shop in Boston. Search pizza in a given radius around a zip code. If a 1000 people are tweeting “I want a pizza shop in Boston” then perhaps its a good business.
Its an alternative to email: People have started to do intro’s on twitter! I have personally talked to people on twitter and then continued conversations offline or email. Several times you can DM people and quickly set up meetings. This is a lot faster than going back forth via email.
Discover your passion: When we talk about thought leaders, all of them have one or two specific things that they are known for. It maybe social media marketing or creating a personal brand like Gary Vaynerchuk. Start finding what you are passionate about and tweet about it. People will start trusting you for those certain topics. I am passionate about startups. It’s still a broad topic. I haven’t quiet found my topic yet but I will find it as I evolve. Don’t worry if you don’t have one either. Just make sure you talk about something! Find your passion….

These are some ways you can use twitter to its max and I am sure you will discover some of your own hacks. Feel free to share them with me or tweet me @thesmitpatel

Tagged with: career, entrepreneur, marketing, social media, socialmedia, tips, twitter
Posted in Career Advice, Marketing