IMPORTANT: This lecture is only for students assigned to the supplementary curriculum "Extended Study on Innovation" offered by the Innovation Incubation Center (i²c)! For further information, please visit http://i2c.tuwien.ac.at/home/are-you-a-student/how-to-apply/
***Content description***
1. Marketing & Sales Lecture (lecturer: Dieter Rappold):
Any startup has the goal of becoming a successful business. While product development is a primary component of a successful startup, equally important is the ability of a startup to become self-sufficient with profitable customers. Many non-business people think that throwing a marketing plan together and starting sales takes a weekend to develop. But the reality is that successful growth, marketing and sales takes time, hypothesizing, testing, processes and some trial and error. How does a startup, especially one that does not have a marketing and sales expert, take the necessary steps to develop a successful growth, marketing and sales strategy, objectives and tactic that lead to sustainable growth?
This course is designed to outline key areas of growth, marketing and sales that startups should focus on from the day they say ‚ya, let’s do this!' till the day they are ready to launch.
Startup lifecycle and how growth, marketing and sales fits in: Why worry about growth, marketing and sales when I do not even have a product to sell?
- Difference between marketing and sales (everyone is a sales person in a startup!)
- Basics of Classical Marketing: 4 P’s, 6’Ps, Markets, Buyer Personas, Buying Process, Marketing & Sales Process
- B2B, B2C, B2G, B2B2C – distribution options
- Developing a marketing strategy, objectives and tactics
- Customer behavior; needs, wants and desires and decision making, empathizing with the customer.
- Call Process – what happens on every interaction with a customer
- Pricing strategies - how to leverage the most undervalued P of the 4Ps of Marketing
- Latest tips and tricks to marketing and sales: internet marketing/social media, Growth Hacking, SEA/SEO
- North star, key metrics and how to make your efforts in go2market measurable.
2. Public Relations Workshop (lecturer: Bernhard Holzer)
Many startups have or will have all kind of stories to tell. But the reality is that most startups lack of visibility or it could be better. What is the right story to tell, who to tell the story and how to find the right media and journalists? This course is designed to provide PR fundamentals, methods and inspiration about how startups can improve their press work.
- Intro PR & storytelling
- Startup PR – what is the difference regarding to classic press work?
- Storytelling – why you are journalists from today on?
- How do I find the right media and get journalists?
- How can I structure a story?
- Insights about how PR & storytelling can give your startup a huge boost
Many examples about how and why PR & stories work in real life for startups and what we can learn out of this
3. Sales & B2B (lecturer: Thomas Rosenmayr)
Many tech-driven startups have innovative products or services but face the challenge to boost their sales. How can a startup set-up a sales process and what are the necessary steps to enable sustainable growth? How can a startup identify and acquire the right business partnerships? This course focuses on how to build a sales playbook with practical steps on messaging, select the right channel mix and tools for automation. Furthermore, ways to establish business partnerships and B2B sales cooperations will be elaborated.
Intro and rerun on Marketing, Sales and Go-to-Market and Growth hacking. What is what and how they are interconnected.
- The 5 Ps of Marketing
- Product market-fit and the aha-moment
- Growth loops
- Customer satisfaction, retention and the magic of client advocacy for early stage startups
How to set up a sales playbook
- Client segmentation and target audiences
- Need narrative
- The buying centre
- B2B, B2C, B2G, B2B2C – distribution options
- How to find your best sales channel(s)
- Client needs and decision making, putting yourself in the users shoes
- Messaging and localization
- North star, key sales metrics and how to make your efforts measurable
- Internationalization (how culture influences sales)
Lets get operational – tools, process and partnerships
- Sales automation
- Sales Process – what is the roadmap a customer travels on from interest to decision
- Business partnership and B2B sales cooperation
4. Go to Market Strategy & Monetization and Pricing Strategy Workshop (lecturer: Alex Pinter)
PART 1: Go to market & Strategy
CLASS CONTENT:
Most people would agree: One of the biggest levers companies have that can dramatically change the position in the market is developing a stellar go-to-market (or GTM) strategy. Figuring out an approach for going-to-market is one of the toughest things for a startup to do - by any means, it’s no trivial exercise. But without understanding the customer’s issues, it’s almost impossible to get right.
Nailing your GTM separates successful startups from those that won’t. 9-out-of-10 startups fail, 66% drastically change their original plan and pivot. This class centers around the only thing that matters - finding product-market-fit. According to Silicon Valley big shot Marc Andreessen, startups are definitely going to fail, if they lack a “market”. In a great market - a market with lots of real potential customers - the market pulls “products” out of startups. Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and a killer team, and it doesn’t matter.
This lecture is all about figuring out the best GTM approach, understanding customers, nailing monetization, and hence, scaling this business model to grow fast.
CLASS OBJECTIVES:
The primary objectives of the course are to enable you to:
● Dive into different GTM strategies to get your product or service to market.
● Learn about the tactical components for a great GTM plan.
● Realize that from no go-to-market plan survives first contact with customers.
● Understand that a series of unknowns is faced – unknown customer segments, unknown customer needs, unknown product feature set, unknown market size etc.
● Recognize that a static go-to-market plan adds no value.
● Accept that achieving real product-market-fit is very hard.
To realize these objectives, students will become familiar with selected GTM frameworks. This course will equip you with the tools and insights to quickly define your initial GTM strategy and gain feedback. Hence, it teaches you how to validate your solution and create traction. By the end of the course, students should have a strong understanding of how to achieve product-market-fit that triggers social proof.
OVERVIEW OF CLASS TOPICS:
Topics covered include GTM strategies (+ scoping), 4W8S-Framework, Leslie’s Compass, Rogers Innovation Curve, product validation, startup traction (+ types) and social proof.
TEACHING STYLE:
We greatly enjoy doing, teaching, and continually learning about go-to-market strategies and make each class as lively, interactive and hands-on as possible. A great attitude, creativity, and a sense of thinking outside-the-box are required to maximize your learnings. Feel free to ask questions at any time. We love to discuss and reflect on things.
As serial entrepreneurs, each of us has over twelve years of experience developing startups - in Europe as well as in Silicon Valley. Hence, the course is designed to be very practical so that students can apply what they learn in class to a wide variety of products and services. We will use case studies to guarantee effective learning (if required).
PART 2: Monetization
CLASS CONTENT:
For startups, it seems, figuring out how to implement monetization is a little like taking out the trash. It’s a chore that you don’t need to do immediately, but the longer you put it off, the worse everything starts to smell. The true product-market-fit as we know is the intersection of product-market-pricing. However, many times, pricing is an afterthought, which is not the ideal setup.
One of the biggest levers companies have that can dramatically influence a company’s well-being is developing a proper business and pricing model in order to generate profits. So, finding the right models that suit the company best is prior for a startup’s long-term existence – it sets the future successful companies apart from those that will poorly fail. As planning on making money is an essential part of every business, being aware of existing revenue models and how to encounter the struggle of choosing the best available possibility eases the startup phase for businesses.
This lecture is all about realizing that monetization is the final piece of a systematic look at a business model. Profit-seeking companies need to choose a model that will successfully generate the highest possible revenue.
CLASS OBJECTIVES:
The primary objectives of the course are to enable you to:
● Dive into different revenue models and monetization tactics.
● Learn about best practices and common mistakes founders make.
● Realize that pricing is based on research and data - not opinion, pure guessing or passion.
● Understand a bit of unit economics, and get to know the pricing thermometer.
● Recognize that startups do not need to replicate competitors’ pricing strategies.
● Think bigger and come up with a plan to build a $100 million business (at least in theory!)
To realize these objectives, students will become familiar with the most popular monetization tactics and revenue models. This course will equip you with the tools and insights to quickly define your initial pricing strategy and gain feedback. Hence, it teaches you how to validate your pricing and initial revenue streams. By the end of the course, students should have a strong understanding that pricing decisions are crucial to the success of any startup.
OVERVIEW OF CLASS TOPICS:
Topics covered include aspiration map (market segment vs. delight), basics of unit economics, pricing thermometer, main pricing strategies, pricing lessons learned, insights to SaaS pricing, user-first monetization, popular revenue models and monetization tactics (app, marketplaces,...) and thus, ways to build a $100 million business.
TEACHING STYLE:
We greatly enjoy doing, teaching, and continually learning about monetization strategies and make each class as lively, interactive and hands-on as possible. A great attitude, creativity, and a sense of thinking outside-the-box are required to maximize your learnings. Feel free to ask questions at any time. We love to discuss and reflect on things.
As serial entrepreneurs, each of us has over twelve years of experience developing startups - in Europe as well as in Silicon Valley. Hence, the course is designed to be very practical so that students can apply what they learn in class to a wide variety of products and services. We will use case studies to guarantee effective learning (if required).
***Lecturers***
Dieter Rappold is the founder and CEO of Speedinvest Pirates, the growth marketing unit of Speedinvest and partner for more than 80 European Startups. He founded one of the most successful Digital Agencies in Austria with knallgrau (later Virtual Identity) in 2001 and scaled it to 50 employees as part of an independent agency with more than 180 employees and 21 million euro in annual revenue. Thus he has over 17 years of experience working with large Brands like Coca-Cola, Heineken, BMW, Opel, Telefonica, HVB and others on international Web Projects and digital strategies. He is an accomplished speaker with more than 100 keynotes, lectures and interviews on digital marketing, making him an expert on the field.
Alex Pinter is co-founder of Trayn, a platform for strength and conditioning coaches to create fully individualized training programs for athletes faster and easier. It was officially launched in 2014 with selected professional sports teams in the US and Canada. Prior to that, he was a strategy consultant at Accenture for many years and worked with numerous international clients across Europe (main industry focus: consumer goods, retail, high-tech, and chemicals).
Bernhard Holzer is a PR professional and one of the most well-known communications experts in the Austrian and German Startup scene. He worked in a leading communications position at Germanys biggest Startup-factory Rocket Internet in Berlin. Before that he founded zoomsquare, Austrias Startup of the year 2013. He also set up the StartupPR and Storytelling company woodspr, focusing on Austria, Germany and Switzerland (DACH-region) as well as international Tech media.
Thomas Rosenmayr is co-founder and Growth B2B Sales Partner of SpeedInvest Pirates. Before SpeedInvest Pirates Thomas founded nexxar, a European leader in digital corporate reporting (50+ employees). He is a leading digital corporate communications expert in Europe with 20+ years of experience in large scale digital publishing projects with big corporates clients (eg. BASF, Barclays, Novartis, Shell, VW). He successfully built an international client base of +70 clients across Europe, North America and even Japan; a network he regularly taps into for the startups he works with. Besides his expertise he is also active as an angel investor in Europe.
Thomas Schranz is software developer, serial entrepreneur, and Angel Investor. He organizes Software Engineering Retreats and Hackathons related to emerging technology from data science, functional programming, machine learning, blockchain, and augmented reality. Due to his experience as a serial entrepreneur and angel investor he has a lot of experience in how to build protoypes.
The student has to be enrolled for at least one of the studies listed below
