The world just landed on your company’s door, a little stunned from a rough, pandemic-style skid landing. It’s sitting there, panting, looking around, wondering where to go.
Startups, Invite it in.
With all the virtual meeting platforms, founders are finally living in a form of actual meritocracy folks talk about. Your platinum travel budget? Don’t need it. Nice Hertz Gold car rental for driving a customer? Useless. All the gingerbread is just a joke now.
What’s no joke, though, is the enhanced customer focus on the quality of your content. You. Can. Compete. With Anyone. Anywhere. It’s a real meritocracy, but the merit is the quality of your creativity in outreach AND in content and content process. This opportunity favors all founders, and especially founders from outside perspectives such as founders of color and women, who have particular reservoirs of courage–not to mention practice–when it comes to doing more with less.
Startup opportunity in pandemic: content and connection
Think about how these developments can help your startup find opportunity in the pandemic:
1. SaaS firm Miro hosted their first user conference digitally, with 35 speakers, in less than 6 weeks. Here’s their roadmap.
This fall is the perfect time to host an insanely strong user conference–remote–for yourself. Can you imagine how much video content, customer testimonials, and product insights you can get? 10X what you have now. How much would that accelerate 2021? Exactly.
2. Zoom just released its ability to share Keynote or PPT slides as your virtual background–-for that TEDx look. This is a game-changer for a powerful keynote OR product roadmap session OR … get the idea?
You can do a product demo (slide version) right behind your talking faces. You can even have different team members sharing different slide decks, all in one meeting. Meetings just got so much better, and every one of your customers has the front row.
3. Customer advisory councils. A lot of CEOs don’t have customer advisory boards because it can be tough to schedule a high-end dinner with these hard-to-reach people, and it’s often done at the major conference in your industry. You don’t have to wait now. Are the top 10 companies in your industry advising your CEO in a highly privileged face to face Zoom? Well, they’d like to be, wouldn’t they?
Startup opportunity in pandemic: go time
Now’s the time. By Halloween, all the digital hustlers will have taken the slack out of executive schedules. But we still have a window–now–to ramp up your access to Fortune 100 levels like never before. Go get ’em!