Speaking At The Innovation Lab For Silicon Valley Startup Founders

Looking forward to speaking about social media for entrepreneurs along with Tanya Monsef Bunger at the Women's Startup Lab's Innovation Lab on May 13th. Innovation Lab is an intensive and interactive learning lab for startup founders "to develop the skills and competencies needed to be effective leaders/founders."

Tanya and I will be leading a 3 hour workshop in the ‘Grow your Startup’ section of the lab.

To complement six other ’how to’ subjects offered in this series, such as essential sales techniques to close deals, lean marketing strategy, lean startup training, UI/UX design, IP Strategy and Valuation/Financial modeling, we will be instructing the group on using social media to build an online community.

Tanya is my GlobalNiche team member, and for the past year has been a business coach at the Women's Startup Lab founded by Allison Chapman and Ari Horie, who's pictured below.

Multiplying Community Management Effects In A Startup Accelerator

Excited to brainstorm next week with Olivia June Poole, the new community director of RocketSpace where I'm now based, a regular gathering of community managers here to bring together all the different community people from startups in this incubator/accelerator/coworking space.

Kinda meta. Also, a way to make coworking even more beneficial.

I see it being a way to get to know our fellow community-entrusted pros, discuss community management issues among ourselves, and begin to meld our discrete communities for increased impact and opportunity.

Executing Global Rollout Of A New Social Networking Collaboration Tool

Selfish: Capture, collaborate on, and share life's important moments http://t.co/0o2jSACIz4 — BetaList (@BetaList) April 6, 2014

BetaList highlights to thousands of tech-savvy early adopters the upcoming mobile app of Selfish.me, the San Francisco startup I joined in February as director of community...

So fun strategizing and executing the global rollout of this new social networking collaboration tool! Sign up now to be notified as soon as it hits the app store.

2014 Marks 2 Years Of Offering The GlobalNiche Program: An Update & Shifting Of Gears

An update from me, my GlobalNiche cofounder Tara Agacayak, and our team member Tanya Monsef Bunger. 

Today over 3000 are taking the course, with 13 study group leaders working to bring the program to their own communities of artisans, expats, servant leaders, writers and academics, and women entrepreneurs.

It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to have worked full time on this endeavor for the past 24 months.Today we’re excited to share what we’ve achieved -- as well as how we’re shifting gears.

Back in 2009, we envisioned a professional alliance of people connected online sharing ideas and supporting each other’s work.

We began speaking to groups about how to use social media to develop professionally by building an online web platform. We conducted on and offline seminars and workshops, masterminds and community-building programs.

By committing to work in community, we evolved the GlobalNiche program as an easy, systematic, iterative way to build a platform for opportunity to happen. We realize that our individual platforms open us up to opportunity -- not by magic, but by connecting us with our global community via the social web.

In the past two years, we’ve won an award for our global community-building methodology, hosted 20+ live web conversations with emerging thought leaders on cutting edge GlobalNiche issues, designed, created and delivered email tutorials, program pilots, a self-study workbook, a high-touch 6-week coaching program, on-demand multimedia programs, 2 online study groups, a peer study group training, supported 3 peer study groups with more on the calendar and published a Kindle handbook. We’ve also provided our platform building tutorial to the Global Tech Women conference, become a LeanIn platform partner, spoken at numerous events and broadened the GlobalNiche network to include women leaders, content creators, social business people and entrepreneurs everywhere. We’re proud to have contributed to, participated in, and added GlobalNiche’s definition and practice to these global life/work movements:

• every-day entrepreneurial thinking and acting, creative entrepreneurship as a solution for everyone
• location independence and lifestyle design in populations beyond expats, travelers and life hackers
• recognition of the importance of digital identity, personal branding, digital footprints and online social networking for personal and professional development
• re-envisioning the future of work with online collaboration and co-creation
• the adoption of global communication best practices
• the tidal wave of online content marketing
• the rise of the transformational consumer and transformational online communities

Working on GlobalNiche educated us in what it takes to build a business. We’ve gained a new appreciation for what we know, as well as identified gaps in our own knowledge, skills, abilities and experience.

Our early stage founder experience took us into the startup world. We opened and maintained profiles at accelerator and incubator application platforms like Gust.com, Angel.co, and F6s.  We attended founder events, applied to accelerators, got VC training for elevator pitches, learned the investment landscape. We learned about the role of mentors, advisors, and equity positions.

We tried our hand at investor presentations, worked toward that elusive thing called “product-market fit”, learned about choosing vendors, designed logos and website look & feel, investigated shopping cart and affiliate network solutions until we ran screaming in the other direction.

We worked on what seems like a lifetime about brand messaging - writing taglines and elevator pitches on a weekly basis (and still not there yet).

We discovered what it means to be a globally distributed team managing a variety of time zones, test driving collaboration software.

Looking back on all that we’ve achieved and learned, we realize that we’ve reached our 2009 goal of building an online global support alliance. More than that, we developed a curriculum that teaches people the skills they need to do this for themselves.

Now we’re turning the method over -- to you, and to your communities, and to people far beyond those in our current networks -- to let it grow.

2014’s shift toward a community-based movement not only makes the method available to more people but it also allows the founding team to focus on applying what we’ve learned, what we built, and the skills we developed on new projects and in ever wider communities. This is the next chapter for GlobalNiche thinking and methodology. Tara is leaving her position with GlobalNiche. She is putting her strategy and analytical skills to work doing market research for a London-based company and she has been contracted as project manager on an upcoming socio-cultural book about Turkey.

Anastasia continues to lead the GlobalNiche movement by holding the vision and on-going operations. She has taken a community-building position in a new social storytelling startup being incubated at RocketSpace in San Francisco. As a speaker and consultant, this spring she’ll be talking about platform at the Exceptional Women In Publishing conference, and leading a workshop with Tanya about the GlobalNiche Method at Women’s Startup Lab.

Tanya is continuing business development related to the GlobalNiche movement. She is working with female founders/entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to accelerate their businesses and has also accepted a professorship at Santa Clara University where she’s exploring opportunities to use the GlobalNiche curriculum. She will act as director of the Global Fellows program.

As we shift gears, we’re grateful and proud of what we’ve created together, how the GlobalNiche movement continues to support our growth through the principles we’ve established in the program and using social technology.

And as ever, we appreciate being on this journey with you.

Turkey-Related Entrepreneurs, Founders & Funders

Out having antique cocktails (that's the San Francisco way) at Comstock Saloon with family and friends. The international (and Turkish-related) set of startup entrepreneurs, founders and funders included Bora Sahinoglu, Burc Sahinoglu (of CratePlayer & HIVEBEATS), Rostem Hairedin (of Selfish.me) and Ersin Pamuksuzer of StartupBootcamp in Istanbul.

Ersin's latest venture was in the news this week, with TechCrunch announcing "As Investor Interest Heats Up In Turkey, Pan-European Accelerator Startupbootcamp Launches In Istanbul."

TechCrunch also reported that heat up this week. Congrats to my friend global VC Cem Sertoglu who's managing the $130 million Earlybird Digital East Fund (EDEF) "to invest in early and early growth startups in Turkey and Central and Eastern Europe."

Being Small = Going For It Despite The Odds

My startup GlobalNiche equips women to use their online presence to build broader networks, connect to opportunities and be the agent of their own development. Six months ago we launched our product based on 25 years of experience, and we have customers. I submitted it to be featured in a directory of companies empowering women listed by a high profile women's empowerment organization. No dice.

"Come back when you have 1,000 Facebook likes and 1,000 Twitter followers." That was the response. "Oh, and when you have a full-featured website."

Seriously? Didn't see any of those stipulations in the directions to submit. Lot of big companies are listed. Guess they didn't think they needed to specify limits for who's empowering and who's not.

But here's the thing: being a small operation does not mean we are not seriously trying to accomplish our goals. It doesn't mean we will not grow. It doesn't mean the value of our enterprise is suspect. It doesn't mean we aren't empowering women.

Being small and scrappy can mean you're just starting out. Maybe you're seeking funding, incubation, acceleration, and entrepreneurial mentorship. Maybe you're taking the time to apply to be listed in women's empowerment organization directories alongside big name companies. Being small can mean going for it despite the odds.

The organization in question is looking for a baseline of commitment in the space, but they're asking the wrong questions.

Likes and follower counts are known to be gameable metrics. They're called 'empty metrics' by leaders in social media and entrepreneurship with The Lean Startup's Eric Ries shaming them as 'vanity metrics'.

And what is a full-featured site for a bootstrapped startup? What's required beyond a home page, an about page, a blog, an email sign up form, and some pages about products, services, social proof?

Does our site look like we've spent $100k developing it? Nope. We use a handful of industry-decent services and products to produce the site. Even when we institute the fresh look a designer is working on for us right now, we'll still look like a bootstrapped company until we have at least $15k for upgrades we envision.

We need help to take our work to the next level. We're asking for it. We have to start somewhere.

For a women's empowerment organization devoted to inspiring, educating and supporting us to reach our goals, the least it could do is recognize that very fact.

Pitched to Silicon Valley VCs At Orrick's Elevator Pitch Roundtable

This is a photo of my fellow entrepreneurs and I *do* mean fellow --I was the only woman pitching in a room of 40 --  at global law firm Orrick's Elevator Pitch Roundtable last week in Silicon Valley. We all practiced 30 second pitches to venture capitalists like Blue Run Ventures' Jeff Tannenbaum (seen here in a blazer leaning against wall).

Many of the companies I heard pitched were about cars (either traffic or parking), sports (events, or extreme sports video communities), entertainment (YouTube analytics, movie tickets). There was only one other educational venture, and none specifically aimed at women, or personal/pro development.

Before the event I'd already cut down my  current pitch by half (see it below) and it was still twice too long. Mine were the longest 30 seconds of anyone in the room. Back to drawing board.

Many people feel out of place in their own lives, surrounded by the 'wrong' culture or people.

GlobalNiche empowers those people to find their place on and offline by tapping our 25 years of global experience living and working off the map.

GlobalNiche is an educational online destination of live video events, course material and a supportive environment to teach every day people personal branding, platform building, creative entrepreneurship and global community development.

Our market is 180 million people interested in life-improvement using new technology and the web. Our first product launches in September and we're recognized as top expat entrepreneurs in social media by Telegraph UK and Forbes.com

A comment I got from a veteran entrepreneur that GlobalNiche sounds like "a therapeutic solution for unactualized people" and few investors I might pitch will ever personally connect with the idea of being unsuccessful.

Now I am thinking about how I might aim for resonance: "You know that person in your life who's talented or creative, or has an adventurous spirit, but simply cannot make it work for them? Pretty much all of us have a friend or family member we've been watching and trying to help but don't know how to light their fire. That's what GlobalNiche does. We guide people to light their own fire."

The same entrepreneur said he sees GlobalNiche getting funded by sponsorships (as in nonprofit) than by investorship.

VC Tannenbaum gave me feedback. He said VCs care less about HOW it works and our pitching goal is to get to that first meeting. He also said if you have a difficult to understand business find an existing solution to compare it to. Analogies. I am looking for something like that for GlobalNiche.

If you're interested in participating in a similar event, consider joining Orrick's TOTAL ACCESS mailing list to be notified of future opportunities.