fresh advice
sunir from freshbooks was kind enough to invite me to the freshbooks office in toronto. he was incredibly gracious with his time, and made a lot of effort to help me learn about marketing and PR.
as far as startup internet companies go in ontario, freshbooks has a sort of “this is the way it’s done” reputation about them amongst us first-timers. freshbooks is also known for being involved in the startup community.
basically they’re a great bunch of guys.
their office was in a strange location — sunir’s directions instructed me to park at a place called “bellini cabinets” and then make my way up some stairs. but once i got there, i was amazed. the space was huge with high ceilings and a gorgeous open-concept feel to it. everyone was working on large monitors on large desks in one large room. what a cool place to work!
sunir gave me lots of great advice including:
- read “crossing the chasm” (he tells me this at least 3 times every time i meet him)
- consider having separate pr firms that specialize in target demographics, and then paying them per project
- banner marketing only works when you have a very specific set of sites you post them on
- in marketing, measurement is crucial. you need to find every way to measure where your visitors are coming from, which ads are working, and details about your visitors. sunir has all these dynamically generated maps that tell him about his visitors and users. it’s quite impressive.
- understand your brand and how your customers perceive your brand
as i sat with sunir, mike mcderment stopped by and sat with us. he gave me advice on how to get connected in the startup network and with angel investors.
there’s a lot to learn from the people at freshbooks.
also, from what i could tell, it seems like there’s a lot of exciting things in the near and long-term future of their company.
thanks, freshbooks team, for being such an excellent example for the rest of us and for being so helpful.
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