11 Questions for Your First Investor Meeting

When it’s time to start raising capital, just asking for money isn’t the whole pitch. Startups need to ask questions of potential investors and figure out if they are good for their company.

Most founders spend little time asking investors questions, and that’s too bad. Good investors love it when you ask them questions, because it shows that you are thoughtful and don’t think of them as just a walking wallet.

By asking the right questions, you can really qualify investors in your funnel get clear answers, and minimize the chance of wasting your time with investors who will not invest.

Are you interested in potentially investing in my company, and if so, what are the next steps?

No first meeting with an angel or VC should end without you asking this question. Be direct. Do not be shy.  Every investor by the end of the meeting will make up his or her mind.

By asking this simple and direct question, you will know exactly where you stand. If the investor indicates interest in continuing the conversation, then ask about the next steps. Listen carefully to what the investor is saying.

For example, the investor might say keep me posted, or I am traveling the next few weeks or I have a lot of things I am working on – this is known as a soft NO or definitely not now. When an investor is vague, assume he / she is not interested.

On the other hand, if the investor proposes to set up a follow-up meeting or a call in the next week or so, this means there is interest. Listen carefully to what the next steps are and decide if the interest is real.

What is your investment process, and how long does it take?

If the investor is interested in taking the next steps, you need to ask about the whole investment process. The process will vary widely depending on the type of investor.

Some angels like to co-invest with others, and that often prolongs the process. Typically, a formal angel group will assign a team of angels to an investment committee for each deal. You will need to meet with them at least a few times and then, if things go well, present to the entire angel group. After that, there maybe more diligence.

The process for Micro VC and VC firms varies but generally takes 3-4 meetings to get a positive decision. Every firm meets regularly to evaluate the deal flow. When you hear that you will be talked about during the partner meeting this week, in general, this a positive thing, but be ready for a quick NO coming out of that meeting. If the VC is engaged, you should be meeting with more and more partners in the firm as the process unfolds. For larger checks, you will be invited to present at a partner meeting. That would be a critical meeting for a YES decision.

What is your check size?

Knowing the check size helps influence the timeline and, frankly, the effort you put into this particular pitch. For example, if you are raising a $1MM round you can’t spend a ton of time with people who write $25K checks. You simply won’t be able to get to the finish line if you focus on those.

Oftentimes you will hear a range. An angel can say I invest $25K-$200K, or a VC invests anywhere from $300K to $5MM. Ranges, in general, aren’t great because they lack clarity. There may be complexity or another message behind them. For example, an angel who says $25K-$200K may only invest $25K personally and then syndicate out the rest.

Similarly, when a VC names a range, it might actually mean that they do seed exceptionally rarely. Find out their minimum investment before you spend your time.

How many more investments are you planning to make this year?

Number of investments per year is called pacing, and the disciplined investors pay a lot of attention to it because they want to be investing continuously through the year. For example, if a VC has a seed program, and you are talking to them in October, and they decided to fund 10 deals a year and they already funded all 10, there are no more checks left. With this information, the founder should reduce the chance of being funded by this firm to basically 0.

Another, much more subtle issue with VC would be capacity. Some partners just don’t have the bandwidth to take on any more investments. In that case, they would still meet with the founders, but they just can’t invest. Asking about an ability to invest upfront saves a lot of time.

Who else needs to be involved in making the decision to invest?

ABC in sales is to find a champion and to find who can cut the check. Similarly with fundraising, when you are dealing with angel groups and venture firms, it is important to understand who will be involved in making the decision. Some angels tell you that they co-invest with friends. This can be both a good thing or a bad thing. The good is that there may be more capital available if you succeed, the bad is that the decision is distributed. Be sure to meet everyone who is involved in making a decision, don’t let other people present the business on your behalf.

In most VC firms, associates will not be able to make a decision without involving a partner. Which partner is making a decision? Can you meet them? Again, making sure that you meet with the decision maker is critical on the path to getting a YES. Another way to think about this is that if you don’t meet the partner, it is basically an NO.

What is the last company backed, and why?

This is a simple but relevant question. You are testing for how quickly the answer comes, how enthusiastic the investor is and when was the investment made.

It can be quite telling one way or another. Has it been a really long time since last investment? If so, what does it mean? Is it that the investor has a high bar or is it that they don’t have capital left to invest this year? Ask about the number of planned investments question and you will have the answer.

You also want to hear the WHY. What made the investor write the check? Was it an amazing founder, vision, market, etc? Listen carefully to the answer, as it should be helpful to figure out what the investor will look for in your startup.

Have you invested in a competitor, or evaluating investing in one?

You should ask this question 100 percent of the time, because unfortunately, some investors will not tell you this unless you ask.

If an investor invested in a competitor, even if it is not a super close competitor, the chance of you getting a check from them is close to zero. VCs don’t invest in competitors, and angels avoid doing it too. It is essentially a conflict of interest.

Evaluating investing in a competitor is much more subtle. It is typical that when a venture firm is planning to make an investment in the space, they do a lot of digging and research. Part of the research is that they would reach out to all competitors and try to get more information. A VC is trying to do its best to pick the best company in the space.

You may get a call from an associate of a firm saying that the firm is interested in the space and wants to talk. You will be asked a lot of questions, and at times, even move through the process only to find out in the end that it was a so-called “brain suck”.

This may seem very unfair to the founders, but it is the reality of what’s happening in the market. To avoid wasting time and getting hurt, ask about competitive investments or research upfront.

What are your concerns about our business?

This is a great question that Steve Schlafman from RRE ventures suggested founders ask. Why wouldn’t you invest in my company? How do you see the risk here? What do you think won’t work or that I am doing wrong?

By asking this question directly, you are accomplishing several things. First, you are signaling that you are open to feedback and value it. Secondly, that you respect the opinion of this investor. More importantly, you are likely getting valuable information, a perspective of an investor who sees dozens and hundreds of companies per month.

The concerns will range from market size to acquisition channels, to competition and pricing. Having this information can help you work through the concerns and address them during the investment process.

What is your follow-on strategy?

Some investors follow on. i.e. put more money into the companies, and some don’t. Both strategies are perfectly fine, but it pays off to know.

Specifically, if you are raising money from angels, say $1MM round, and most of your backers do not follow on, this means that you may have a hard time raising the second seed. Most companies need more capital before they get to series A, and most of this capital comes from insiders – investors who already invested. If most of your insiders don’t follow on, you will need to go outside to raise more capital. This can be tricky, especially when you post seed and before series A.

With VC firms, the dynamic is different. Some VC firms deploy a smaller amount of capital at the seed stage with the idea of leading series A. The follow-on strategy is to lead series A. However, there is a potential issue that founders need to be aware of – IF the firm decides to not lead series A, there may be a signaling issue to the rest of the market. It pays off to connect with other founders that the firm backed to get the color on this dynamic.

How do you help companies you back?

Many investors talk about being a “value add” in addition to funds. Ask how exactly does this particular investor help and ask for specific examples involving companies the investor backed. Some investors come with a massive network. Some larger VC firms will help you recruit and scale. Some smaller angels are great at pricing and financial modeling. Some investors really understand distribution.

Whatever it is, investors like being asked this question and it is helpful for the founders to know.

Who are some of the founders you backed that I can talk to?

Much like how investors reference check founders, the founders should reference check investors. Ask for 2-3 founders that this investor has worked with.

You don’t necessarily need to connect with them after your firm’s meeting with the investor, but it is a good question to ask and see what the answer is. Great investors will have raving references from the founders they supported and less than great investors will be reluctant to name names.

   Source : http://bit.ly/2enuDAS

The most common marketing mistake startups make

I ’ve seen the same basic marketing mistake play out at some of the best software companies in the world: If your marketing team needs help from engineering to update their website (publish new posts, edit copy, upload images, etc.), then they have been set up to fail.

This mistake is most often made when executives of companies (often engineers themselves) are unfamiliar with the day-to-day job of the marketers, website designers and developers they employ. I know of software companies with hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of revenue on the line where marketers are simply unable to do their jobs and have to wait on engineering for days/weeks/months to make updates to their websites.

Launching new online campaigns can mean waiting for the engineering team of the company to de-prioritize working on product features to create time for marketing’s needs. It can become a large-scale organizational dysfunction.

This is insane (making the same predictable mistake over and over again) and it should stop. It’s 2016 — we should not still be having this debate.

In this post, I want to dive deep on how this problem gets created, why it can be ignored for so long and what marketers (and enlightened startup executives) can do to fix it.

What is a website?

There is a reason one of the first marketing investments your company made was building your website. When companies first get going they will often put up a website before they print business cards. Your website is literally the face of your company — it is instantly accessible by anyone in the world via the Internet, putting them at the strategic center of any digital marketing effort. For this reason, more dollars are spent on websites ($190 billion) than all of the digital advertising ($154 billion).

The website at early startups often is seen (and built) literally as an extension of the product — with flat HTML/CSS and deployed on the same code-path as the company’s core product. This makes sense when the same team that designed and built the product has all the marketing responsibilities themselves.

But some day you need to grow up, hire marketers and build a proper website. I know of multiple startups with >$50 million revenue where website updates require a new deploy of their core product. This means every time marketing wants to update their website copy, they have to convince engineering to make a new deploy.

A good marketer obsesses over messaging, writing, branding, SEO, SEM, analytics, etc. Some of them can code, some of them are analytics engineers — but they are not software engineers (they are marketers!). Requiring marketers to learn how to submit a GitHub Pull Request and go through your engineering approval pipeline to do their job is taking dogfooding a few steps too far. You are now needlessly bottlenecking their work and making it needlessly challenging for them to do their jobs.

What is a website?

There is a reason one of the first marketing investments your company made was building your website. When companies first get going they will often put up a website before they print business cards. Your website is literally the face of your company — it is instantly accessible by anyone in the world via the Internet, putting them at the strategic center of any digital marketing effort. For this reason, more dollars are spent on websites ($190 billion) than all of the digital advertising ($154 billion).

The website at early startups often is seen (and built) literally as an extension of the product — with flat HTML/CSS and deployed on the same code-path as the company’s core product. This makes sense when the same team that designed and built the product has all the marketing responsibilities themselves.

But some day you need to grow up, hire marketers and build a proper website. I know of multiple startups with >$50 million revenue where website updates require a new deploy of their core product. This means every time marketing wants to update their website copy, they have to convince engineering to make a new deploy.

A good marketer obsesses over messaging, writing, branding, SEO, SEM, analytics, etc. Some of them can code, some of them are analytics engineers — but they are not software engineers (they are marketers!). Requiring marketers to learn how to submit a GitHub Pull Request and go through your engineering approval pipeline to do their job is taking dogfooding a few steps too far. You are now needlessly bottlenecking their work and making it needlessly challenging for them to do their jobs.

Let engineers code, and let marketers publish their content! Marketers who can’t control their content can’t do their job.If you delay too long and take this to the extreme, you end up with a marketing team of dozens of employees where they can’t update and control the content themselves. How would you like to work on an engineering team where in order to deploy code you had to wait in line in the copyediting queue to get marketing to approve the grammar and sentence construction of your code’s comments?

Enter content management

Simply put, content management software enables marketers to update the content of their websites themselves via a graphical interface. No coding, no pull requests, no code-review — no engineering intervention required. Content management works. Content management enables marketers to do their job.

Content management software has been around for more than 20 years but, strangely for such a large ($190 billion) industry, it has only recently matured. Drupal and WordPress between them now command 65 percent share of the market (going to 80 percent quickly). WordPress and Drupal have won the market primarily because the industry of professional website designers and developers have, by and large, standardized their work on the software. Increasingly over the last few years, if you are professional website developer you won’t get hired by marketers unless you use Drupal or WordPress.

Most marketers by now know how to use these tools and are comfortable using them (just ask them!). There is an increasingly robust vendor ecosystem (in which Pantheon competes) that specializes in operating — hosting, scaling, tuning, developing — WordPress and Drupal sites. But it is a specialized industry with its own tools and vendors, connected but separate from the wider software engineering industry. I’ve found many engineers at startups who are pulled into website projects but often are not up to speed on the content management industry, which contributes to this disconnect.

How website technology decisions at startups go down

Does this sound familiar?

• Pre-seed: The engineering and product design team for the company’s product own the website. It’s often flat XHTML/CSS hanging off product code base. Life is simple and engineers manage the content themselves. This works!
• Seed stage: You have your first marketer on staff. You try to teach them how to update the website. It’s pretty hacky, but it kind of works. You know you are bottlenecking them, but who has time to go implement a whole new website?
• Series A: You are now scaling up your marketing team. You have a marketing executive who keeps bringing up the website and how they can’t really update it themselves. They want WordPress. You suddenly remember how much a PITA that last WordPress site was that you had to manage, so you plead “I hear you, but I don’t think we can prioritize this right now.”
• Scaling: You now have a sophisticated marketing team built. Content marketers, writers, editors, designers, demand gen, the whole shebang. The marketing team has given up on owning the website. You’ll hear the odd grumbling now and then, but “it is what it is.” Your product team (designers and engineers) must be heavily involved in any new marketing campaign launch. Things seem to move much slower than they should, but the thought of re-building the website feels totally overwhelming to everyone involved. At this point, nobody wants to own it.
• Then: One night you are browsing a competitor’s or sister company’s website and you realize how much you hate your website. Your website may be well-designed, but it is incredibly thin on content. You know it doesn’t fairly reflect the quality and depth of your product and your company . You know demand-gen is suffering and you can see why —  the volume and quality of publishing on a proper website is incredible. You’re sitting in a (stunning) 1967 Camaro to drag race with a Tesla. Your website may look cool at first blush, but you are being left in the dust.

Even if you are convinced that marketing needs content management, it’s not like you can just snap your fingers. Let’s get into the real horse-trading that happens when it comes to managing your company’s website. And let’s make sure marketing is properly armed because it’s not always fair pitting a marketer against your world-class engineers weighing in on a technology decision.

Top reasons engineers will use to try to explain why you don’t need content management software (and what to tell them)

We can’t run WordPress or Drupal because it’s insecure.

This is a very lazy excuse. While it’s true that you need to manage Drupal and WordPress security updates, that is true of all software for which engineers are responsible. It would be like a marketer saying “We can’t invest in PR because it may result in bad PR.” Technically true, but wrong nonetheless.

It may be true that the engineer may not want to take on the security burden themselves, which is fair, but there are a number of great options for outsourcing this responsibility.

My follow-up question for your security-minded engineering: Do we really want to run our public, Internet-accessible website on the same infrastructure as our product and user data? Breaking out your website from your product can improve security via security in depth.

Our website developers don’t want to use WordPress or Drupal.

This often happens if you are borrowing engineers from your product team to develop your website. Engineers who build products for a living are more familiar with tools for software engineers — React, Ruby on Rails — as opposed to the tools professional website developers use, such as WordPress and Drupal. This can be especially tricky if these developers are shared between product and marketing; it is hard to ask engineers to flip back and forth between two very different kinds of environments.

However, to be fair to marketing, you are making an implicit trade-off. You need to sit down and decide what’s more important: for your front-end engineers to use the tools they prefer or for your marketing team to be able to manage their content. That’s a decision that requires thoughtful weighing of trade-offs.

Long term, obviously, the real answer here is to get marketing their own resources for developing the website. The sooner the better, because it will become increasingly hard for the product teams to carve out time to help to market; they have their “real” jobs to do, of course.

This flat-file website technology I use to update my personal website is way better than Drupal and WordPress, so we should use it instead. I’ll teach you how to make a Pull Request, it’s easy!

This is pure hubris. Marketers, not your engineering team, are experts in evaluating marketing software. What would happen if your marketer went up to your CTO and told them “I went to this conference and saw a demo of this data-center management software from Oracle that is SUPER powerful? I am really concerned that we are missing the boat here.”

If an engineer ever tells your marketing executive they know how to evaluate marketing technology better, your marketer should smile politely and stay firm (and feel free to send them to this post).

WordPress and Drupal are overkill, our engineers are going to build you a custom CMS that will work way better.

This is beyond hubris. It’s really stupid. Anyone planning to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (let alone millions) building a custom CMS is on a fool’s errand. I am not understating the risk. In extreme cases (e.g. at digital publishers) I have seen these decision derail companies.

What would you say if your CTO came to the conclusion that in order to build your product they needed to develop their own proprietary replacement for the Linux kernel?

WordPress and Drupal are huge, established open-source projects with thousands of contributors and ecosystems of hundreds of thousands of professional developers, marketing users, and vendors. In terms of successful open-source projects, they are right up there with the Linux kernel. They have leveraged hundreds of millions of dollars of open-source engineering effort. They are incredibly robust products.

Your engineering team may be talented, but they are not going to build a replacement for WordPress or Drupal overnight. They are going to build you a complicated, buggy website money pit that your marketing department will be married to indefinitely. For a marketer, this can be job-ender.

If your engineering team came to this conclusion, you need to push them hard — your company cannot afford this mistake.

We are too invested in our current website stack right now and there is no way we can prioritize rebuilding it right now.

This is a tough one as it’s a high-level and high-stakes prioritization decision for your company.

You first need to answer for your company, how important is our website? I would start this exercise by finding out what percent of your leads originate on your website. (For software companies this is often as high as 95 percent.)

You will then need to weigh the cost (time and money) of rebuilding your website against the opportunity cost of having a high-functioning website. To be fair, you will need to weigh in the project risk of the transition itself as these projects can be complicated.

Finally, you need to answer: If we don’t rebuild our website now, then when will we?

Slowly, but surely rational business decision making will win the day.

 

 Source: http://tcrn.ch/1QWhGTW

5 Obvious Truths About Successful Entrepreneurs

Every entrepreneur hopes to be successful. Some entertain the remote possibility of becoming very rich. But most entrepreneurs do not achieve the kind of material wealth that Bill Gates enjoys. You may wonder -- what are the secrets to their success?

I have been fortunate to start several software companies myself and now lead the team at Aha! -- I always want to keep learning. So, I read as much as I can about innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as the stories of successful entrepreneurs. 

Of course, their upbringing, influences, and personalities are all very different, as well as the companies they lead. But I have noticed a few important qualities that any entrepreneur should emulate if they want to be successful.

Here are five obvious approaches that you should definitely follow:

Work with the best

Having a great idea for a business is not enough. You need the complementary talents of others to help you reach your goals. As Marc Andreesen once said, "Everyone wants a Sheryl, the high-powered business person with deep capabilities in sales, marketing and operations," referring to Sheryl Sandberg, who Mark Zuckerberg hired as the Facebook Chief Operating Officer. 

Takeaway: Surround yourself with great people who will round out your team and challenge you to bring your best. 

Tackle tough problems

Elon Musk could have easily developed a line of gasoline-powered cars and been successful. But he believed that electric-powered cars mattered for the health of our environment, and sought to make them affordable with his latest model. He is also tackling a second problem -- how to keep those cars powered -- and is rolling out a network of charging stations across the world. 

Takeaway: If you are looking for an opportunity, consider taking on a difficult problem that most others are afraid to tackle.

Pursue your passions

Many successful entrepreneurs first focused their energy on what made them happiest and it paid off. Self-taught software developer Larry Ellison started Oracle so he would have a working environment that he enjoyed. Likewise, Bill Gates spent countless hours programming as a kid, launching his first business at age 15 along with school friend Paul Allen (his partner in founding Microsoft.)

Takeaway: You cannot go wrong if you are pursuing what you love.

Live generously

Many wealthy entrepreneurs have realized they can put their money to good use and change lives for generations. Bill and Melinda Gates, Larry Ellison, Warren Buffett, and many others have signed the Giving Pledge to donate half of their wealth to charity. Sheryl Sandberg started the Lean In Foundation to empower young women and is also working to stop hunger in the Bay area.

Takeaway: No matter how much you have, being generous will help you live a life of purpose.

Know when to innovate

Being first matters. Case in point: In the 90s, Jeff Bezos heard the Internet was growing by 2,400 percent annually and recognized the great opportunity there. Inspired by the digital catalogs of book distributors, he created a book distribution channel that completely upended the publishing industry (and Amazon panned out for other kinds of merchandise as well.) 

Takeaway: Always stay curious, keeping your eyes open for game-changing ideas. 

There is no foolproof recipe for achieving success, and there is no getting around the hard work and perseverance required. But you can learn great lessons from wildly successful and wealthy entrepreneurs and develop the qualities that will position you for success. 

 Source: http://bit.ly/24mpmZ3

4 things you can do to become a better manager today

 

Effectively managing people is difficult, and no one is born knowing how to do it.

Fortunately, management can be learned. We suggest following these four steps, which are simple, but time-tested:

1. Set appropriate goals.

Goal-setting is essential. It helps employees prioritize their activities and focus their efforts. When setting goals with employees, you should make sure that they are SMART goals (specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistically high, time and resource bound).

The goals must also be meaningful to the employee. Sufficient rewards for goal achievement and consequences for failure should be specified. This will ensure that the goal and what's needed to achieve it will rise to the top of the employees' "To Do" list.

Near the end of his life, H.L. Hunt, the self-made oil billionaire, was asked to name the requirements for success. He answered, "There are only two real requirements for success in life. The first requirement is deciding exactly what you want [setting goals]. Most people never get to that point. The second requirement is determining the price that will have to be paid to get it, and then resolving to pay that price."

2. Develop a plan to achieve the goals.

After setting goals with the employee, put together a plan to achieve them. To accomplish any individual goal, the employee will need to commit to a set of actions. A goal without an action plan is just a dream. It’s not real, and it’s not likely to happen.

Most people don’t understand how to break larger projects, goals or tasks down into actionable steps. As a manager, you can use your experience and knowledge to guide the employee. Keep the number of actions from becoming overwhelming by limiting them to what the employee can reasonably accomplish within two weeks. Set dates and even a deadline that makes sense, for when the employee will complete each action step. This will create the urgency necessary to complete the work in a timely manner.

Finally, holding a meeting that occurs at the same day and time each week will give you a mechanism for checking on progress and creating a natural deadline for your staff. The meeting can be as short as 15 minutes or as long as an hour, but should be comprised of three segments:

• First segment: Have the employee report to you on his or her progress.
• Second segment: Give the employee feedback and help him or her overcome obstacles that stand in the way.
• Third segment: Set new actions, including dates and times for completion.

3. Empower the employee.

To maximize the probability that your employees achieve their goals, empower them. That means three things. First, you must properly train your workers to do the tasks necessary to achieve their goals. This includes giving the employee enough time to practice the new skills so that they become proficient.

Second, motivate your people. Rewards for success and consequences for failure should be specified. But keep in mind that an environment that relies solely on either rewards or consequences will create a dysfunctional culture: You will have employees who either become used to a country-club existence or live in fear of making mistakes. Neither is conducive to long-term productivity.

Finally, remove roadblocks that are within the company’s control. Make sure that people have the tools, equipment and information they need to do their jobs. Removing roadblocks also includes developing effective policies and procedures.

4. Assess performance and make adjustments.

Once the above three steps are complete, you will need to assess performance and make any necessary changes. We’re not talking about annual performance evaluations. A formal review may happen only once a year, but effective management requires assessing performance much more frequently.

For employees who are new to the organization or learning a new task, you may need to assess performance daily or perhaps even more frequently. Get away from your desk and computer screen and walk around the area where your employees work. Stop to talk and ask questions. Be available and interested.

Employees who have demonstrated competence may require only a weekly meeting to stay on track. But, in either case, you should take an active role in monitoring and commenting on performance, to benefit both the organization and the employee.

Managing people is difficult. It’s not an exact science, and there is no magic wand to ensure you always get it right. In fact, you won’t always get it right. Even outstanding managers make mistakes. The good news is that managing people well is a learned skill.

With work, you can improve your capability in this area. A concerted effort on your part is required. But if your company is going to thrive, your skills as a manager will be of paramount importance.

   Source : http://read.bi/1PSHvVI

7 Simple Ways To Be Famous In One Year

There’s fame and there’s infamy. There’s long-term fame and “15 minutes of fame.” Actors and actresses have fame. Some of them have infamy. Barack Obama has fame, and he has long-term fame as a President of the United States. Osama Bin Laden had infamy, and he certainly had his 15 minutes of fame until taken out. Anyone can become famous, for good or for bad. And many can have 15 minutes of fame by getting hundreds of thousands of hits on a YouTube video.

There is another kind of fame, however. It is not global fame necessarily, such as that enjoyed by Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. But it can be a local, regional, and then national fame within a niche. And that fame can result in respect, authority, and income, whether that income comes from a business venture, a very smart investment in a startup or IPO, book sales, or another source.

This is the fame that is long-lasting and that says “success.” Many people achieve this kind of fame and do so relatively easily. And here are 7 relatively simple steps on that path.

1. Begin By Making It All About Others, Not Yourself

If you are going to reach niche celebrity status, your first step is to become a truly trusted resource for others. This means that you do the following:

• Inspire, entertain and educate others without thought to making sales or promoting yourself or your business
• Be a real person behind that company, not a faceless entity
• Be accessible and transparent; have a social media presence that involves conversations; answer emails; be present wherever there are important conversations occurring, especially in groups related to your niche
• Do not be “better” than others; rather be helpful and friendly and humble
• Engage others daily, especially influencers. Hanging out with influencers makes you one too.
• If you succeed, don’t be the first one to boast, but try to share the lessons you’ve learn and inspire other people to follow your path. And if you don’t succeed from the first attempt, don’t be discreet about your failure either. There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes and talking about that, rather than trying to appear as a super human.

Compare this to the traditional concept of a supposed industry leader – one who gave an occasional interview; one who had “gatekeepers;” one who knew s/he was “better” than the others; one who was inaccessible. This won’t work for you, because you don’t have any fame yet.

2.  Get Your Face and Your Personality “Out There” 

Brands are not really spread by products and services anymore. They are spread by personalities on social websites and news media.

It’s almost as if we have returned to days of old when storekeepers had personal relationships with all of their customers. Of course, these can no longer be face-to-face, but they can be strong relationships nevertheless. Today’s digital consumers of anything demand relationships.

If you have written a book, for example, you need to show online communities who you are, your sense of humor, your sense of compassion, your incredible expertise, whatever it is that makes you a bit of a “giant” in your niche. Provide excerpts from that book for free to every digital community possible. Set up book signings everywhere possible and call the local news media to cover them. Offer an additional benefit with a book purchase. Get buzz going by pushing your face and your personality, not just your book.

Inject your personality into everything you do online and on the ground. If you are in a business niche, hold events, make videos, and plaster them all over the place. Feature your customers in your blog posts, on your social media platforms. Do anything that you can to spread your brand by spreading the people factor, not by pushing the product or service. Come up with something that people will look forward to every week – things that will draw them to you and make them draw their communities to you too.

3. Provide Consistent, Public, Interesting, and Free Content

Jack Daniels is a well-known brand. It has been a well-known brand for years. And it has done this by consistently keeping itself in front of the public. Now, in years past it relied on TV advertising – expensive advertising. Advertising that those of us who would just like to become famous in our niche cannot afford.

We have to find cheap ways to become famous, and even Jack Daniels is going the cheap route now. It’s not all over TV – that’s a thing of the past. What does Jack Daniels do now? It has an amazing website and an amazing social media presence. It sponsors contests for people to submit new drink recipes. It asks customers to submit weird bar stories, which it publishes – consumers love it and they continue to love Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels will be famous for years to come because it understand how fame is now built. When you use the same strategies that Jack Daniels uses, you can build your fame too.

Get your “public” involved in everything you do. Other than the cost of maintaining your websites and social media platforms through employees or contractors, your cost of providing amazing and interest and entertaining and inspirational content is cheap. No one wants to read what looks like a textbook; and no one want to just hear about products. They want some fun and some education and they want it in engaging ways.

Even if your niche seems “boring”, there’s still a way to interact with your audience successfully and leveraging your authority status. Simply, by offering free detailed information of every aspect related to your business. For instance, Moverscorp publishes loads of amazing guides, covering pretty much any aspect of moving – from choosing the company to packing to tipping movers and things to do after the move.

You can build your fame if you are committed to giving your public the best content ever. On the Internet there are no walls and there are few rules. You build a fan base and that fan base reaches out to its communities, as long as your content is great. People share what is free and what is publicly provided. So give free and public!

4. Sponsor an Important Charity

One of the best ways to enhance your fame is to sponsor a well-known and compassionate charitable cause. You can do wonderful good while you increase your fame as well.

Why do people love Toms Shoes, and why has Toms Shoes become so famous? Because owner Blake Mycoskie, “chief shoe giver,” donates a pair of shoes to a needy child for every pair of shoes he sells. And he has branched out now into efforts for restoring eyesight and drilling water in 3rd world countries. He is a hero, especially among millennials, the biggest buying demographic, for all that he does. And he has great fame within his niche.

Jessica Erickson, owner of Headbands for Hope has gained national fame for her charitable work with children’s cancer research and her donations of headbands to young girls with cancer. If you want to make a difference in the lives of people and gain fame as well, this is a great path. Local, regional and state media love these kinds of stories, and the reach spreads. Both Mycoskie and Erickson have been featured on national television shows several times.

5. Develop Relationships with Influencers

There are famous people in related niches. Influencers are already famous within their niches. One of the “rules” for success is to hang out with successful people.

The same goes in the digital world. You can “follow” influencers, participate in their discussions, and make yourself known as an expert in your niche. Cultivate these relationships before you propose any reciprocity of promotion, but ultimately you can get to that. Being respected and liked by an influencer, even if not directly related to your niche is big. And influencers can introduce you to other influencers as well. This can ultimate get you speaking engagements, interviews, and/or promotion of your book, and so forth, depending upon the type of fame you are seeking.

6. Work on Your Fame Everyday

This means many things. It can be to join new groups. It can mean to contact local media with a press release. It can mean creating amazing content or videos. It can mean reaching out to new communities on social media. But you must consistently commit to doing something every day to promote your fame. If you do this for an entire year, you will be pretty amazed at how famous you have become with your ideal audience.

7. Cultivate your Guru Status

At first, you will give away a lot of stuff, maybe you will create free “how-to” e-guides.  Maybe you will create slide shows and videos that provide expert advice. As the demand for your stuff grows, create new “stuff” and begin to charge for it. Why? Because famous people are expected to charge for their “stuff,” and because you have the right to earn money for your hard work.

Neil Patel, the guru of content marketing, has the perfect combination. He is the co-founder of Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, and Hello Bar. These are for-profit companies with famous clients like Amazon, GM, NBC, etc. He also has a blog, called Quick Sprout. Here he provides free educational articles for content marketers and business owners. But always on that blog, he is promoting his fee-based services, one of which is to make a business owner a “guru” and famous in his/her own niche.

Becoming famous in a year is simple, but not necessarily easy. It takes concerted effort and a commitment that must be held every single day of that year. It means spending two hours working on that book; or it means an hour contacting local press to promote a charitable event; or it means writing the best content ever; or it mean networking and “rubbing elbows” with influencers. It can be tiring and it can mean that your workday just got longer.

You have to ask yourself, before you take on this “fame” goal: why you want to become famous and what it will mean for you? If you can answer these questions positively, then you are ready for the journey.

   Source : http://bit.ly/1Q6zc8g