2010 July | Justin Levy

Checking and Recalibrating Your Goals

July 15, 2010 By Justin Levy 3 Comments

It’s already a couple weeks into the 2nd half of the year. Can you believe it? The first half of the year blew by so fast. Some days felt like they would never end while other entire weeks flew by before coffee could even be poured. It seems that just a few days ago we were all sitting around making our New Year’s resolutions and setting our goals for the upcoming year.

Earlier today I spent a little while going through the goals I set at the beginning of the year. Overall, I’m pretty happy with where I am with my goals for this year. There were a couple setbacks due to being busy at both New Marketing Labs and Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse. However, I was able to check off some and I made action plans on how to attack a few more to get a couple small victories over the next several weeks. I also scheduled myself a reminder to check in and recalibrate again at the end of 3rd quarter.

Now that we’re fast approaching Fall, have you checked in on those goals that you set? How are you doing with them? Are there any that you can check off? Any that you need to recalibrate?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Photo Credit: angietorres

Filed Under: Motivation, Personal Tagged With: goal setting, Motivation, Personal, recalibrating

Bain Capital Ventures Launches an Innovation Center

July 13, 2010 By Justin Levy 1 Comment

Bain Capital Ventures, the venture capital arm of Bain Capital, has just launched the Bain Capital Ventures Innovation Center (BCVIC).

The site has a simple goal: turning your ideas into reality by providing the resources necessary to make that happen. As they describe on the website:

The Bain Capital Ventures Innovation Center is about you and your startup. We want to provide entrepreneurs with a suite of resources to help them with the burning issues that they have when starting a business, including among other things: vetting a product or service concept, raising capital, building the right team, finding the first customer, networking to other entrepreneurs, and working with the right partners.

Some of the many resources that the Bain Capital Ventures Innovation Center is making available to entrepreneurs includes:

An events calendar with a hand-picked list of events in New England and New York that are geared towards entrepreneurs.
An opportunity to network through Bain Capital Ventures with companies in a range of vertical including: media, retail and restaurants, healthcare, financial services, and information technology. Also, groups and associations such as Cambridge Innovation Center, DartBoston, TechStars and many more.
An array of partner companies that provide services that may be helpful as you build your startup that the BCVIC help make an introduction to including angel funds, early-stage venture capitals, accounting firms, banks, law firms and recruiting firms.
A Startup Toolkit that has a variety of how-to guides, resources, data sheets and other useful resources for entrepreneurs.
The ability to submit a request for team members such as a co-founder or a CEO so that the Bain Capital Ventures Innovation Center can help match your with those of someone looking for help or if you’re looking for a new gig, matching the requests with your capabilities.
Office hours every Friday from 3-5p at both the VentureCafe at Cambridge Innovation Center and at the Bain Capital Ventures offices where you can schedule time to get help with your business plan, ask general questions or any other help you may need.

Besides an awesome website, there is also a BCVIC LinkedIn Group and a Facebook Page that you can join and begin networking with other like-minded entrepreneurs, start-up junkies and those looking to help.

I’m really excited by the BCVIC and look forward to seeing how it will continue to evolve. The possibilities are endless.

What say you about the BCVIC launch?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Filed Under: Community Tagged With: bain capital ventures, Community, entrepreneur, innovation, networking

Reviews of Facebook Marketing

July 11, 2010 By Justin Levy 4 Comments

Have you had a chance to pick up your copy of Facebook Marketing yet? If you’re still deciding whether or not it is worth your $20-ish, you might wander over to a few of the reviews so far of Facebook Marketing to see if that helps to convince you.

First up is a video review by Chris Brogan:

Next, here are a few other reviews that you may find interesting:

If you’ve written up a review of Facebook Marketing, please let me know in the comments. I will keep this post updated with more reviews as I find them.

If you have already read Facebook Marketing, would you mind leaving a rating and review over on Amazon?

Most importantly, thank YOU for all of your support since the book launch!

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Facebook, Reviews, Social Media, Videos Tagged With: Book Reviews, Facebook, Reviews, Social Media, Videos

The ABCs of Startup Marketing

July 10, 2010 By Justin Levy 7 Comments

Anyone that has worked the startup life before knows how different and difficult it can be and how important marketing and lead generation is to the survival of the company. Especially when you’re first starting out, the win of a single customer could be what pays the light bill for the month or the loss of a single customer could be enough to put the company on life support. For those of you reading this who work at a startup, if there were a set of tips from a successful startup that would help you be a better marketer at your company, you’d want to know about it, right?

Recently Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing at HubSpot spoke at Atlassian Starter Day in San Francisco about startup marketing. Mike used his experiences over the past 3 years of spearheading marketing for HubSpot while it grew from 5 to 160 employees and from a few customers to over 3,000.

I think you’ll find this presentation really useful as it has all sorts of actionable nuggets hiding inside of it. I know I took down a few notes and already shot off a couple of ideas to my team at New Marketing Labs. I would encourage you to sit back, relax, and hit play because I think you’ll do the same thing.

In case you missed it during the presentation, Mike broke down the ABCs of startup marketing into the following:

-Avoid Addiction
-Blog Beforehand
-Create Convenience
-Data Drives Decision
-Employ the Exceptional

You can read a short description of each of these over on the OnStartups blog.

If you don’t already know Mike, you should get to know him. As any good marketer would be, Mike can be found all over the web on his personal blog, the HubSpot blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, just to name a few. He’s works for an awesome company and is a good friend of mine that I think you would enjoy following.

Were there any letters in the alphabet that you think Mike was missing? List them in the comments below along with a short description.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Filed Under: Hubspot, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Videos Tagged With: Hubspot, Inbound Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Videos

Understanding How Google Works [Infographic]

July 8, 2010 By Justin Levy Leave a Comment

If you’re anything like me then you probably run a handful of searches through Google each day. Have you ever wondered what happens when you hit “Return” or “Enter” on your keyboard? The folks over at PPC Blog have created an infographic to help us visualize how many considerations and actions take place in less than a second from when you initiate the search and before that results page loads.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Filed Under: Google, Infographic Tagged With: Google, Infographic