Many startups specially Arab ones underestimate the importance of public relations in branding their products and in marketing them. Take a look at startup weekends events in recent Arab countries, does anyone remember them or what they do? does anyone use them? where are they now?

Public relations is a cheapest way to market your products or startup and entice people to use it, if people do not know about you they will not use you.

In nut shell you need to develop media contacts and write a well written press release about your product and services, and pitch your story to the media and journalists from the angle that interest them and their readers not yours, meaning if you have a cooking website you can target women life style magazines by pitching your story in a way that your startups saves time when looking for a recipe to cook something.

I am not going to go through how to write a press release and how to develop media relations, I am going to ask entrepreneurs and specially Arab startups to do the minimal which is having a blog for the company and email relevant media sites like us, with your news.

In your blog you need to keep your users updated with what is new at your company, example: new features, new millstones, new partnership deals and so on. And this is not enough you need to email the media.

Main stream media in many cases won’t understand your startup and the possibility of having an article about you is low. We do encourage to target them but here at ArabCrunch, because we cover Arab startups and the Arab tech sector, your news is important to us and our readers, so go ahead and start sending us your news and we will cover you “inshallah” in ArabCrunch English and ArabCrunch Arabic. You do not have to send a press release, just the basic news of what, when, why, and where. This effort does not need a team or a special PR agency, a startup of 1 or 2 people can handle a small job like that.

One note, we read every email that is sent to us but we can not respond to every email, however if your news is interesting to our readers we promise to do our best and cover it.

Remember in many cases startups die not because the startup idea is horrible, but because their founders did not do the minimal marketing and PR effort. And for those startupweekendrs please stop being lazy and do the minimal and email us

PS: here is 12 Ways to Market Your Startup With Zero Ad Spending.

#image credit.

Startup Genome a project that originally launched a survey from over 3,200 startups to investigate “the science of startups” has launched a new web tool to benchmark your startup according to the findings of the report called Startup Genome Compass.

Users can create an account, and take a 20-40 minute test that classifies their startups by type and stage.

A personalized report will then be generated which will gauge a startup according to the to the 5 aspects of startups: Customer, Product, Team, Business Model, and Financial the tool . Users can retake the test once a month to test the health of their startups.

Take the test and let us know how you find it!

Saudi based National Net Ventures or (N2V) is one of the largest Internet holding companies in the Arab world, it invests “venture funds” in Arab Internet and mobile startups and owns and develops its own ventures. The Company owns a number of popular websites including: HawaaWorld an Arab women destination site, N2V Development House a software and web out sourcing company, SNSEO social media and SEO company, and Net Advantage: the first specialized Internet media house in the Arab world.

While N2V’s investment program breaks into, Seed program: which uses a startup accelerator model, offering capital, mentorship and office space for 3 to 6 month, this program is aimed at startups that did not launch their products yet. Early startups: focus on web and mobile ventures, and specifically, consumer web, the program invests cash on startups that already launched and are operational. Joint Startups a program to work with international companies to develop join venture to penetrate the Arab market and N2VLabs: is N2V’s own produced startups with the leadership of their Entrepreneurs-in-Residence.

All these programs have been launched relativity recently by N2V, the company is expanding massively and hiring top talent in the Arab world. Among them is Nagi Salloum ex-marketing manager for Google MENA was recruited N2V head of marketing.

Under Nagi direction the company marketing efforts are directed at making N2V one of the most recognized Internet brands in the Arab world, or Google of the Arab world as Nagi puts it: “we at N2V are focused on disrupting digital Arabia” To do so, the company has been sponsoring tech and entreprunership events across the Arab world.

And most recently N2V aimed at its facebook page, the page 1 month ago had around 75 fans in then N2V launched a logo contest last month, which changed everything.

The facebook contest asks participants to submit a design of N2V logo made from any physical material ( photoshop made logos are not accepted) to win iPhones, iPods and Samsung Galaxy tab and Galaxy S II.

The winners are determined by calculating the most voted photos, so this step has increased the viral growth of the app, as participants rush to ask their friends to vote for their logo. And in order to participate, you have to like N2V page on facebook page first. Other viral elements of the app are voting and commenting on photos which shows up on the users facebook stream, which in turn would bring more users.

N2V did spend on facebook ads to promote the contest but as Nagi says “We consciously decided to have very limited ad spending, and instead design a very viral Facebook photo contest app to grow our fan base by. This proved a right strategy and eventually helped us reach thousands of new users very quickly.”

He also said “We launched the N2V page and competition 21 June, 2011 in order to build awareness of N2V brand, and connecting with users in a fun and engaging way. ”

The contests has been an instant success in less than a month the contests generated over 100,000 fans for N2V facebook page (now it is 109,272 fans), over 2300 photos submitted and 40,000 votes.

Several companies connected N2V and started using the app “including big brands such as LIVE MENA, and we are finalizing discussions now with several other local and global companies. We are also excited to release a site just for this application to allow companies and users from around the world to use it.” said Nagi.

Nagi attributes the contests success to “very close attention to every detail when designing the application, from user experience, user behavior, 24 hours moderation and monitoring, promptly answering user queries.”
The contests ends on 30 July 2011, you can view submited logos and submit your own here.

What can brands, marketers and entrepreneurs learn from this success: do not just start a facebook fan page and promote it with FB ads, innovate and bring new ideas to drive engagement and fans.”We like to believe that we created one of the most intuitive and engaging photo voting application, with such high quality that easily competes with similar global apps.” concludes Nagi.

Many entrepreneurs think the hard part of building a successful business is coding, while it is important milestone, but if no body bought it or used it, your startup will go no where.

Today we assemble a quick list in how to market your startup with zero ad spending, you are encouraged to tweet the method you found most effective and add your say :

1-Leverage Your Network:[tweet]
Ask your friends, family, coworkers, Facebook, Twitter and email connects to join your startup and use it, ask them to invite their friends.

2- Add Viral Components [tweet]

The best why to grow your user base is to add viral component to your web app, you need to allow members to invite their friends to join them on your site. This is best done when you offer incentive to do so. Foursquare growth is partly because of Twitter and Facebook integration, whenever you check in to a location or gain a badge it tweets the info. People link their Twitter and Facebook accounts with Fouresquare  because they see value of notifying their friends of their were abouts.

3- Get Bloggers to Write about You [tweet]

Look for relevant blogs to write about you, even if your startup tech oriented you might fall on other non tech bloggs, say Location based blogs. Beofre you do that, friend the bloggers, look them up at Twitter, look for their personal blogs, engage with them so they know you and write about your startup. Email them their news, but remember bloggers are very busy people you need to shoot a short and coherent email that is customized to the blogger. Whenever you add a new feature connect the blogger who wrote about you and send him your updates pin pointing to the last coverage you got.

4- Submit your startup to ArabCrunch.NET, Younoodle and CrunchBase
[tweet]

5- Partner with Events: [tweet]

Offer events of relevance to your business free ads in exchange for adding you as a media partner.

6- Create an Interesting Company Blog: [tweet]

Your startup’s blog should not just publish news about new features you release, make your blog an industry voice. web apps developers 37signals ‘s blog has established it self as an industry destination in design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. and helped the growth of their paid apps.

Remember to add “post this blog pos”t to Facebook and Retweet buttons, this help virally push your blog posts hence your startup

7- Release an API:[tweet]

By releasing an API developers will find new ways to use your product and bring new customers to you for free. Twitter’s API helped build an ecosystem that reshaped Twitter form just a SMS tool to an information exchange hub, most users use Twitter via desktop or mobile apps rather than Twitter.com

8- Participate in Business Plan Competitions: [tweet]

You do this not just to win the cash award, but winning a competition would help push your startup more people, they will recognize it and will push it with the media not to mention when you add the award badge to your website it would build more trust to your startup.

9- Recruit a Celebrity to Join You: [tweet]

Get someone famous to join your startup put him on the board of directors or so. Celebrities bring their fans along to use your app, they get you instant media coverage and build trust in your brand.

When Brian Lee founded  LegalZoom in 2001 as a website that provides legal documents, He recruited Robert Shepero who is one of the most famous litigators, well known for OJ Simpson trial. Getting Shepro joining LegalZoom helped gain needed people trust.
Take Twitter as another example and the major role celebrities play in bringing millions of new users and mainstream press attention.

10- SEO: [tweet]

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via organic or nonpaid methods. You should build your product from the beginning with SEO in mind. Many people will find you via searching.

11- OEM: [tweet]

Original equipment manufacture (OEM)r, were a reseller would resell your product using his name. this is case is mostly used in software and hardware. When I used to work with Telefinity a Telecom software company we had an OEM partner in Pakistan who used to sell our call recording solution to call centers there, without him we would have spent lots of money opening an office in Pakistan.

12- Have an Awesome Product: [tweet]

If your product sucks no body will use it, so before you go into marketing your startup, your product should provide value to users and offer a strong reason to use it. Do not do a copycat.

Now you have a another tip, you can share it to help other entrepreneurs ?

#image credits.

There have been some confusion among some our followers on Twitter and facebook about our tweets since we recently started to share our readers’ comments on ArabCrunch English and Arabic.

Yes, we started to tweet our readers’ comments on ArabCrunch via our Twitter account, but that does not mean we necessarily agree with them, it is just to inform our Twitter followers of these comments and to offer our readers more visible voice. If anyone do not like the comment, he/she is welcomed to comment back on ArabCrunch.

Normally when we share a reader’s comment, we start the tweet with “comment” or “commenter” or the user name depending in how best we can shrink the tweet into 140 characters, the limit that Twitter offers.

On the Retweeting: We do retweet tweets from our followers and other places around the web, again that does not mean that we necessarily agree with the content of the tweet or the post. It is just that we find the Tweet or the post worth sharing or think it is of interest to read, again that does not mean we necessarily agree with the tweet’s content in fact in many occasions we do not. Example, if we stumbled into a post about “how Communists work with technology,” that does not mean we are communist, in fact we are NOT and we DO NOT have any political ideology or bias at ArabCrunch. But it would be of interest to know how communists use or work with technology.

This also applies to our facebook page, as we also started to share with our followers some of our users’ comments and other posts from around the web.

At personal user level, people need to note that if a person “Likes” a page or an update on facebook, it does not necessarily mean he/she really “likes” everything in that page or update, he might disagree with the whole update. But since Facebook does not have the text option of “follow” status update or “follow” a page many people will think that this person truly likes this page because the word is “liked”, which in many cases is not true. As again it might be something he/she likes to share or follow, however in other occasions he might truly like that post or update.

We hope this post clarifies some of the confusion about the stuff we share on Twitter and facebook.

Thanks,

Group-buying is one of the web’s fastest-growing retail platforms, and UAE based GoNabit is the first to bring it to the Arab world. CEO and Co-Founder Dan Stuart answered some questions we had about GoNabit and its quest to bring value to consumers and businesses in the Arab world.

[Rock Sfeir]: What is GoNabit and what value does it bring to consumers and businesses?

[Dan Stuart]: GoNabit is the first group buying website in the Middle East. We source deeply discounted deals from local businesses to be sold to subscribers online within a limited period of time. GoNabit uses the power of social commerce to offer businesses a risk-free customer-creation engine.

[Rock Sfeir]: Many entrepreneurial-minded individuals are currently working in the corporate world and are unsure of when to make the move to launch a start-up. You were a part of Bayt.com before launching GoNabit. When did you decide that the time was right to launch your own start-up?

[Dan Stuart]: I’ve been thinking about this for a long time…but especially in the last year or so. I had an understanding with Bayt.com CEO Rabea Ataya that he would look closely and possibly invest in anything that I felt strongly about launching. My job made it easier since I spent my days looking at new launch opportunities and evaluating investment proposals.

That said, it was my passion…being on the pulse of what was new and relevant to the region. The key was to have the experience in sales, marketing and product. Without these in your leadership team you are in for larger challenges and won’t have as clear insight into what you are conceptualizing.

Eventually, I made a fairly quick decision, and started working…I didn’t think too much. I knew I had the capital to launch it, and the follow-on investment was verbally committed. You really need to be ready for the insecurity and sleepless nights. If not, keep your job and your sanity…but accept that you will never shape your own thing, too.

[Rock Sfeir]: Are you pleased with the sales numbers you are seeing? What items are currently selling out quickly?

[Dan Stuart]: We’ve done over 1,400 transactions in 8 weeks. Greater than 95% of that is e-commerce, so I think that surprises a lot of people …except me. I knew the will and interest was there. There was/is simply very little to buy online in this part of the world due to the structural challenges of selling online here.

People really like lifestyle products like massages. We do like to mix in some really quirky things too. It’s our testing phase after all, so we need really give the market a chance to give us broad feedback…and we’re listening.

[Rock Sfeir]: What are your plans for regional and international expansion? What is the most difficult part about growing regionally?

[Dan Stuart]: Every city is a new country…so that is tough. If I was home in Canada I’d have 15 cities of serious size to expand that all have one language, currency, and legal structure.

Here it is expensive, time-consuming and inhibits scale.

This is one of the reasons that very few online companies in the region are of any real size. They need growth to scale…and growth requires crossing many significant barriers. You can go be 5th biggest in India and have an easier time than owning the Middle East, because you can grow more inexpensively. Europe has made growth far more open. North America is much easier. The Middle East doesn’t do themselves any favors. That said, our strategic investor Bayt.com has a network throughout the region that we are leveraging to grow quickly. If you don’t have that you’ll have a tough time keeping pace.

We’re also sniffing around outside the region.

[Rock Sfeir]: How do you convince businesses to sign on with GoNabit? Are some business owners hesitant to take an initial hit in their profits, even if it means getting new customers?

[Dan Stuart]: GoNabit provides businesses with a risk free customer-creation engine:

• No upfront cost – either financially, or in terms of time. Merchants only have to be prepared to offer a discount between 50-90% off their regular retail price,
• An advertising investment concentrated on actual customers (nabber community exists to buy deals and have chosen to receive them),
• Large reach into young savvy buyers (social, internet savvy professionals aged between 24 and 54 and weighted to females 60:40),
• Brand awareness – an exclusive spotlight on your business  combined with the buzz and power of social media,
• An additional shop window without the retail investment,
• Certainty of a clear and measurable return on investment, and
• Increased customer footfall – the opportunity to convert the one-off GoNabit voucher user into a loyal customer

It’s an education process for sure…and we’re doing it quite successfully. We can always get better. It’s only been 8 weeks after all.

[Rock Sfeir]: What forms of media are you utilizing to reach people? Do you feel that certain forms of media are more unique to the Middle-East than they might be elsewhere?

[Dan Stuart]: Social media is at the forefront for us. It is inherently a social undertaking where people buy online and share these experiences with friends offline. It makes sense to share since you do better if more people know. eBay and Souq work well when the auctions are not popularly known…so the price stays down. For us, buyers benefit by more people knowing.

We have also been strong in the media in terms of building awareness while educating the market. We haven’t really cracked the paid ads egg too much so far. We’ll see more of that as we grow and as we move in later phases of our awareness campaigns.

I think the Middle East is like most markets with little difference for our purposes. The scale is just smaller, but the sharing is no less personal and the measurement of marketing methods no less critical.

[Rock Sfeir]: What methods of payment do you accept?

[Dan Stuart]: We accept cash, cheque and paypal right now. We have 2-4 more payment methods under consideration, but not necessarily as additions, but some as replacements and localized solutions

[Rock Sfeir]: What would you have to say to Middle-Eastern consumers that are skeptical about online purchasing?

[Dan Stuart]: If you’re thinking about buying online then you are clearly not satisfied with the speed, access and choice available offline. E-commerce gives you this. If you participate in buying through proper online sites then you grow an industry, and that’s an industry that brings you economies of scale that pass on choice and cost benefits to you….you should want ecommerce to succeed.

Ultimately, look for sites with globally recognized security certifications, certified data usage policies, clear and obvious customer contact mechanisms….and try out those contact mechanisms. Send a test inquiry. If you don’t get an intelligent, timely and useful reply, then go elsewhere. You want to know that your question will get answered properly. You are paying for this contact and confidence so assign it value and feel confident in a site that provides it…and give them your business.

[Rock Sfeir]: As the Arab world gets more and more connected to the web, your target market keeps growing. But, what do you feel is the biggest challenge to the growth of GoNabit?

[Dan Stuart]: The biggest challenge is achieving scale despite trying to grow in a market that is fairly sluggish in terms of ecommerce. It’s sluggish because of the self-fulfilling prophecy in the region: people say that people don’t like buying online so many don’t because they hear that people don’t buy online in the region.

In fact, 10,000s buy through Aramex’s Shop and Ship each month…so that’s not true. We do 50-100 online transactions a day…making us one of the biggest ecommece sites in the region already.

I think the myth is hurting the region. The payment providers are generally poor and apathetic but that is changing with NBAD and Bank Audi. People will buy online if there is value for them, ease and confidence.

[Rock Sfeir]: Essentially, it seems that GoNabit is taking a proven concept and applying it to the usually under-served market in the Middle-East. Do you see forthcoming competition? Is it going to be a new start-up, or an established group-buying business operating internationally?

[Dan Stuart]: I think we’ll see both. We’ve led the market, done the education and proved the concept for the cities we are in. There will certainly be others to see that we have laid steps for them to follow in.

I think we’re bound to see an international player sniff around the region at some point, but there are far more mature businesses here in the region who remain independent (Bayt, Souq, etc), so we’re down the list from them in terms of sparking international interest.

Again, the structural challenges in the region make entry in markets beyond Dubai a real challenge for anyone apart from a really committed regional player.

What I would like to see is a company like us use this knowledge gained in a tough market to move to new market outside the region. We need to work harder and be better to overcome regional challenges…so why not apply that to other challenging markets and build a presence?

[Rock Sfeir]: Where do you see GoNabit heading in the next couple of years?

[Dan Stuart]: Tough call. We certainly have a vision that the founders share to some extent or another. We definitely want to grow and be a sustainable business held to global standards.

I would like to have sparked the rise of ecommerce in every country in the region, built the largest volume of ecommerce transaction of any website in the region, and sparked a new industry of startups that believe that ecommerce is do-able.

I’d also like to have to hire some staff who speaks another language besides English and Arabic

[Rock Sfeir]: Anything else you want to add?

[Dan Stuart]: If you are thinking of launching a business, think big and start soon. Thinking small and waiting means you’ll never start, and even when you do, you won’t do much.

I am some how late in posting part II of my review of Business Model Generation book, a book that helps you build business models for your startup, company or even understand your competitors business models as the book describes in details the rationale of how an organization, create, delivers and captures value.

In part one, we wrote an overview of the book mentioning the 9 blocks of how a company will make money: customer segment, value proposition, channels, customer relationship, revenues stream, key resources, key activities, key partnerships, cost structure.

Today we focus on Value Proposition as it is the heart of any successful business. If you offer no value to users, no body will buy from you or use you.

The book describes value proposition as the bundle of products and services that create value for a specific customer segment. It is essentionaly the reason why customer turn to a company or will turn to your company over another!

The book explains that value proposition creates value for a customer segment through distinct mix of elements catering to that segment’s needs. Value may be quantitative ( ex: price, speed of services) or qualitative (ex: design, customer experience.) It also offers a list that can contribute to customer value creation, here the list with my own take.

You’re encouraged to share your  favorite way or all of them by using the “tweet” links next to each one.

1-Newness: Create something new that users did not know they need. [tweet]

A Value proposition that satisfy an entirely new set of needs that customer did not know they need or did not bother to ask for because there was no simlier offering. In most cases this often is technology related: example of Newness:

- headphones innovated by Sony

- Mobile cell phones

- Islamic Banks (Muslims needed it but no one offered it before.)

- Tablet PCs like the iPad.

- Microsoft instaLoad.

However newness is not a grantee of success for any business, headphones lost for MP3 players and MP3 players to now smart phones, Friendster was the first social networking website now not only that market is dominated by Facebook. But with 500 millions members and the vast amount of “likes” warehouse data Facebook has it is poising a great threat to the search leader Google.

2-Performance: Offer Speed and Superior Performance.[tweet]

Increasing a the performance of something has been around since year on PCs and Mobiles as a way to create value. Another example is one of the values Opera browser offers over other browsers is increased performance and faster browsing.

3-Customization: Offer Customers Choice. [tweet]

Which is tailoring a products and services to the specific needs of individual customers or customer segments. examples includes DELL which started by offering customers the option to customize a PC, choose your CPU, your hard drive your RAM etc.

Online zazzle for example allows you to customize in a simple Drag-and-Drop Design Tools t-shirts, business cards, invitations, in addition to a variety of custom gift. Zazzle is used by Millions of people.

4- Getting the job done: I will do it for you, you focus on your core business [tweet]

Here Value can be created simply by helping customers getting the job done. the book mentions Rolls-Royce as the airline industry relay entirely on Rolls-Royoce to manufacture and service jet engines. This way airlines can focus on running their airline business. In the online world web hosting companies might fall into that point too, instead of buying your own servers, the hosting company will take care of that you focus on developing your app and marketing it.

5-Design: Superior design is a weapon of 2 edge. [tweet]

Products may stand out because of superior design, but I do not think it is the only reason why customer would buy from you. Design is more important in the fashion industries. In Mobile there is no doubt the candy like design of iPhone helped sell the product. In the web they say design is 30% the rest is content, in my side i’d say depending in the product, in blogs and news websites content is number one in webapps and or any app design and UI is very important. However web design should aim to achieve the business objectives, It is not about offering artistic full of flash website.

6- Brand/Status: Do not be too much afraid from Big online Brands entering your Market. [tweet]

Customer may use or buy a product simply because it is a brand or satisfy a certain status “needs” wearing Rolex watch signifies wealth. On the other hand, teenagers might wear Mettallica t-shrits simple to show they are “cool”!

Brand is important but alone it is not enough, Nokia is a brand and had a brand equity as the Mobile leader more than Apple which has no single Mobile