Bye Bello 2016 … Ciao Gorgeous 2017

This year has been particularly interesting as we met with various start-ups in Geo-location, O2O, Local Search and Delivery services, and it was clear that they all have a great product – there is no doubt – and they all tackled various problems with the willingness to conquer certain and specific market niches.

However, despite the above, these entrepreneurs all suffered from, struggled with and even had nightmares about a very critical issue: audience; how to persuade a bunch of potential users to put their product in front of them and enable their product to work its magic.

It was interesting that the entrepreneurs were product hackers, engineers, or, even, industry experts, but rarely we met a marketing guru or a growth hacker who could black belt resources and make an audience surrender to make it face their work of art and see it perform.

Now, the scenario at hand does not look very promising for the non marketing savvy. With the renaissance of mobile and its mobile-only drive; the signals of a stampede out of the app world; the hardships (to say the least) of customer acquisition with high CPAs and uninstall rates in both IOS and Android platforms; the remainders of unused apps taking real estate in our phones that sooner than later are removed; all in all, the war for audience has become a terrain that not every entrepreneur is well suited to fight or in default he/she feels very cautious about spending the dollars that his/her start-up dully earned. But in the end, what do entrepreneurs prefer, marketing dollars or traffic? (read more)