Welcome to The Mill, our weekly roundup of the hottest startup stories and resources to hit the web. Curated by the PAYMILL team, here’s what grabbed our attention in the past seven days.
This week in startups
5 PR lessons from Viber’s rise from zero users to a $900M exit: Whenever I mention Viber to people, I’ve also said that it’s the “WhatsApp for voice calls.” Viber and WhatsApp are two different applications, however they do share a couple of similarities.
For instance both require a users phone number to signup, cross platform compatibility, no advertisements and both were acquired this year – Viber for $900 million and WhatsApp for $19 billion by Rakuten and Facebook respectively.
Last week we covered some facts about WhatsApp, but we’ll focus on Viber and how they approached their PR efforts. Over at VentureBeat, Ayelet Noff founder of public relations firm Blonde 2.0 describes what they learnt by handling Viber’s PR push. In short, Noff highlights 5 lessons:
- Start with a path that makes sense for your startup
- Make friends with influencers and early adopters
- Face-to-face meetings are still king!
- Strike when iron is hot when you’ve got unqualified success
- Have a great and newsworthy product to pitch
For more details, simply follow the link above. Meanwhile, we’ve got another great resource from VentureBeat coming up next.
A Berlin VC shares what he looks for in cloud software: If you’re building an SaaS startup, Christoph Janz – co-founder of Point Nine Capital – has some tips for you. In this post, Janz highlights four things venture capitalists look for to spot a successful startup. Well worth checking out if you’re in the process of raising funds.
Startup Fundraising Lessons For The 99%: In another instalment of Startup Anonymous on PandoDaily, you’ll discover what it’s like to raise funding when you don’t have Y Combinator’s seal of approval. Spoiler alert: It’s not so easy!
How to get a busy person to respond to your email: While an easy means of communications, email can easily become a burden for most of us – especially if you’re working in a startup! Fortunately, this post describes several steps you can take to get a reply to your emails – something everybody should read!
