A lot of you will still be wishing each other happy new year till March, so I figured the middle of January isn’t too late to say so to TechCabal readers.
Before we entered 2014, I asked on Twitter what resolutions startups were making for the new year. Some answers were really helpful. Some, not so much. Most of them were personal to each startup. On account of our experience attempting to cover startups in the eight months since TechCabal launched, we’ve made sort of a random short list of things we hope startups would do going forward.
1. Step up your image game.
Every self-respecting startup team should have decent PR pictures of the founders, team and products. These go into a press kit along with some earnest, good-natured copy that explains what you do and why it’s important. Not that it is compulsory, but any startup that want us to believe they are the best thing since the hyperloop should at least try and look the part.
2. Start a blog.
Unlike most blogs and PR agencies would like you to believe, your PR destiny is in your hands, except you decide to turn it over to someone else. Engaging your customers, investors and your industry with a human voice that genuinely communicates what you have set out to do in constructive ways will do serendipitous wonders for your startup (in the long run). Blogging has many benefits, but we’ll talk about that some other time.
3. Go mobile everywhere.
Try and fit that software, website and newsletter into a 5 inch screen. This is 2014, please and please. Not a fan of the spam, but ToLet.ng has one of the best designed newsletters for a Nigerian startup.
4. Stop making bogus claims
They will only make you look silly. Funny enough, ToLet.ng is also the example of this fail that is apparently endemic among Nigerian startups.
5. Give back to the community
Start or join an opensource project. Submit helpful code to a repo. Make things other people can use, like Namzo. Be like Kehers or Tim Akinbo or this fella here that made a plugin for a Nigerian payments gateway and uploaded it to the free WordPress plugin repository.
Above all, be excellent to each other. Our ecosystem is on the cusp of great things. Happy 2014.
Image via Smashing Magazine
