Nun sind 4 Monate schon wieder vorbei und damit auch der letzte Austauschmonat von Jaqueline bei ihrem portugiesischen Gastunternehmer. Was sie in dieser Zeit getan hat und das Fazit von ihrem Austausch lest ihr hier:

In my last month at Build Up Labs I was able to complete some of my projects. I implemented our social media strategy for LinkedIn and Twitter to a large extent and have already achieved initial successes. Especially the traffic on our incubator website could be increased by continuous social media activities. However, this hasn’t led to more applications and thus participants for our incubator programs. From this, we concluded that social media for startups at this young stage primarily leads to higher brand awareness, but not to higher sales and revenues. To find out how the startups that apply to us become aware of us, I integrated a question to our Typeform. Here it came out that most of the young entrepreneurs found BUL via Google search, recommendations or online directories. LinkedIn or Twitter have not been mentioned yet. It can be concluded that in the future the presence in online directories should be increased and the SEO for the website must be worked on in order to appear higher up in Google search. In addition, it is important to develop a long-term referral program so that startups that are already under contract with us have a higher incentive to recommend the incubator to others.

Furthermore, I created analyses for our incubator by calculating the customer lifetime value as well as the average amount that startups spend with us. I also calculated the monthly recurring revenue and made forecasts for the coming months. The aim is to increase these figures from month to month and to draw conclusions from this for new measures and improvements.

We were also able to achieve further successes with our framework. We have optimized our automated emails and have already been able to generate some sales. In addition, we’ve revised the entire landing page in terms of keywords and copywriting and were able to achieve a better Google ranking. Unfortunately, we have still not been able to define the user journey, as we only have very limited data on this via Google Analytics. However, I am confident that BUL will continue to develop in this direction.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to fully elaborate a strategy for our ecosystem players. So far, they are mainly our competitors. One idea is to contact government institutions or universities in particular that support startups and young entrepreneurs and to achieve cooperation here, as this would prevent direct competition. However, it is still unclear how exactly such a cooperation could look like.

Overall, I’ve used the last month mostly to create summary deliverables of my previous work. I made handovers to new colleagues and completed my projects. I was also able to further develop my own portfolio for my startup and gather new ideas. I learned that reacting quickly to trends and developments is especially important for young companies. I also acquired how to create analyses and use them as a basis for further measures. Not every idea and project are feasible and promising in the world of young companies. It is normal to fail from time to time and it is especially important to learn from it and not repeat the same mistakes.