More on me: http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamtr

The biggest mistake startups make is waiting until the product is done to start building awareness and momentum around their audience. The best approach is to think strategically about who can influence your brand adoption and start now to build a group of advocates who will help you when the time comes. This is a time-consuming process, but it pays critical dividends when it comes time to launch.

5 key elements of every tech co launch plan. The bottom three on the list here are often neglected or under-served until the last minute. It takes time to build a community of customers, partners, influencers, and journalists that care about you. It's not enough to just identify the key people who will help you launch. You need to engage based on a "give before you get" mentality. If you wait until the day of launch to start engaging with this community, you did it wrong.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept, here's an article that might help: http://www.marketingteacher.com/lesson-store/lesson-objectives.html

this is an example of a SMART objective in the context of Techstars.

One problem many startups face is that they start their story by talking about "WHAT" instead of "WHY." The result is often a failure to inspire or connect with anyone (customers, media, investors, influencers)... Watch this video for inspiration: http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html

For Haiku Deck we created Twitter lists of key influencers, like presentation experts, PR experts, sales experts, keynote speakers, etc. Then we listened to these folks and engaged with them. We read their blogs. We commented on their work. By the time we launched, we were already on their radar for having been participants in the conversation.

Use Google Adwords tools and FB advertising to validate your ideas before you write code. For example, we could see in Google Adwords that millions of people were searching for "powerpoint for iPad" and "powerpoint alternative." This helped to validate our idea. Though it can be expensive to use these tools as a means for acquiring customers in the beginning, they're indispensable tools for understanding the marketplace.

Go back to your objectives and think about who are the key partners that will help you reach your objectives. For us, a key objective involves broad distribution, so we think alot about partners who can help us in this regard.