Happy New Year

It’s the start of an exciting year. This year I’m going to try posting more regularly about startups from a marketing POV. I think there’s room for commentary that looks at some of the ventures with a nuanced eye to consumers, behavior and demand for alternatives to what has been.

I think the startup market is huge, and it represents a big shift in how entrepreneurs define their jobs and what they expect of their lives. About 10 years ago, when I was leading a small creative group, management complained about the young people we were hiring having some interesting ideas about how they wanted to live their lives and what they expected from work. They wanted choice, balance and the kinds of things that made the older people opine on this silliness with “when I was a kid starting out…” and finishing with asking me something like, what was I going to do about it?

That was just the front edge of a new generation that I’ve seen as just expecting they should be able to do something better than what’s been already. The entrepreneurs I work with tend to keep their ideals in their back pocket, and put the focus on what their business will do for the people it’s built for. But at the end of the day, they just want to make the world better, one project at a time.

Over the next year I’ll be covering startups through a marketing lens, writing about some of the ones I’m working with as well as others I find interesting. Though they’re starting to see more mainstream media coverage, much of the startup scene is covered by technology and VC publishers and blogs. My interest is in the potential impact for consumers and the broader public, changing behaviours and expectations, market insights and what brave new entrepreneurs are doing to change the world. The impact I’m hoping for is to inspire people outside of the startup scene with some of the exciting new work that’s happening.