25/04/2022 – Tokeportal’s own content

In our previous interview, Zsuzsanna Farkas introduced herself, and now Tamas Muller answers our questions about his mentoring activities.

Tamas is a social media and marketing specialist, an expert on women startups, a community builder and serial entrepreneur. He has more than 20 years of experience in online and digital marketing and business development. Last year he organised the seventh edition of the Women Startup Competition Europe, a networking, mentoring and competition event for women and gender diverse startups that he founded. His areas of expertise include business model design, marketing strategy, women startups and online communication.

In a startup style, I would simplify the answer. For a startup communication, it is important to reach as many people as possible with as simple and to the point a message as possible. And, of course, we must remember to make it as cheap as possible. I’m not going to talk about campaigns targeted at specific groups, remarketing and growthacking at the beginning, because especially in the early stages it’s usually true that “we’re shooting at everyone”. We need market feedback to define sales target groups, to discover alternative opportunities, to create partnerships that simplify our work and to reach future investors. Of course, this market experience then need to be compiled into a more specific marketing strategy with segmentation points to guide the work in the coming years and brief the marketing agencies and subcontractors with whom we will need to work.

For sure, startups shouldn’t miss out on the competitions and events that are available in the market in their hundreds. Whether you win or not, there is a lot to learn from them. It means free PR, product validation and business networking, as well as being able to constantly improve your business model, business plan and pitch presentation based on feedback from investors and mentors.

It also ensures that presentations will not appeal to those who try to run their business marketing campaign with plain Facebook or Google ads. Here too, the most appealing are viral effects, user-generated content, or any clickbait or hack solution that stands out from the crowd.

Of course, it’s important to find a healthy balance between startup development and working and attending events. I also wrote a separate article on this back in 2017, if anyone is interested in more on the topic.

Luckily, I always have a lot of plans and they all relate to developing and promoting startups and the community around them. Among them are developing a co-living centre in Budapest and in the countryside for foreign teams in the area, building a social media executive team that can provide practical implementation behind the marketing strategy of startups, and since some of my domestic and international startup investments are finally paying off, I will be reinvesting in new startups.

However, the most topical one right now is the one we have been working on the most over the last few years. My friends and I are working on a backend system that simplifies the process of building and developing startup teams and businesses while measuring the activity, quality and investment maturity of the players involved and helping us select the most promising investment opportunities, while offering more opportunities for our startups to do so. This is www.pozi.io.

I’m sorry to say this, but unfortunately the Hungarian ecosystem is still very inward-looking and not based on professional knowledge and experience, but rather on friends and buddies around a few groups of domestic investors.

Which is also bad because it also determines that international contacts and their impact are negligible compared to previous years.

Of course, the almost complete absence of a centrally supported communication strategy and presence has also contributed to this. Also, the 600million incubator funds allocated by the state and several rounds have only served to properly account for outsourcing and not to increase exit and international market presence.

It should be recognised that there should be much stronger communication at central level in a much bigger startup media noise.

Regarding the Statrtup report, I am very happy that such a publication has finally been published, but if you look at the similar Estonian, Israeli or even Polish sites, you will see that in 1-1 such reports the most promising startups are promoted and less the statistical results and expert statements.

In other words, they promote what they want to sell.

So far, if you mentioned our Prezi, Ustream, Logmein trio in an international competition, everyone knew one of them, and that they were Hungarian. Now there is no such thing anymore… or rather SEON is certainly getting in now with its gigabe investment, but one is very, very few in the last period.

So we need to break out of the communication notion that someone is going to be “world famous” at home. I see start-ups communicated on certain press platforms all the time that are nowhere to be found in six months, as opposed to those that are working and producing result after result and are noted by the international press.

Far from all actors being consulted and activated, nor encouraged to look back and help their ‘home country’. Speaking from my own experience, in many cases it is precisely the networking opportunities and international connections that would most help the next generations to step out onto the international stage that are lost. In the case of the WSC, for example, we have tried for several years to organise international finals in Budapest, but if you get more support from the Vienna or London community as a foreigner than you do as a Hungarian at home, this determines that good initiatives will be removed. Unfortunately, this will be the case for all start-ups that are not supported by the system here at home, and by support I do not just mean financial support.

Certainly, there should be much stronger support for local innovative businesses to keep them ahead on the international stage. If we really want to make a difference on the international market, we need to support Hungarian start-ups so that they can build a base with a local back office and team, but also be active in as many international market events as possible. Unfortunately, it is not even enough to “throw them out” to 1 or 1 of the more prestigious US incubators if we don’t help them to get established and make progress there.

Another obstacle to current progress is that there is still a gigantic bureaucratic burden on early-stage start-ups to get 1-1 funding or investment.

It is also a common scene in many cases, where public funds over-subsidise start-ups that look sympathetic to them, so that they are not forced to focus on real revenue and expansion in market conditions. Ergo, the meaningful sales/marketing work is replaced by bureaucratic administration, which is the death knell for any startup in the long run.

Much smaller steps, less bureaucratic burden and more marketable professional support would allow to move forward on a national level.

Crowdfunding is a very good way to validate a startup’s knowledge and viability on the sales and marketing/pr side, because without these skills, successful crowdfunding will not work.

In addition, crowdfunding can attract partners, backers and future customers who can create the first revenue streams and first sales opportunities for the final market launch.

Thirdly, crowdfunding helps you not to build your product in a drawer, but to enter the market as early as possible so that you can manage and protect yourself against emerging competitors or copycat start-ups.

If you would like to know more about Tamás, check his mentor profile.