On Blogging, College Mogul, Drupal, and Acquia

Marketing is sometimes the toughest part of starting a company. It won't matter if you have a great idea, product, service, or blog in my case, if you can't reach your target audience and make it as easy as possible for people to find you. One of the quickest ways of building traffic to your site is via blogging. It is also a perfect way to start building an audience before you even launch by writing about the industry you seek to enter, providing valuable information, or just simply writing about your experience starting your company. Blogging has exploded and even seeping into the corporate world. Did you know GE just launched their corporate blog ? In many ways blogging is starting to mold a new era where transparency, free information, and daily communication between companies and public are critical to build brands and companies that people are attracted to.

Blogging, in other words, is a great marketing tool. Although, I'm not using this blog to market something else, I am using it to build a brand, culture, and motivating force to inspire other young entrepreneurs to venture into the world of startups. I suppose to some degree I am marketing myself, but I mostly blog because I enjoy it, love startups, and know that there are tons of interestings startups by college entrepreneurs who don't receive enough press coverage. They need a home. Anyway, I'm a fanatic about technology, the web, startups, entrepreneurship, innovation, web trends, and anything that challenges something in the world to do something better.

The drive to live in this type of environment has been with me for some while now. I suppose it runs in my blood...my Father started a successful currency investment firm after moving here from Sweden and my Grandfather helped develop a small town outside of Santa Fe, NM, growing several small businesses. In high school, I started a portable recording studio business and then moved on to grow my own painting company to over $100,000 in revenue over two summers while attending Boston College. During my Senior year there I attempted to start a mobile startup, Textworks, and College Mogul. Although Textworks didn't take off, we did raise over $100,000 in seed financing from private investors and pitched to several prominent venture capital firms. One of the coolest experiences was when I had to bench press over 340 pounds to back up a fact on my profile slide after presenting to Highland Capital Partners. It was an experience that I can probably say I learned more from than my four years at school (doing all of the startup stuff, that is). I suppose I should be fair, I didn't study that much. I just found it more valuable to learn actually doing business rather than reading about it. So, ended up skipping classes to pitch to investors and spent free moments tweaking pitch decks and business plans.

Anyway, I am working full time at Acquia now, a funded startup commercializing Drupal, a popular open source CMS platform that over a quarter million sites are built off of. We just launched about 6 weeks ago, so work has been nonstop busy, yet extremely exciting. Ironically, Drupal was started by a college entrepreneur too, Dries Buyteart, as an online message board that he opened up to allow other developers to add on to. Since then, it has developed into a leading social publishing software for the web. I was so impressed when I learned more that it compelled me to take our startup focused blog off WordPress and move to Drupal so that we would have more flexibility adding features and possibly other subsites. (I'll save the full explanation for another post though.)

Btw...if you're interested in blogging for College Mogul, drop me an email at collegemogul2 [at] gmail.com. Its a great way to build your resume, make a name for yourself, network with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and learn a thing or too about startups. Its also helps if you want to land a job at a startup too one day.