The Web is a blessing and a curse. It’s the greatest publishing platform ever devised, it offers accessibility and allows for the free flow of information. On the other hand, it has made getting actual exposure even harder. Yet, some brands still mistake the former for the latter and continue to pursue traditional marketing strategies.

Every new business needs an online platform, some turf to call your own. So, you invest time and money to build it. Finally, after months of negotiations and revisions, you deploy it. At first, you’re happy, but weeks go by and your shiny new website is still not attracting customers. In an effort to protect your investment, you start spending more money on PR trying to get people to notice you. But it doesn’t work the same way it did before.

Bad news is — press release is dead. Good news — there are ways around that. Once you understand how we got here and why the old tricks don’t work anymore, you’ll be able to adjust and rise to the top.

TheKey is, as they like to call themselves, a «network of smart workspaces». But it wasn’t always this way.

^{The kitchen here is small, but cozy}

The internet is a global high-density slum. The Kowloon Walled City of our times, it is packed to brim with useless promotional content. Trying to sell a product in this environment is no easy feat.

No matter how original and well thought-out it is, it has to provide cultural value to succeed. Otherwise you become the knockoff brand. Below are three ways to quickly integrate brand’s culture into your content-marketing strategy, and what’s even more important — scale it with little to no additional resources.

Successful startups often emphasize their grassroots aspects. In part one of this series, we talked about the origins of startup culture and the DIY attitude that is prevalent in the tech industry. However, there’s more to modern startup culture than that. Today, it is in many ways defined by the innovation infrastructure that got things started and allowed the tech space to blossom, and that is the focus of this article.

SXSW is a festival of culture and technology held every spring in Austin, Texas. It’s a global phenomenon, with hundreds of thousands attending the event every year and millions more following the media coverage. Even if you’ve never heard of it, you’ve certainly felt its influence on our culture.

But it wasn’t always that way.

In the late 1930s, two Stanford students, William Hewlett and David Packard, were inspired by their professor’s plea to turn the Bay Area into the national capital of high tech. Operating out of the cheapest property they could find — a garage in suburban Palo Alto, they built their first commercial product, the HP200A oscillator. Now a private museum and a California Historic Landmark, this place is a living monument, commemorating the birth of the Silicon Valley startup culture.

This event preceded the similar and widely publicized success stories of Microsoft and Apple by more than 30 years. But it nonetheless perfectly defines the startup culture as we know it today. How come?

Dmitry learned the language of business but I think about the world as an engineer. He works with tech brands to create content and promote corporate culture at scale. Apart from it, he is one of the veterans at Techstars Startup Digest, and he is acting as an advisor for the SXSW tech festival.

Here is his interview with the LAMA app platform.

How’s your work week going? I took some time off publishing new articles and consulting clients to look at «The Hero and the Outlaw» by Carol Pearson and Margaret Mark. It’s a guide to leveraging the power of archetypes for your brand, and I think there’s much to learn from it.

Archetypes are properly defined as «universal constructs of the human psyche». In layman’s terms, these are images we all recognise because they’re built into our subconscious mind. One such example is the archetype of the hero  —  a good guy who triumphs over evil and saves the day.

Entrepreneurs are constantly looking for new tools and possibilities to develop their businesses and enrich their knowledge. One of the ways of doing this is visiting themed events — meeting colleagues in real life, exchanging experiences, and communicating with potential investors.

In fact, there are thousands of tech-focused events taking place annually. The important thing is to pick the best, most useful and easily accessible ones to optimize your time and expenses.

Techstars Startup Digest solves this problem by sending its subscribers an email newsletter with a curated list of relevant and reasonably priced events for entrepreneurs. Currently, Startup Digest consists of more than 700 curators, is approaching 700K subscriptions, and is available in more than 300 cities all around the world. Today, I’d like to share its history, how the founders came up with the idea, what it looked like in the initial stages, and what it’s going through right now.

Good luck getting people to read your branded tech story. Now, before you get mad, I’m sure you’ve got something great to share. I’m sure you found an exciting new solution to some sort of problem. All you want is for others to be as excited about it as you are. Sadly, the odds are not in your favour.