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Serial entrepreneur Paavo Beckman started his first company at 23, and has since come a long way. 15 years and 6 entertainment and tech companies later, Paavo has evolved into something of a specialist in his field.
In mid December,Paavo gave advice for boostrapped marketing and other marketing and business hacks at an event held by Business Angels Copenhagen and Danish startup news site Trendsonline.
With a marketing budget of 600Danish kroner, Paavo and a business partner took a completely unknown Finnish rock band with 19 fans and turned it into one of Finland’s biggest chart toppers. How did he manage to do this?
No advertising
Paavo and his partner decided upon a bold course of action when they first went into the music industry: no advertising.
Their ideas was to create exclusivity around the band, so they decide only to take advantage of the 19 fans, and contact them exclusively through their private e-mail addresses.
They expanded this process to other fangroups to bring attention to the band by holding a contest where the winner got an exclusive picture of the band that had a special connection to one of their concerts. The competition went beyond all expectations, as fans were excited about the exclusive offers.
Declarations of love on toilet paper
One of the fans gathered toilet paper rolls from her school and wrote the band’s history on paper, so people in her school would learn about the band’s existence when they went to the bathroom.
It’s just one of a wide variety of fun and inspiring anecdotes he tells about his time as an entrepreneur. But funny stories is not the only thing he took from his time with the band. For Paavo, Beckman, the most important thing was realizing the importance of engaging a target audience.
“To be able to market yourself as accurately as possible, you need to know who you are addressing. This requires that you know your audience in advance, ” he says.
After talking at business conferences around Europe and North America for several years, he has decided to engage in helping European startups to grow faster than ever before.
Therefore, he now dedicates all his time and energy to his initiative Startup Catapult, which assists with networking and investment for new European startups.
