Low-budget Entrepreneurship and TalentEgg.ca

This post will be a little off-topic as the entrepreneur inside me wants to share some insight through a couple of great cases. As the founder of FreeFolder, a company that I put on the back-burner for a while, I felt the need to point out a growing philosophy amongst Web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

Start-ups: turning lack of resources into strengths
For those of you who don't know yet, I'm a big fan of Tim Ferriss' thoughts & approaches about starting and running businesses. As he puts it best, having few start-up resources "forces you to be clever, to dissect problems instead of throwing cash at them, and to innovate instead of imitating better-funded competitors." Furthermore, Jack Ma, founder of alibaba.com, commented on his website's IPO of $26 billion saying the following:"there were three reasons why we survived. We had no money, we had no technology and we had no plan. Every dollar, we used very carefully."

TalentEgg.ca
That brings me to Lauren Friese's venture called TalentEgg which I fully back and support. It is a job search website that specializes in putting Canadian graduating university students directly in touch with firms looking to hire them. For many university graduates, differentiating themselves from the thousands of graduates is hard, which is where TalentEgg comes handy. The site allows each student to create 'Talent Cards' to let companies know a little 'extra' about them such as a personal story, a travel experience or simply some words of wisdom. Companies are starting to recognize the value in such a concept in an era where personal branding is becoming more and more important. Lauren explains that "Talent Cards give graduates the freedom to show employers why their life experiences make them a great fit. They are the 3-D version of Resumes."

Talent Egg and Organic PR
Lauren documented her journey starting the site and how she used a $12,000 start-up budget in a year time to set-up, market and grow TalentEgg. With such financial limitations, she was forced to turn to organic PR and exploit Web 2.0, word-of-mouth and approaching the right people in order to get free (and genuine) visibility in the press, on TV, at conferences and online. Her PR exposure is referenced here.
In our email conversation, she highlighted how she "very much believes that 'organic' word of mouth via PR [and] 'being remarkable', is MUCH more valuable than buying ad space. Organic marketing has credibility, bought marketing/advertising has none." Moreover, she chose to "compete [by] being special" and making graduating students look special.

To wrap up this post, I encourage every student, wishing to stand out in the eyes of recruiters to register on TalentEgg, as well as every company looking to find the right talent to post on TalentEgg.
Lauren, best of luck in your eggciting journey.


Remember that Microsoft and Nike both started with less than $10,000 in start-up capital.