Year: 2020

Our Co-Founder & COO, Sukhi Jutla, was recently interviewed by Ramesh Dontha for The Agile Entrepreneur podcast.

They discussed Sukhi’s background, education, her career in Finance and how she became an accidental entrepreneur. They also talked about the vision behind MarketOrders and the startup’s journey.

Watch it now, here!

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Cast Box!

What are the advantages and disadvantages for startups to hire a PR person in-house versus hiring an external PR consultant or a PR agency to run a campaign?

Our Head of PR & Communications, Caroline Hoffmann, answers this question in PR on the go article ‘Public Relations for Start-ups: In-house Or Outsourced?’.

She said:

“The main advantages of hiring a PR agency are getting results more effectively and save you some time. Time is money! As a startup, the trickiest part of press relations is getting the journalists’ contact details, knowing how to pitch them and getting their attention. A PR agency has already built trusted relationships with journalists and knows what they’re interested in, which helps them pitch relevant publications and be more efficient. Regarding the results, you can put KPIs in place to ensure you get minimum results every month. For example, quoted in 3 top tier publications and get 1 industry profile piece a month.

The main disadvantages of hiring a PR agency are a substantial cost and not ‘owning’ the relationships with journalists. As a startup, you usually have little idea of how much a PR agency costs. Price can range from £1000 to £10,000 for the same service. I’d say the average price for press relations is £1500 for a great freelancer and £4500 for a great agency.

It can also be difficult to know which agency pitches for organic content and which agency pays for coverage in unfaithful ways. I’d say if an agency tells you they can guarantee you coverage in Forbes and the Financial Times, run away! No one can guarantee press coverage unless they’re using illegal ways to get it.

The second disadvantage is not owning the relationships with journalists as every communication you’ll have with them will usually go through the agency. This means you’ll not be directly in touch with journalists and will not be able to stay in touch the day you stop working with the agency. This is why as a startup, you should try to do some in-house PR using free tools like HARO or Qwoted so that you can build and own the relationships with journalists.

At MarketOrders, when we started we didn’t have any budget to allocate to PR and used free tools like HARO, Qwoted and our network (don’t underestimate the power of your network!). After 6 months of work, we got fantastic results:

• Over 100 articles in the press, including The Sun, The Telegraph, City AM, Startups Magazine, Business Cloud, Management Today…
• Over 20 awards nominations.
• Our crowdfunding campaign overfunded at 112%, raising a total of £439,840.
• 95% of the investors heard of us outside of the crowdfunding platform, through press coverage.

Moral of the story? If you can afford it, have someone in-house to manage your PR and hire an agency to get top tier press coverage and high-quality articles, which are harder to get. Building your profile and credibility using free tools on a day to day basis is very rewarding and also makes the agency’s job easier. You can also hire an agency only for a 4–6 month campaign to launch a specific product or service.”

Read the article here.

The world’s first blockchain was introduced a decade ago. Since then, the adoption of blockchain technology has occurred at snail’s pace. E-Crypto News spoke to some experts, including MarketOrders, about the best blockchain adoption strategies.

Our COO, Sukhi Jutla, said: “Here are my top tips on creating a blockchain strategy:
1. Ensure there is a shared understanding of blockchain within your business and team who will execute the project so they have an understanding of how the technology works. Know what it can do and it’s limitations. This will also help to get management buy-in and support from stakeholders.
2. Define the problem – you don’t want to be boiling the ocean as results will be difficult to quantity. Instead, take time to identify a specific business area or process where you think blockchain could create benefits such as increases efficiently or better transactional performance.
3. Build a Minimal viable product – prototype your idea using minimum resources and in a short time frame. This will allow you to build something fast and not waste months on something that may fail. This MVP will also help to identify if you have created the right solution to the right problem.
4. Identify where you may have a skills gap in your team and recruit the right skill set to help you build your solution.
5. Once you have a solution that works you can then start to think about scaling this to other areas of your business.”

Read the article here.

And… here is another publication shining a light on our White Paper! This time, it’s RegTech Analyst!

Read the article here.