Oliver Zhang's Blog

Marketing Before Funding

Marketing Before Funding is a blog maintained by a soon-to-be Sauder graduate, Mike Abasov. The goal of this blog is to provide startups and small companies with simple yet effective tools and strategies to market themselves. One key characteristic that I enjoy about this blog is the fact that it teaches a lot of stuff that isn’t traditionally taught in schools. For example, most of the marketing strategies that are explained on his blog use different social media and web based tools, which differ from the traditionally tactics to marketing that business schools teach. However, at the same time, this blog applies a lot marketing principles such as value propositions and point of difference to these new tech savvy strategies. As a result, I believe this blog can be an excellent supplement to the different ideas that one can learn in school. Moreover, I enjoy the fact that it teaches startups to use marketing tactics that will allow them to actually sell their products and become self-sufficient instead of constantly relying for venture capital, which was one of the biggest issues in the Dot-Com Bubble. As a result, I believe this blog to be both innovative and extremely knowledgeable.