IPitch
When I came on with IPitch, it was nothing but an idea and a logo. IPitch was conceived by two Australian venture capitalists who saw a gap in representation for local startups. After briefly meeting one of these VCs in San Francisco at a mobile conference, it wasn't long before I was off to Australia to help bring the concept, modeled off of American sites like Younoodle and Vator.TV, together. At its heart IPitch is a community site for Australian startups, entrepreneurs, investors and service providers to come together. In my role I wear a lot of hats ranging from community management to content creation to business development. The job has taken me to tech conferences around the world and made me formally acquainted with startup culture.

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The Site
Designed by Sydney developers Creatio, with text and UX aid from myself, IPitch allows startups, investors and service providers to log on, create a comprehensive profile and find one another. Handling this community meant urging people along to finish out their profile, mining existing entrepreneurial and tech groups for new members and educating people in how to engage with the site.



The News
IPitch's other component included news and articles relevant to the startup space. This content was sourced from placed including press releases, google alerts on the names of all our member companies and regular scrapes of Twitter and blogs. The articles types varied between interviews will local entrepreneurs, coverage of events like TechCrunch in San Francisco and instructional articles on topics like NDAs. These articles greatly helped build our SEO as a new site and created a community of commenters we regularly engaged with. You can read some of this work in the Clips section.



Social Marketing
Before IPitch was anything more than a landing page, I started a Twitter account to start learning the market and building interest. I was up bright and early on the day Facebook vanity names were released and secured ours town. Twitter, and the tweets that fed into our Facebook, became a central promotional spot for the site, and we used sites like HootSuite and Bitly to track links and automate them through the day. I also experimented with alternatives of branding to our Twitter and began also tweeting under the @aussiestartups name. Youtube, and video in general, were always central to our goals at IPitch and from structured event coverage to spontaneous interview with Google's Dr.Wave himself, we stocked our playlist with interesting features. You can see more of this in IPitch TV.

Distribution and Marketing
Online marketing efforts for the site included getting listed in relevant news feeds and directories such as Loaded Web, and the Australian WotNews. Newsletter marketing also proved to be a successful route for us with an almost 50% open rate and only eight unsubscribers in the first five months. These weekly member emails, published through MailChimp, drew members back to the site with links of new startups, news from the site and event updates. You can read some of these newsletters here, here and here.