The Digital Business Start-Up Workbook: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide to Succeeding Online from Start-up to Exit

1. Visibility

Back in the late 1990s Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman became the poster people of the emergent dot com scene. This was partly due to their knack for generating column inches and creating a buzz about their brand in a time precluding blogs, profiles and hashtags; when a tweet was just something a bird did. Their secret was to make themselves as visible as possible.

‘We went to every single function we could find, accepted every invitation and talked about our product all the time’, recalls Martha. ‘It’s tiring and can be boring but you have to go through it at every opportunity. That helped get the business out there.’

Today, similarly, you need to be smart about putting yourself where people will find you, rather than expecting ...