Denis Oakley

Startups that I work focus on - What is the customers pain? - Is it a pain that is sufficiently bad that they will accept an something that barely works as a solution? - are there enough desperate cases who will pay to create a business? Everything else is bullshit. Or comes after that. When it doesn't you fail (or occasionally get lucky - and no, that's not you or you wouldn't be here ) I teach entrepreneurship at Warwick University. I run research commercialisation programmes for academics. I run large scale accelerators for some of the largest tech companies in the world. I have f****d up a surprisingly large number of times in the 20+ years I've been an entrepreneur. In part that's what makes me a good mentor - I've failed miserably - and I've learned the lessons. On the other side, I'm neurodivergent with ASD and ADHD and a few others. I've seen how my mind screws me and learned, (still learning) lots of hacks to get more out of the massive advantages that my ND gives me. I've done philosophy, engineering and business degrees, supervise phDs and am amazed by how little I know, and how ignorant I am. Doesn't stop the questions or the exploring

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  Go to market strategy

  What have I done? I've failed a lot. Sometimes through inexperience. Sometimes through a bad brief. Sometimes because I couldn't think of anything better to do and data from failed experiments seemed to offer the best path forward. I know the basics, done most types of marketing activity for new startups and helped a lot of entrepreneurs see their market differently. That seems to help get traction

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  Growth marketing

  20+ years of intrapreneurship, entrepreneurship and startup advisory. Focused on pre-seed and seed B2B startups. - 60x sales in 2 months - $2 million in 1st-year sales for my first startup

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  Idea validation

  I hate ideas. They are the most pernicious source of entrepreneurial failure out there. Seriously. Most people with ideas are idiots (me included) But they do get you thinking about problems, and that, it turns out is quite useful

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  Product market fit

  I really do business model innovation - but product-market fit is the closest we get to that. This is normally big picture stuff on how to approach the market, how to design the business model and also how to pivot - if required

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  Sales

  B2B sales - Deep experience in startup B2B sales process in Europe and SE Asia - Field Sales, Partnerships, client POCs, Exhibitions, conferences, cold lead gen -

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  Buffer

  17 years of experience

  I've used it for 13 years. This is here as a skill to show my breadth of knowledge, rather than to have a focused session on using Buffer to grow your business

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  Hubspot

  15 years of experience

  I've used it for a year. This is here as a skill to show my breadth of knowledge, rather than to have a focused session on using Mailchimp to grow your business. That said I've been using inbound marketing as a technique for a decade

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  Mailchimp

  20 years of experience

  I've used it for 13 years. This is here as a skill to show my breadth of knowledge, rather than to have a focused session on using Mailchimp to grow your business

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  Salesforce

  20 years of experience

  Designed built and ran a totally customised force.com platform that helped us get to the semi-finals of HSBC Startup Stars. Not an expert on SFDC by any means and technical knowledge is rusty

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  Wordpress

  20 years of experience

  I've used it for 13 years. This is here as a skill to show my breadth of knowledge, rather than to have a focused session on using WordPress to grow your business

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  Consulting

  I work with B2B entrepreneurs mainly in the engineering/manufacturing scientific space. Whilst I won't always (often) understand the technical details of your idea/product, I will rapidly understand how it applies to you market and help you decide your next steps.