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Amid a declining housing market and volatile economy, mortgage and banking marketers may find themselves in a difficult position.  While the future may seem bleak and uncertain, marketers have a unique opportunity to make a lasting impact on existing and new customers if they take advantage of this slowed pace to optimize the customer experience of their marketing efforts in their respective markets.  Crashing into opportunity As 2022 comes to an end, predictions for mortgage and banking trends have been nothing short of ominous. According to Freddie Mac, 30-year fixed mortgage interest rates are expected to drop from an average of 6.8% in late 2022 to 6.25 in Q4 2023. While this shift heads in the direction lenders would like to see, these rates remain striking considering that 2021 mortgage rates were approximately 3%. According to IntraFi’s quarterly survey, bank executives revealed that federal funding rates won’t peak until the first half of 2023 in response to ...

As you enter your first enterprise, you will likely face many challenges. It's important to understand the common mistakes made by first-time entrepreneurs so that you can preempt them. Hiring who you know, rather than who is best As a first-time entrepreneur, you may be tempted to hire people you know looking for work. Perhaps it's a friend or family member who has expressed an interest in working for your company. While this can be a good way to help out someone close to you, it can also lead to problems down the road if their skills don't match what's required of them on the job. Hiring based on skill set rather than who you know and trust is best. Not having a great product or service Even if you don't want to compete on price, which many small businesses do because they can't afford to compete on service, you still need to have something unique about your product or service to succeed. Without this unique element, your customers will go elsewher...

In every tech company, there is, at some point, the challenge that not every department is getting what they want. Product guys want to innovate, marketing guys want visibility and competitive edge, and the sales guys want to follow the money. Looking at stats collected from various sources like Salesforce, McKinsey, and others: 86% of employees and executives cite lack of collaboration or ineffective communication for workplace failures, and 97% of employees and executives believe lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. Moreover, while about 75%  of employers rate teamwork and collaboration as “very important”, only 18% of employees get communication evaluations at their performance reviews. And, to rest the case, according to McKinsey, knowledge workers spend an average of 14% of their workweek in communicating and collaborating internally. Towards the last quarter of each year, companies start planning for next year's goals, budgets, roa...

© Emilija Manevska The easiest question to answer in high-growth entrepreneurship is: Why do so many startups fail? After more than 20 years of investing in startups and working with entrepreneurs, I can say with conviction that most startups fail because they didn’t solve a market problem with a scalable solution that customers wanted to buy. That begets the next question: Why is it that so many bright, determined entrepreneurs — innovators, who are willing to risk time, reputation and money to build a technology-based business — fail to solve market problems that produce sales? The reasons are many — blunt and nuanced. It can be a matter of execution — the company burns through its cash before achieving the critical milestones that lead to breakeven and additional funding or revenue. Sometimes the competition gets there first, or recession or a black swan event (think pandemic) hits. Or just maybe, the startup founders didn’t do the right job of customer and market ...

Sequoia’s Mike Vernal has worn many hats. He was VP of product and engineering at Facebook for eight years before getting into investment. His portfolio includes Houseparty, Threads, Canvas, Citizen, PicsArt and more, and he continues to invest in companies across a broad spectrum of stages and verticals, including consumer, enterprise, marketplaces, fintech and more. Vernal joined us at TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising earlier this month to discuss how founders should think about product-market fit, with a specific focus on tempo. He covered how to organize around the pace of iteration, how to design with customer feedback loops in mind and how Sequoia evaluates companies with regard to tempo. Be explicit and be greedy at every single step along the way about getting feedback. What is tempo? Vernal breaks down tempo into two separate ingredients: speed and consistency. It’s not just about going fast (which can often lead to some recklessness). It’s about s...