Product Framing Can Grow or Kill Your Startup. You Choose.

For Immediate Release: June 7, 2016

Startup sales and marketing specialist April Dunford is coming to Winnipeg to keynote and judge at Lift'Off, Manitoba's annual startup conference and investment competition taking place June 22, 2016 at the Hotel Fort Garry.

April Dunford is an entrepreneur who has enjoyed a number of successful exits and now is an angel investor, advisor and board member at five startups. She recently was lured back into the startup world as the CEO of Sprintly, a SaaS tool created to empower a more productive relationship between development teams and management.

As the founder of RocketWatcher Marketing, April has long been interested in how startups can be more successful in their marketing efforts through the use of planning, testing and metrics. Dunford's keynote talk at Lift'Off will focus on how product framing can help you grow your startup. "How you position your startup in the market is crucial to early startup success," says Dunford, "but it is rarely done consciously by startups, if at all."

Dunford says product framing is the act of providing context to help prospects understand what you are and why they should care. She says startups often jump to the conclusion that there is only one way to position their solution, but doing that generally plays to the strengths of the incumbents.

"We've historically been taught that "positioning" is critical to our businesses, but the way we've been instructed to do it is by creating a positioning statement," says Dunford. "Never has such a useless tool been so widely used," she says. "The fact that it produces a hilariously awkward franken-statement of meaningless mumbo jumbo isn't even the worst of it."

"That's the kind of direct advice that's become a hallmark of an April Dunford presentation," said Jan Lederman, President of Innovate Manitoba, who has heard Dunford speak on several occasions. "She provides one of the most enriching content-filled presentations you will ever hear."

An engineer by training, April has worked as a marketing and sales executive for most of her career. She has been head of marketing and sales at six startups, five of which had successful exits, including Tulip Retail, DataMirror (acquired by IBM), Janna Systems (acquired by Siebel Systems), Sitraka (acquired by Quest software), Watcom (acquired by Sybase). April also has been a marketing executive at a few larger companies where she has focused on launching and growing new product lines, including IBM, Nortel and Siebel Systems. She has launched a dozen products into market and has driven hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue.

"We are really fortunate to have April Dunford keynote Lift'Off," says Lederman. "She is a highly sought after startup advisor in central and eastern Canada, and now she has taken on a CEO role again. But she committed to doing this last fall and she's excited to be coming to Winnipeg. She is giving us an extra day to meet with local founders."

Innovate Manitoba's Lift'Off startup conference takes place June 22, 2016 at the Hotel Fort Garry. To learn more and register >

For more information or an interview:

Jan Lederman
President, Innovate Manitoba
jlederman@innovatemanitoba.com | (204) 284-9925