founders, VC's, mentors and startup experts.
So, should you require a Credit Card to get started in your SaaS Free Trial? TL:DR - By asking for a Credit Card up front, you will get fewer prospects into your Free Trial with no guarantee of converting more paying customers. Now, if you'd like to know why that is, read on ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
In my first couple of startups, I built things in the traditional order: product first, then audience. With Think Traffic, I started blogging first, then figured out which products and services to deliver. ...
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Via: Think Traffic
Founder of Think Traffic. Creator of Fizzle: Honest Online B |
When I advise entrepreneurs to build their own MVP many ask me, "what language should I use." Since technology is rarely a business risk for startups, I advise entrepreneurs to make the decision based on community instead. Pick a popular technology based on the availability of people who can help you when you get stuck. ...
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Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
When companies talk about their new product or service, they talk about what it does. Features, bullet points, checkboxes. Maybe, if they're particularly enlightened, they'll shift a bit and talk about what problems it will solve. What normal people tell their friends about a product or service, they talk about what it replaces ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
I've recently traded a series of interesting emails on the evolution of social products and how the things that worked years ago- importing addressbooks and blasting out invites, no longer work today. A friend of mine, Sangeet, wrote up a longer analysis on the topic and I wanted to share that with you today. Enjoy! ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Exploring the disruption caused by online and mobile platfor |
I am working on the weekly planner called Week Plan and I decided I needed someone to help me develop it while I focus on the other tasks of the business. Many people resist the idea of outsourcing so I thought I would show how I went through the process myself. ...
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Via: Ayemeric Gaurat
Working on http://taskarmy.com |
Product managers spend much of their time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to their teams. This includes everything from emails communicating decisions, to presentations communicating product roadmaps, to specs communicating product designs, to bug tickets communicating errors in the product. Mastering effective communication is known to be an accelerate to the dissemination of ideas ...
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Via: Sachin Rekhi
Entrepreneur, product guy, and software engineer. Founder & |
For many SaaS and Cloud providers, email will be the main fuel for your Engagement Engine that you use to drive potential customers through your Free Trial to conversion or to drive new customers to become deeply invested in your service. ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
Sometimes your customers know that you provide a feature they want, but for some reason, they don't use it. Why... Read more... You're reading Price is what you pay, Value is what you get. ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
When you're building a new product, you're often thinking about all the new things people are going to be able to do with it. Now they can do this, now they can do that. Exciting! But there's a better question to ask: What are people going to stop doing once they start using your product? What does your product replace? What are they switching from? How did they do the job ...
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Founder of 37signals. Co-author of REWORK. Credo: It's simpl |
Often if I give a talk or I speak with someone about getting their idea off the ground, the topic of how solid the product should be comes up. In particular, people very frequently wait far too long before launching. One of the key learning for me with Buffer was that the impact of problems people have and downtime they experience are directly tied to how we, as a startup, choose to handle it. ...
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Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
A startup CEO sent me a pained email the other day. The gist was that a competitor (loosely defined) had just released a great new feature to their product. That feature had been on the drawing board for this CEO for months, and they even had a prototype built. But they hadn't finished. ...
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Via: Nabeel Hyatt
entrepreneur, investor, geek, product guy. vc @ spark. |
Take a look at this image courtesy of Planet Money What you see are the annual revenue numbers for MegaBloks and Lego. Since Lego does not have (any more) exclusive rights to make the bricks, anyone can make them. And MegaBloks does. Its bricks are perfect replacement (as for as I know) for Lego bricks only cheaper. ...
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Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
It's okay if you don't know exactly where you're going - because things are always changing - just so long as you're focused on the Right Things. BUT, this is really hard at a startup precisely because everything is always changing. It's essential that your developers are okay with these points. ...
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Via: Hacker Chick
Hacker Chick ~ startup guardian angel ~ awesomely eclectic |
It's risky to try to improve any part of a product without understanding the job that it does for customers, and what their success criteria are. ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
Are you in Beta and getting ready to move to production? Did you already publish your prices on your website? Or are you thinking about running an extended Beta testing period for your new app? Well, you only get ONE chance to exit Beta... don't screw it up! ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
In my hurry to launch my first product, an eBook called The App Design Handbook, I almost made a mistake that would have cost me over $10,000, a mistake that I see being made with products all around the web. Luckily for me, a few people were kind enough to lead by example and show how important it was to fix this. ...
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Via: Think Traffic
Founder and Designer at Legend. App designer, writer, travel |
Founder Feedback gives you insight from the startup trenches. In a post from his blog, Dave Parker, Co-Founder and CEO of Bundled.com and Director of the Seattle Founder Institute, explains how to hypothesize appopriate product pricing. Instead of putting off pricing until the last minute, Founders should begin thinking about and planning their financial model early on. ...
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Husband, Dad, Entrepreneur, Board Member, Founder @OneAccord |
As consumers grow accustomed to automated payments and pay-per-use solutions, the benefits of fostering repetitive customer contact and creating recurring revenues through a subscription model are obvious. However, subscriptions should not be considered the end game for the billing world. ...
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Via: Marketing Profs
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Instagram: Bought for $1 billion, over 100 million users Dropbox: Worth $4 billion, over 100 million users Foursquare: Worth $760 million, 25 million users Twitter: Worth $8 billion, more than 500 million users What do all of these products have in common? Outside of being wildly successful, they are simple and have a small feature set. ...
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I work with @KISSmetrics. Likes: @TheRyanAdams, reading prod |
Language - be it Objective C, Chinese, Ruby, or Klingon - isn't something you learn through study, it's something you learn through use. The best way to learn how to build your startup MVP is to start building your startup MVP. ...
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Via: Kevin Dewalt
Startup founder(4x), investor(~20 deals), advisor(a lot). H |
By now we all know that successful startups focus on learning about their users -- figuring out what features, branding, and messaging resonate and perform best. Smart teams invest valuable time designing, building, testing, and iterating their own designs and prototypes based on learning from analytics and user studies.But don't forget to test your competitors' products too! ...
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Via: Design Staff
User Experience Designer, Prototyper, Storyteller. Partner a |
If you're trying to attract awesome developers, you need to create an awesome candidate experience (CX). Something that makes them go "WOW!". It's like UX -- but for the people interviewing to join your team. ...
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Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
In my 14 years of developing and launching products, I have launched early, late and at "just the right time". Truth is there is no "right time" if you have been working with customers and getting feedback. At that point the launch event tends to be largely a PR ...
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Via: Be a Force of Good
CEO in Residence, Microsoft Accelerator @msftaccelerator |
A lot of companies still talk about being in stealth mode and aiming for a big hoorah type launch. It doesn't usually work. Worse still, startups that are in stealth mode rarely talk to customers, prospects, users, partners or anyone else before their big reveal, which means they have little to no validation for what they're doing. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
how do people respond when they are presented a product or service without a corresponding price? I am specifically referring to situations where the seller invites the buyer to name his own price for something of value that is being offered by the seller. Evidence shows that when the user is asked to name his price he often quotes $0! ...
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Via: Filepicker.io
Co-Founder Filepicker.io. Growth hacker. Software sales & bi |
Neil Hunt, Chief Product Officer at Netflix, wrote a good answer on Quora to the question Why doesn't Netflix offer "Advanced Search" on their site? It's a great Product Management lesson: Nothing is purely additive unless everyone uses it. ...
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User experience design & strategy at @flow_sa. Contributor t |
You know how it goes in economic theory: To maximize your returns, you find the maximum price each of your customer segments is willing to pay and charge them that amount. In practice though, this doesn't always play out the way our Econ 101 professors taught us. ...
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Via: Venture Beat
Software Entrepreneur focusing on Team Productivity. Involv |
This post dives deep into how we're developing and launching Fizzle, our new video training platform for online business builders. A little over a month ago, we intentionally launched a very unfinished product. Functionality was missing, content was meager and many questions were unanswered, yet we opened the doors to real customers anyway, on a date we had scheduled months in advance. ...
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Via: Think Traffic
Founder of Think Traffic. Creator of Fizzle: Honest Online B |
Some people get excited about building something new that the world has never seen. Others get excited about making something more beautiful than it was before. Others like making things faster. And some others get off on making something less expensive. To differing degrees, these are all personal driving factors of mine as well. But the one that stands out above all the others is. ...
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Founder of 37signals. Co-author of REWORK. Credo: It's simpl |
I love, love, love numbers. But with time, touchy-feely neurons sprouted within my data brain. Minimum viable products, "release early, release often" philosophies, feedback loops, and A/B testing help optimization and decision-making but they can't guarantee that a product is awesome. ...
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Via: Elaine Wherry
co-founder of meebo |
I tend to get one particular question over and over. It is some variant on "How is the UX for my product/site?" In order to get in touch with some of your users, I'd recommend that you do the following: Figure out exactly what you are concerned about with your site or product. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
I do a lot of work with B2B SaaS / Web App / and Cloud companies - of all sizes - on Free Trial Optimization, helping them turn their Free Trial into a Customer-Acquisition Machine! Well, I was just asked about $1 Trials on Quora and at first, I didn't think I had much to say on the topic... but I guess I do ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
Can a services company like an app development house become a product company, and, as Silicon Valley VCs typically demand, command high multiples? ...
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Via: Venture Beat
I tweet about the web, social media, tech, and startups. Wr |
One topic that has been debated in the startup community forever is whether or not you should keep your startup in stealth mode until it is ready for the big release. Most people, especially the ones with experience, will tell you not to be afraid of someone stealing your idea and avoid being in stealth. ...
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Helping startups kick ass at marketing. Running a blog about |
In 1906 Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, observed that wealth was unequally distributed in Italy. He noted that 80% of the land and wealth was owned by 20% of the people. A similar relationship can be observed in the wealth and income across most countries. It turns out what Pareto observed isn't limited to wealth and income. ...
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Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
Wait what? INCREASED support requests? Isn't our goal at startups to reduce the support requests? After all, support requests means time taken away from developing code right? ...
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Via: Phil's Blawg
Startup guy, Founder of BudgetSimple, Soccer player, beer dr |
Many consumer Internet business executives are loyalists of the Lifetime Value model, often referred to as the LTV model or formula. Lifetime value is the net present value of the profit stream of a customer. This concept, which appears on the surface to be quite benign, is typically used to compare the costs of acquiring customers. ...
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Via: abovethecrowd.com
VC @Benchmark (investor @Twitter), blog: AboveTheCrowd, BOD |
The startup community operates in a world of "get out of the building." Of "write more specs". Of asking "should this project even be built"? This converges on a culture of "everything except the code." Have meetings about the featureset. Write documents about the featureset. Argue with other developers about the design. ...
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Via: Sealed Abstract
I run my own iOS development company. |
If you want funding, don't pay freelancers (or agencies) to have your first product version built. Doing so is a dead end, a trap, a red herring, and generally expensive. This trap is easy to fall into because investors truthfully claim that they need to see a product before they can invest. But they also need to see a product team, and hiring someone to build your version 1 does not bring you any ...
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Via: The Startup Toolkit
Founder at http://dex.io (get more speaking gigs). I talk & |
I recently wrote a blog post about how Mobile Startups are Failing Like it's 1999. The idea is that they are taking too long to ship their initial versions and then spending too much time between updates. As a result, they fail in a way that's reminiscent of 1999 "waterfall"-style product development practices. The post was meant to be a challenge to the whole tech community, and I got a bunch of ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
One way to minimize time spent creating documentation that will rarely be read and will constantly need updating is by creating prototypes. By creating a prototype of the primary workflow you're currently working on, your team can center around the interaction design in that workflow. Conversation is facilitated around that deliverable and the team can start building as the design is further refin ...
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Via: Johnny Holland
Jeff is a UX Designer, author of O'Reilly' Lean UX book, he |
What *exactly* should you do when you want to raise prices, especially on existing customers? ...
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Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
In the last week I've talked with a few early stage startup founders about pricing. It seems pricing is often a large block for many. It's understandable, since there are so many decisions to make: When do you start charging? How much do you charge? Do you have a free plan? Do you have a trial period? How many tiers do you have? If you're like I was, it can also be very difficult to imagine anyone ...
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Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
They raised their prices 10x and they made their customers HAPPIER! So I just had one of my quarterly Progress Check and Planning sessions with a Free Trial Dominator Premium Member - we'll call him "Larry" - who told me since they moved away from Freemium just 4 months ago to a Premium-only SaaS offering with a Free Trial they are now profitable and are on track to do $100,000 in revenue this mon ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
Give the text in this picture a read. Clearly Wright brothers had it all wrong - starting with customer segment, choosing one that not only had a pressing need but also had the budget to pay for it and charging for the product. Had they made it free for all, after all ...
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Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
First, for those that are not familiar with the term, time-boxing is not the same as time-limiting. Time-limiting is what we did in Waterfall. Teams would plan a schedule with 2-4 weeks of time to do "requirements and design" and then development would proceed after that. ...
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I'm a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, specializing |
What Is A Sprint? A Sprint is a term common in the development world were you focus on one core task or objective which you can complete in a short period of time. You essentially "sprint" to the outcome, disregarding everything else. There is another term that goes hand-in-hand with the Sprint concept known as an "Epic". An Epic is also an objective, but it's too big to be done in a sprint time f ...
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Blogger and Internet business entrepreneur from Australia |
For those SaaS companies who've offered a Free Trial and had it fail, it is hard to see how it could ever work. For those who've never offered a Free Trial, the idea of adding an extra 30 or 60 days to the sales cycle seems like a bad idea ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
I help SaaS and Cloud companies acquire - and keep - more cu |
There's been an illness going around startup land, a crippling disease that is paralyzing startups everywhere. This sickness is called fear of money, and thousands may be afflicted with this epidemic.A lot of startups, especially SaaS startups, are extending their free beta for far too long. So many companies seem scared of pulling the trigger and asking their users to give them a dollar, and evol ...
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Via: Ilya Lichtenstein
I've been driving traffic online for years. Now I'm building |
Developers are like olive oil. Valuable in a variety of settings. Full of substance and flavor. The good ones are a little peppery. Marketing people are like balsamic vinegar. Sometimes a little sweet. Sometimes a little acidic. Always capable of adding flavor and zing. ...
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Via: Numerate Choir
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Server Density does server monitoring to a) give you peace of mind when all is well and b) alert you really darn quickly when all isn't. (Sidenote: If you run a software business, you absolutely need some form of server monitoring, because the application being down costs you money and trust. I personally use Scout because of great Ruby integration options. ...
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Via: Kalzumeus Software
I'm a small software developer. Blog: http://www.kalzumeus. |
This article is geared toward aspiring founders and young business professionals in the SaaS industry. I wrote an article a while back about why I disagreed with a growing notion that non-technical co-founders ought to learn code. My assertion is that learning to program is a very intensive and time consuming task, not to mention one needs to figure out what language and framework to start with ...
I've invested in hundreds of companies that have started from scratch and I've been though some crazy number of product launches, especially if you include all of the TechStars companies I've been involved with. These alphas, or betas, or v1.0 or v0.1 launches are exciting moments as they signify the transition from an idea to a product. And, it's at that point that the real work begins. ...
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Via: Feld Thoughts
I'm a managing director at Foundry Group. I live in Boulder, |
Was it as amazing as you hoped for? I don't mean kinda-sorta amazing, I mean riding in on a unicorn with rainbows shooting out of its eyes amazing. Probably not. And if it did, the product you bought before that certainly didn't. ...
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Lars Lofgren helps businesses grow their profits using onlin |
We can break down how users interact with a product into two stages. At the first stage, a user has yet to use the product. Getting people to start using a product has greater business impact, but designers often expend too little effort at this stage. At the second stage, the user is actually using the product, and that is when usability plays a critical role. Let's look at a few examples to illu ...
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Via: UXmatters
A respected user experience strategist and architect, Frank |
In my previous columns, I've framed my discussions around the practice of information architecture. To recap, the DSIA Research Initiative--of which I am the curator--defines the practice of information architecture as "the effort of organizing and relating information in a way that simplifies how people navigate and use content on the Web." ...
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Via: UXmatters
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One of the seminal moments in the early days of the Web 2.0 era, was a simple default setting. At launch, a new photo service called Flickr set the default on images shared to "public". This was a stark contrast to the rest of their competitors at the time who all defaulted to private. This default to "public" had such a powerful effect on unlocking the network effects of this new service, and era ...
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Via: Bryce DOT VC
VC, Dad |
The Swiss Army knife is a remarkable product. By combining many products of low utility, it becomes a product of some utility. This is one of the rare occasions where a core product gets better by adding mediocre features. ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
We just hit 53 full-time people at Treehouse. I've never managed this many people before so I'm having to learn as I go. I have zero formal training in management or business. I love it though, as I have a naively fresh view on how to run the company. One of the biggest challenges I'm encountering is how to align everyone's goals and communicate them clearly. To tackle this, we're creating a set o ...
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Via: The Naive Optimist
I'm a Father, entrepreneur and lover of movies. Founder and |
It was difficult to estimate what could fit into two weeks. We were crunching to squeeze everything in at the last minute, which is never good for stress levels or quality. And we were spending too much time in meetings - planning the release in advance, during the release for status updates, and after the release to evaluate what happened. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
Until you start shipping regularly and thinking about everything in terms of how quickly you can get usage and test your assumptions, it's easy to imagine that things will often go to plan. The crazy part is, in my experience, the more likely case is that things won't go to plan. ...
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Via: joel.is
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Recently I was with my friend Jeff Patton, one of the pioneers in applying Agile to product organizations, and he told that he has been advocating the term "Opportunity Backlog" as an alternative to the product roadmap. I have written earlier about the problems with old-style product roadmaps, so I immediately liked this and wanted to do my part to try to spread this concept. ...
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I'm a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, specializing |
Many of us tend to get pissed the moment Facebook changes something, or Twitter adds promoted tweets, or Instagram sells itself, or Lore doesn't work. Count me among them. But are we entitled to get that upset? We receive these services for free and enjoy a multitude of benefits from using them. ...
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Via: Creativity Unbound
Marketer, Blogger, Believer in Sharing, Chief Innovation Off |
Two of these areas cannot be outsourced: product management and project management. Product management looks outside the building, discovering people with problems that need to be resolved, understanding what are these problems and how these problems can be transformed into a web product. ...
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Co-founder of @LightPointSec - a web security startup. Proje |
Rather than rehash anecdotes of terrible pitches, I've collected a series of best practices, extracted from the best demos. Keep it short - Beyond wanting to fit in multiple demos, there's a good reason we keep demos to just a few minutes. With attention spans dwindling, you're racing against the clock before they lose interest and start flipping around on twitter. You may think the audience needs ...
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Via: Zvi Band
hacker/founder/community builder. CEO of @contactually (back |
I wanted to offer some thoughts on pitching versus product planning. In an effort to impress investors, we've all steered our products towards what we think is sexy or investable, versus what is most likely to work for consumers. I've come to believe that this is a kind of Silicon Valley disease, and we should try hard to avoid it. ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
This last weekend, I watched Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview. It's great for many, many reasons, and I wanted to write an important point I seized upon during the talk. Make it insanely great, even while you copy, steal, reinvent, or invent whatever you need to make that happen. ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
The problem with casting a wide net and attempting to attract anyone that sort of needs what you do is that sometimes it works. Look through your client roster and tell me about your most troubling clients. The ones that came to you based on price, left and came back for the same reason ...
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Via: Duct Tape Marketing
Small business marketing consultant, speaker and author of D |
"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole," an HBS professor named Theodore Levitt famously told his students. Too often, marketers get wrapped up in the features and functions of their products, rather than solving the actual problems of the consumer. That leads to a lot of one-upmanship versus competition and over-bundled products ...
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Via: Tom FishBurne
Marketoonist and Founder of Marketoon Studios (http://market |
Everyone can tell you that building a big web project, one that's going to handle millions of users, withstand the force of a thousand monkeys with typewriters and look damn sexy doing it requires a cacophony of small (but efficient) services. ...
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Via: Fruit Business
A geek with a hat |
There is no such thing as an “inactive user” in a Free Trial. You can’t be a “user” if you aren’t “using,” right? Makes sense. I think we get confused because in software the “user” connotation comes from the fact that a user is literally someone for whom an access account has been created. For [...]Free Trial Users are a Vanity Metric is ...
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Via: SaaS Marketing
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Alert: Are you sure you want to proceed? In his seminal book, The Humane Interface, the late Jef Raskin, one of the original Apple Designers, described inefficient interfaces as those that required user input but provided nothing in return. He provided as an example a Mac dialogue box from over 12 years ago (shown below) which had an efficiency rating of 0 (effort in and nothing out). ...
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Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
Sometimes, the search for pricing proxies can lead to absurdity. I once heard someone from a prominent hardware company tell a story about how his company had offered two versions of a printer. The cheaper model was identical to the more expensive one, except the cheaper one printed fewer pages per minute. To accomplish this, the cheaper one had an additional chip that forced it to slow down. ...
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Via: chris dixon's blog
Founder & investor |
Back in the early days of Forrst, when there were just a few hundred people signed up, and perhaps only a few dozen using it on any given day, I was naturally the most prolific user -- I didn't realize it then, but it's so important to be your own best user ...
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Via: Kyle Bragger
Founded @forrst. Married to @fameandfrippery. Writing http:/ |
SaaS is widely accepted as the way software (with a few exceptions) should be developed and delivered. SaaS is the industry standard, not something revolutionary or cutting edge. Today, you'd have to be insane to be working on software to be delivered as a locally installable application. ...
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Via: kashflow
33, Founder and CEO of KashFlow - Leading UK SaaS Accounting |
In my previous post, I said that teams need to stop shipping features and focus on creating value. I promised a tactical view of how an existing organization. 10 Characteristics of a Lean* product team: ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
As marketers, bloggers, or business owners, you will most likely come to deal with the process of pricing your products or services. The thing is, many folks struggle with this process because although they understand their customer's needs, they aren't experience with what to charge people for their work. Below I've analyzed a few recent research studies that dive into pricing of products and ser ...
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Dropping science like a kid from Catholic school. Latest pro |
Many companies I meet are confused about roles and responsibilities. They're not sure the difference between product managers and project managers, or between product managers and product marketing, or between product managers and interaction designers, as just a few common examples. I have strong opinions about what roles are critical to success ...
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I'm a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, specializing |
What do I mean by Agile 1.0? Agile 1.0 is all about production, i.e. shipping features in an effective manner. In Agile 1.0, the stakeholder is called the "customer" (which is crazy when you think about it). In Agile 1.0, dev is too often an order-taker, not a strategic partner in the business. ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
If you have a bunch of custom white label deals, each with their own branches of software and service level agreements to maintain that can create a lot of friction for a buyer. In the worst case it can kill the deal if the buyer does not want to take on the obligations. At the least, you won't get full value in the exit price from this business as they will likely be buying you for your direct b ...
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Via: Mark MacLeod
Seed investor for SaaS, e-commerce and other awesome startup |
Eric Paley of Founder Collective facilitated an awesome panel at the 2012 Nantucket Conference around startups whose businesses are built on the contributions not of their employees but of people in the communities they've created: uTest, Skillshare, and GrabCAD. In each case, without their community (testers, teachers or engineers, respectively) - there is no business. ...
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Via: Hacker Chick
Hacker Chick ~ startup guardian angel ~ awesomely eclectic |
The one common startup mistake that I see many people, not only habitually making but bragging about, involves over complicating your product. For most first time and seasoned tech entrepreneurs, the natural desires to make your product a Swiss Army knife of useless crap can be hard to resist. ...
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Via: VooDoo Anthology
Former special operations combat veteran turned writer and e |
While product managers are often the greatest allies UX professionals can have, in spite of the many positive aspects of our relationships with them, there is some inherent tension between us. ...
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Via: UXmatters
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Choosing the freemium business model can be brilliant or deadly. The difference lies not only in the execution of the marketing, but also in the nature of your product and the design of your business. Can you coordinate all three to become sustainably freemium by making a profit? ...
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Via: Wensing
Pricing, segmentation, and #HackerDad tips. Co-founder & CE |
One of the most defensible positions for a startup is if you can achieve the network effect. The network effect is so strong that it has kept large companies in business for a long time, despite bad products and numerous competitors. Craigslist is a perfect example. ...
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Via: brianbalfour
Founder of Boundless Learning, Viximo, PopSignal |
Most entrepreneurs I know are individually very innovative, but a successful startup can't be a one-man show (for long). That means they need to build an innovative team, which is not a skill that most people are born with. In fact, some very innovative individuals, known as 'idea people' or inventors, often end up creating the most dysfunctional teams. ...
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Veteran startup mentor, executive, blogger, author, tech pro |
Creating a shared understanding among stakeholders is crucial and that UX is really the best-positioned team to facilitate this. I have a specific idea of what a shared understanding means. Shared understanding means that everyone knows what will be built and why it will be built that way. ...
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Via: Johnny Holland
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If it takes talking to 200 people to get those 10, that's not a good sign. You might think "5% conversion is pretty good," but not when you're getting face-time. If the founder sits down with what ought to be the perfect customer and chats for an hour and cannot convince more than one in twenty of the value of the project, it's too difficult to sell. ...
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Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
Since different businesses require different approaches to customer development, I want to make sure we have a wide range of startups on here sharing their stories. With that, I’m very excited to introduce Mark Horoszowski. Mark is CEO at MovingWorlds, a B2B social enterprise that’s in the midst of its validating it’s business model. He’ll [...] ...
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Co-founder at MovingWorlds. Social Entrepreneur Empowering S |
Product management isn't a role or a function, it's a set of skills. Those skills help remove obstacles and grease the wheels so that the functional experts can do their jobs best. Product management also balances the needs of users, the business and the team and makes the difficult tradeoffs needed to keep pressing ahead. In that way, Product Managers are very similar to CEOs. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
Companies that challenge the belief that more is better create products that are elegant in their simplicity. Bang ...
Preceden, a web-based timeline maker that I run, is free to try but costs $39 once to upgrade to a pro account, which let's you add an unlimited number of events to your timelines. Conveying this limitation to visitors has always been a bit tricky. The more I emphasize the cost, the lower the conversion rate is. However, you don't want to hide the cost completely, as that's both dishonest and wou ...
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Via: Matt Mazur
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There are three pillars to a successful digital startup: engineering, design and business. Those roles can be split amongst people or shared amongst multi-disciplinary individuals, but above all build a culture where each feels valued, where trust and collaboration can thrive, and where everyone feels motivated to excel. ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
You'd expect that the people who pay the most feel more entitled to support, and thus ask for more of it. So if the cheapest customers truly require the most support, why is that? At first, I intuitively assumed it was a matter of character: like people who pinch hotel slippers and airline blankets, they simply wanted to extract the most value out of any situation. ...
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Via: SachaGreif.com
Designer from Paris, now living in Osaka. Creator of @YoFoly |
I've been building a new product and I'm almost ready to launch it. However, I'm having a really hard time figuring out the right pricing structure so I'm going to analyze my favorite Freemium SaaS businesses. ...
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Via: On Startups
Entrepreneur. Founder/CTO @HubSpot inbound marketing and st |
There's a traditional, somewhat logical, pattern to how business has always been done. The seller describes a product or service, promise benefits, maybe even paints a rosy picture of the prospective buyer's life with said product or service, and asks the buyer to pay a set price in order to acquire it. ...
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Via: Duct Tape Marketing
Small business marketing consultant, speaker and author of D |
We have always offered a 60 day trial, one of the longest in our industry. I decided to drop it to 14 days - one of the shortest. The reasoning for this was that of those that didn't convert into paying customers after the trial, by far the most cited reason was that they didn't get a chance to take a look. ...
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Via: kashflow
33, Founder and CEO of KashFlow - Leading UK SaaS Accounting |
The definition of an "engaged user" varies from product to product. For a to-do app an engaged user should be logging in every day to add and complete items whereas for an invoicing app an engaged user might only log in once per month. There is no consistent quantifiable definition of engagement across different products. ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
It's very surprising to see a post entitled "Please Don't Learn to Code" at the top of Hacker News, and even more surprising that its author would be Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror and StackOverflow fame. Jeff is arguing that not everybody needs to learn to code, and in fact the world doesn't need more mediocre coders. ...
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Via: SachaGreif.com
Designer from Paris, now living in Osaka. Creator of @YoFoly |
You will (probably) learn: Is it usable? Can people figure out how to navigate through your product? You will not learn: Is it useful? Would they bother if you weren't there in the room watching them? Are your calls-to-action compelling? Will people actually click them? ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
There has been a lot of discussion in the design world recently about "change aversion." Most of the articles about it seem to be targeting the new Google redesign, but I've certainly seen this same discussion happen at many companies when big changes aren't universally embraced by users. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
The idea that customers can't or shouldn't participate much in the innovation process is one barrier to creativity that companies are rapidly knocking down. Many firms are rethinking their businesses, envisioning themselves less as providers of internally-created products and services, and more as platforms that allow customers to create their own experience and value. This new view and way of ope ...
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Bill Lee is a business consultant and professional speaker w |
There are 3 types of data that every product manager or application owner should have easy access to: User Activity, Product Usage, and Revenue. ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
Over the years, we have seen many businesses adopt a per-project or per-user pricing structure, which pushes customers to re-evaluate the value of the products they are using. Not only does this run the risk of losing customers, but it goes as far as punishing them for their loyalty. Why would any company chose to lose customers? More than that, why would they punish them for using their products? ...
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Via: ZURB Blog
ZURB is a close-knit team of product designers who help comp |
If two companies have the same revenue, one from a few large customers and the other from many little customers, which is better? Which would you rather build? ...
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Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
At the center of that value proposition is you. What problems do you understand uniquely well? What can you deliver uniquely well? What sort of disruptive business model can you bring to bear? Be true to yourself and play from a position of strength. A little self-awareness can go a long way in crafting a value proposition with power. ...
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Via: Venture Beat
Former entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Twitter handl |
I recently ran across yet another situation where an entrepreneur was reluctant to launch early. He had two urges. He wanted to continue polishing the UX to make it more mainstream-ready. He also wanted to add more features and options to appeal to a broader range of customers. Here was my advice: ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
One month ago on March 20 I released a short eBook entitled "Step by Step UI Design". Since then, I've sold the eBook over 2000 times and almost reached $10,000 in profits. A lot of people have asked me for more details about how I wrote, launched, and promoted the book, so here is a post-mortem to see what went right, what went wrong, and what you can learn from my own experience. ...
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Via: SachaGreif.com
Designer from Paris, now living in Osaka. Creator of @YoFoly |
In startups, a succinct explanation of what a PM does is to translate the product vision into an actual execution plan by delivering the right features at the right time. Here is a snapshot of what PM duties may be in your startup ...
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Co.Founder @TripLingo, an avid member of the tech / startup |
You've got your vision of what you want to build. You've also got a ton of unknowns and uncertainty. You know you can't just go build it and hope they will come. You have to do it iteratively. Put a little bit out there, see how people react, figure out what to do next. But where do you start? How much is enough to start getting feedback? ...
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Via: Hacker Chick
Hacker Chick ~ startup guardian angel ~ awesomely eclectic |
We live in a fast-paced, time-strapped, multi-tasking world. Most Web users are lazy; they want instant gratification with minimal effort. For startups, it is a challenging landscape because they may only get a single, short-lived shot to attract a potential user. Even if your product is useful, interesting or valuable, it also has to be immediately captivating. ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
It is an unfortunate fact that many startups talk to people like me (or their investors or their advisors or "industry experts") instead of talking to their users. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
As I've mentioned many times before: churn (the rate at which customers cancel their subscription) is the most important metric for any recurring revenue business. This should make sense. The longer a customer keeps paying you, the more valuable that customer is. ...
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Via: Mark MacLeod
Seed investor for SaaS, e-commerce and other awesome startup |
I have written earlier about the differences between user prototypes (simulations intended to test the user experience), and live-data prototypes (actual code intended to send live traffic to in order to test real behavior). ...
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I'm a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, specializing |
Jarrod released his eBook about Design on exactly the same say as Sacha. He earned more money while selling only 1/6th as many books. Here's how, and why it's sometimes the best strategy. ...
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Via: A Smart Bear
Bootstrapper. Designer+developer. Author of http://Bootstrap |
let's assume a startup's messaging, value propositions and benefits are well-articulated and clear. Congratulations, but if you want someone to sign up for your service, there’s another big hurdle to overcome: the registration process. Don’t Ask for Too Much Info ...
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Via: Mark Evans Tech
Startup marketer, conference organizer, hockey player, dad, |
Pricing strategy starts with customer segments and their needs. You cannot serve all segments, you need to make choices. Choose the segments you can target and deliver them a product at a price they are wiling to pay. ...
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Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
Early adopters desire the new functionality you claim to provide. They are willing to accept instability, poor usability, limited integrations and other faults just to gain this new technology.You're reading Running Closed Betas: Which Users, and How Long?, a post from the Intercom Blog. Intercom is a powerful CRM and mess ...
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Via: The Intercom Blog
COO at @Intercom. I speak & write about UX, Customer Acquisi |
All startups have to decide the trade-off between time and money. I will point out a set of problems where throwing money is optimal in 99% of the situations. Programmer time is VERY expensive. Anything plumbing (like mail handling, source code hosting, live deployment, server management, bounce rate tracking, newsletter lists), should not be done in-house if you can avoid it, especially in the b ...
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Via: Archit
Making Indian Taxes fantastically simple online. #Delhi # |
Intuitively, we tend to see prices as a consequence of a product's inherent worth, and marketers everywhere want to keep it that way. But psychologists know that prices have a lot more power than that: the right pricing can greatly contribute to a product's perceived worth, or even make the entirety of it (ever heard of diamonds?). ...
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Via: A Smart Bear
I'm an entrepreneur and designer from Paris. I'm the founder |
Recently KashFlow CEO Duane Jackson made the decision to reduce the trial periods offered on his product from 60 days down to 14. In blogging about this change, Jackson explained the decision saying; "We analysed our trial data and found that the vast majority of people who never converted from free trial to paid-up had logged into the software only once or twice." ...
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Via: Cloudave
Tech analyst, commentator and evangelist. Entrepreneur. Biz |
We all know the IDEO maxim, "Fail Faster, Succeed Sooner." Rapid prototyping is a key principle of successful innovation. The sooner we make prototypes, the sooner we figure out what works, what doesn't, and what to make in the next prototype. ...
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Via: Tom FishBurne
Marketoonist and Founder of Marketoon Studios (http://market |
Once in a while I find myself in a product or strategy or biz dev discussion at a startup which goes something like: "we are doing xyz to defend against". My reaction is to ask whether xyz is also part of what the startup was trying to build in the first place. If the answer is no, then I will argue strongly that they shouldn't do it at all. ...
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Via: Continuations
VC at http://usv.com |
Paul MacCready recognized that his competitor was spending up to a year on a single design before launching it. These teams would finally complete their designs and then promptly lose a year's worth of work when it inevitably crashed. They didn't do any interim testing because their machines, once destroyed, took months to rebuild. ...
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Via: TheBlogOfAJKessler
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Imitation is an easy trap product designers can easily get stuck in. The desire to be the next Facebook or the next [insert a popular social media product here] is tempting. But as we've said before, imitation is suicide. Yet, product designers continue to be dead serious about imitating what's popular and the argument has been made that they should be. Or has it? ...
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Via: ZURB Blog
ZURB is a close-knit team of product designers who help comp |
At Rackspace an employee on the phone with a customer during a troubleshooting session heard the customer tell someone in the background that they were getting hungry. As she tells it, "So I put them on hold, and I ordered them a pizza. About 30 minutes later we were still on the phone, and there was a knock on their door. I told them to go answer it because it was pizza! They were so excited." ...
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Debunking the top 3 Small Business Pricing Urban Legends. #1 - You can set your prices using your competitor's prices. #2 - Just set your prices lower than everyone else. #3 - Charge what feels right. ...
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Via: Carol Roth Blog
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We analysed our trial data and found that the vast majority of people who never converted from free trial to paid-up had logged into the software only once or twice. It could be argued that this just means they quickly determined the software wasn't for them and went off into the sunset never to be seen again. Maybe. ...
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Via: kashflow
33, Founder and CEO of KashFlow - Leading UK SaaS Accounting |
I believe if you intend to charge for your product, you should start testing pricing even before you build your MVP. Remember from the last post, that pricing is part of the product. Not only does this approach delay validation because it's too easy to say yes, but a lack of strong customer "commitment" can also be detrimental to optimal learning. ...
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Via: Spark59
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
Reacting well to competition requires critical analysis of your own product and its shortcomings, and a complete, open-minded understanding of why people might choose your competitors. They're not fanboys. They're not brainwashed by "marketing". Your competitors' customers aren't passing on your product because they're stupid or irrational. They're choosing your competitors for good reasons ...
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Via: Marco.org
Creator of Instapaper. Amateur writer. Coffee nut. |
Power users are your evangelists, your backup QA testers, and your visionaries. They're also by far the easiest to get in touch with (just try to avoid them - they'll find you.) It would be stupid to blindly ignore their feedback. It's also really hard to tell sometimes: is this an issue that only affects the power users? Or is it a universal thing, and they were just the first to detect it? ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
There are many reasons why usability professionals don't use statistics and I've heard most of them. Many of the reasons are based on misconceptions about what you can and can't do with statistics and the advantage they provide in reducing uncertainly and clarifying our recommendations. Checkout the nine of the more common misconceptions. ...
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Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
An optimal price is one that is accepted but not without some initial resistance. It is your job to both set that price and convince the customer... Pricing is considered more art than science but in the next series of posts I'd like to explore tactics for demystifying how to set and test pricing. ...
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Via: Swombat on Startups
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"Pretotype It" by Alberto Savoia lists seven techniques for determining that you are "building the right product before you invest in building your product right." Bold text is from the book, my comments are mixed in below each one. ...
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Via: Sean Murphy
New Technology Product Introduction Focused on Early Custome |
I'd like to take everyone's advice and talk to potential customers and investors about my ideas, but what if someone else steals my idea? If a competitor got ahold of this - especially a well-funded one - I could die before I ever got started! Don't VCs do that? Almost all founders I encounter are leery about discussing their product plans. Now with the Social Network movie promulgating this fear, ...
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Via: A Smart Bear
Keyword, buzzword, half-truth, adjective, hey look at me! |
Anyone working on getting their first product out to market will often have the feeling that their product isn't quite ready. Or even once it's out and being used, nothing will seem as perfect as they could be, and if you only did X, Y, and Z, then it woould be a little better... it leads to unlaunched products that are endlessly iterated upon without a conclusion. ...
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Via: Andrew Chen Blog
Bay Area entrepreneur, blogger, formerly in online ads and v |
Somebody asked me the other day how can they charge more for their product. Like way more than people are used to paying for products in that category. The solution: create a new product category. Many companies have done this successfully. All you have to do is call your product something else and build a different kind of experience around it. ...
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Via: ConversionXL
I make websites sell. Conversion optimization pro. Founder o |
Yes, you "know" that your power users are different (more vocal, more active, more tech-savvy, more exploratory) than your mainstream users. But do you know HOW MUCH different they are? Chances are, they're not 10% more active. They're not 20% more expert. It's probably more like 100%. 200%. 500%. ...
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Via: Cindy Alvarez
Making people more awesome through building better software. |
There is a pretty common fear that people have. They're concerned that if they ship something that isn't ready, they'll get hammered and lose all their customers. Startups who have spent many painstaking months acquiring a small group of loyal customers are hesitant to lose those customers by shipping something bad. I get it. It's scary. Sorry, cupcake. Do it anyway. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
Recently I started reading the book Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky in attempt to find new ideas about how to run a great company... My favorite idea is the weekly project review instituted by Steve Jobs. Here's how the Apple executive team weekly project review works: ...
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Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
Your first sales goal is to get as many of the the right set of customers signed up as possible. You can absolutely A/B test your way into a successful launch. A launch with a laser focus, the right price, and a line around the block of people shaking fistfuls of money to give you. Here is how ...
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If you've considered using unmoderated remote usability testing with video here are answers to several questions you might have. I hosted a live webinar sponsored by the folks at Userzoom and Usertesting.com. The topic was best practices for remote unmoderated usability testing and in it I walked through the results of a comparative usability benchmark analysis ...
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Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
Being a great product leader is hard. Every organization and process is different, and in many cases your are responsible for the outcome without having the authority to enforce decisions. My recent blog post on Being a Great Product Leader was an attempt to capture the specifics of how to lead a great, cross-functional software team ...
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Via: Psychohistory
Inevitably optimistic |
If you want your start-up to become the next big thing, it's not good enough to just build a great product. Unless you can afford to buy users, you'll have to grow virally. The difference between getting one of your new users to convince one friend to sign up and that person getting two new ...
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Co-Founder and CEO of @Yipit. Sharing lessons learned as a f |
Have you ever left a website because it was too slow? Go ahead, raise your hand — I know I have. The speed of a site is analogous to the traveling speed on a road. If you're driving along on one road and traffic starts to slow down, you'll take a different route ...
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Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
I was talking to a company the other day, and they had just done a major redesign of their product. Unfortunately, as soon as they released it, they started getting customer complaints. They had removed a particular feature from the main part of the product, and paying customers started to scream. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
Last week I was working in a web-based product and I came across a feature that didn't fit. By didn't fit I mean that it felt out of place and there's no way it's potentially usable by 80% of the users. I'd be amazed if more than 1% of the customers have ever used it. ...
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Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
Look, I know that building a product with one or two engineers and no money is tough. As an entrepreneur, you almost certainly have far more ideas than you have resources to create those ideas. And it doesn't help that you have people like me screaming, "Ship it! Ship it!" before you're really ready. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
Most startups are so busy racing around that they rarely take the time to evaluate and improve their own processes. It's unfortunate, because as a startup matures it won't be able to function the same way it did at the very beginning. Once you throw in users, customers, more code, freelancers, more employees, etc. ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
It's often called web surfing or web browsing, but it probably should be called web doing. While there is still plenty of time to kill using the web, in large part, we're all trying to get things done. Purchasing, reserving, comparing and communicatingInternet behavior is largely a goal directed activity. If a website doesn't help users accomplish their goals then it's unlikely users will ...
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Via: Measuring Usability
Please follow @MeasuringU this account is no longer used. |
Entrepreneurs spend a lot of time building great products. But in today’s competitive startup environment, it’s not enough just to build a great product. You have to build a product that keep users coming back to your site. ...
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Via: vcdave
Investor, operator, and entrepreneur |
There is a startup proverb that says you have to be 10x better than your competition to get people to switch. A related one is that you should concentrate on being a painkiller as opposed to a vitamin.Certainly if you're 10x better or are a real painkiller, your job of getting people to switch will be easier. Nevertheless, I've come to think there is an easier way to get people to really try out y ...
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Via: Gabriel Weinberg
Founder, DuckDuckGo. Angel investor. Family guy. |
If you can’t code but aspire to start a Web business, odds are you feel just like the ostrich. Ostriches can’t fly, and to add insult to injury, they’re one of the largest bird species out there. They have to … ...
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Via: Venture Beat
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I talk to a lot of very small companies that are trying to do Customer Development, and the conversations are often the same. The entrepreneur explains that the company is working on a fabulous product, and they want to figure out a) if anybody wants to buy the product and b) if they need to change anything about the product so that more people will buy it. ...
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Via: Users Know
Principal at Users Know. Director of Product & UX at One J |
MIT’s Entrepreneurship Center asked me to give an Agile Product Management workshop for their Hacking IAP course. The course is a special seminar in management they’re doing for MIT student entrepreneurs. It takes place over the IAP (January) term and is open to all MIT students that have startups already underway. The first week of [...] ...
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Via: Hacker Chick
Hacker Chick ~ startup guardian angel ~ awesomely eclectic |
We all would like to believe there is nothing like our product or service. After all we are innovators and our vision is to change the way people do things. The investor pitch deck from a startup, Everest, sums up this attitude Let us take all such claims at face value and treat every one [...] ...
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Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
While a global presence is necessary for any organization hoping to connect with customers around the world, placing reliance on one prevailing strategy is just the beginning. In any web strategy, including social and also mobile media, localization is king. ...
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Via: Social Media Today
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Solis |
Many newbie entrepreneurs think they know exactly what the market wants. I know this, because I used to be exactly like that. But time and bitter experience has taught me – I don’t know what the market wants. And you reading this, neither do you. Let me explain. Your range of experience in this world [...] ...
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Via: Max Klein
I'm an average software developer who sells products on the |
Two years back we saw the story of Starbucks price increase. Despite widespread criticism in the news media we saw no real ill effect on its sales or brand. You know why from here (elasticity) and here (demand curve shifts). Now they are rolling out price increases to the rest of the country. I want to point [...] ...
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Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
(Powered by LaunchBit) (Powered by LaunchBit) It’s fairly well understood at this point that performance is a critical aspect of building for the web. Better performance typically means better results (for whatever you’re trying to get people to do.) E-commerce transactions go up. Sign-up conversions go up. And so on. The same holds true with B2B / enterprise software. People will ov ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
Happy New Year! The last year has seen many changes in the world of product management. Yet, with all these changes, we can all expect ever more exciting trends, processes, and, especially, products in 2012! Continue reading → ...
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Via: The Product Guy
product, technology, & content strategist |
The vast majority of executives who say, "I want to be just like Apple", have no idea what it really takes to achieve that level of success. What they're saying is they want to be adored by their customers, they want to launch sexy products that cause the press to fall all over themselves, and they want to experience incredible financial growth. But they generally want to do it on the cheap. ...
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Via: Conversation Agent
Sr. Director Strategy, Empathy Lab. [Make sense. Make do. Ma |
The first stage of a startup, what I call the Building Product stage is management light. The team should be small. We have portfolio companies like del.icio.us and duck duck go where the Building Product stage was accomplished by one... ...
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Via: AVC
I am a VC |
It’s been a tough week on the technical front, with a variety of products failing to perform their core functions for me. Which prompts a somewhat emotional question for those of us who oversee products (or services) for a living: … Continue reading → ...
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Tech start-up veteran, product executive, writer (The Art of |
When Amazon introduced its Kindle Fire it positioned it as a direct competition to Apple’s expensive iPad. In a letter published in its landing page, Mr. Bezos drew a clear distinction between Apple’s pricing strategy and Amazon’s pricing strategy. Apple was not explicitly named in the letter, but not hard for all to see who [...] ...
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Via: Iterative Path
Practicing Effective Pricing |
A cried a little on a plane last week. It wasn’t due to a delay, an uncomfortable seat, or peanut salt getting in my eye. It was because I saw a shining example of “social business” at work in the real world. Mid-way on a Southwest Airlines flight home from a speaking engagement in Ft. ...
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Via: Convince & Convert
Hype-free social media strategist & keynote speaker. Tequila |
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