founders, VC's, mentors and startup experts.
This is part of my 4-year bootstrapping retrospective. Part 1: Why Bootstrapping Was The Only Logical Choice. A couple months ago, I found something I wrote accidentally on Hacker News. Having vitriol spewed at me. (Surprise! Some might say those two phrases are redundant! ...
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Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
WTF!?, I cried as I discovered that half of all the company's cash equivalents suddenly had been withdrawn from its bank account. But when I found out who had made the withdrawal, I realized. We had not been screwed. We had been robbed. Investors' money, my face. It was gone. A short week earlier the company had held a board meeting. The director of the board and my co-founder (who' ...
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Via: The Methodologist
Founder of Business Model Press. Lecturer of entrepreneurshi |
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 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 |
Hey, there. Four years ago this December, my husband and I launched our first software as a service, Freckle Time Tracking. Since then, it's grossed nearly $700,000, and we've grown, shrunk, hired, fired, stagnated and worked our tails off. To celebrate, I'm writing a series of blog posts about what we've learned. ...
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Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
It's now 2 years since I launched Buffer, and the company has grown from just myself (working from my bedroom) to a team of 7. It seems rather obvious in hindsight, but only after growing a team over 2 years have I realised just how gradual and progressive building a startup culture is. ...
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Via: joel.is
Founder of @bufferapp, a smarter way to share. Focused on th |
A growing startup can be bliss. When Circle of Friends was growing rapidly, I'd wake up suddenly at three AM, my heart jumping with a mix of excitement and nervousness. Because our technology was brittle, I'd walk out to the kitchen and look at my laptop to make sure the site hadn't crashed. And I'd notice that, amazingly, our traffic for the period between midnight and three AM was our highest e ...
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Via: Numerate Choir
http://t.co/rPjQvufk; help w/ data/growth (@500startups); st |
Sree Vijaykumar is the founder of TradeBriefs, which helps every professional become an industry expert through daily email newsletters. Sree explains how he acquired 400,000 subscribers to his newsletter. ...
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Via: 500 Startups
Entrepreneur, Thinker, Doer in Online Media and Retail. Libe |
Deciding to build a second product is a very difficult decision. Especially when you're a small bootstrap company. While we do well with our main product, HelpSpot, we don't have a lot of cash to just throw around. So in planning Snappy, I knew we had to maximize our dollars. I'd much rather spend money on the top notch developers we've hired than other consultants or services. ...
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Via: Ian Landsman
Founder of UserScape. Creators of http://www.helpspot.com an |
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 |
An entrepreneur named Nick Jones recently reached out to me after reading The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development. Nick is the founder of Lavish Longboards. "Skateboards?", you might be asking yourself? Yes, I might answer you, "skateboards". You might then ask, "But don't Lean Startup and Customer Development only pertain to technology startups?" ...
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Via: Vlaskovits
CMO at @GetDrumbi. Wrote The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustD |
Here are some examples of startups that did very well focusing on one marketing technique (and some who are still doing it). While I am not privy to why they chose the technique they did, they are all consistently improving over time. ...
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Via: Be a Force of Good
CEO in Residence, Microsoft Accelerator @msftaccelerator |
Paul Gollash, the founder and CEO of Voxy, just came and spoke at our NYC Lean Startup meetup, and I wanted to share some of his stories. These notes are from my memory, but hopefully reasonably accurate. Voxy is a language learning startup that is around 2 years old ...
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Via: Giff Constable
MD at Neo in New York; maker, designer, entrepreneur, and ag |
I wrote the post ExactTarget and Pardot Join Forces detailing how we had just sold our company and were super excited about the future. Today, I want to talk a bit about the human side of selling a business -- it's incredibly emotional ...
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Via: David Cummings
10-20 tweets per week. Tech entrepreneur who enjoys family, |
Despite the recent success of this blog over the past year (250,000 uniques, hundreds of new subscribers, republished in Lifehacker and others) the truth is that I've been a failed blogger for far more time than I've been a successful one. ...
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Via: Dan Shipper
UPenn junior. Co-Founder at @UseFirefly. Jets fan. |
A few days ago, Indeed (a job aggregator site) announced that they had been acquired by a Japanese company called Recruit Co Ltd. One story I saw pegged the acquisition close to a billion dollars. I've heard through the grapevine about some very happy investors. Indeed is a big company (25,000 employees, 80 million unique visitors per month.) ...
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Via: Instigator Blog
VP Product @GoInstant. Partner @YearOneLabs. Ex-CEO/Founder |
How the hell did 37signals go from an unknown little consulting company to a bootstrapped product juggernaut? Below is a video lesson from my 30×500 Product Launch Class which explains how. It's called Stacking the Bricks, and it's a no-nonsense look at how 5 businesses got started, and how they grew and are growing ...
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Via: UnicornFree
I put the Amy in anomaly. Bootstrapper, product crusader, Ru |
There is a very good chance anyone reading this is already familiar with the concept of evergreen content; or content that is perpetually relevant. Most of us have experienced at least one piece of content that holds timeless in the usefulness of its information. Creating content that is just as useful five years down the road as it was the day it was published is not easy, but it's possible. ...
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Via: SEOmoz
VP Digital Strategy at W.L. Snook & Associates. Partner @Fac |
Case studies they are by nature more realistic than tutorials, and they often raise the hard questions that normal articles can easily sweep under the rug. Plus, there's the big advantage that you can usually experience the finished product for yourself. Case studies are also a big part of how I happened to learn design myself. I remember Jesse Bennet-Chamberlain's posts in particular being a big ...
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Via: SachaGreif.com
Designer from Paris, now living in Osaka. Creator of @YoFoly |
There are many companies that are competing to be the "operating system" for small businesses. The theory is that with the advent of the cloud in the digital age, small businesses can leverage a suite of services from a technology vendor to manage all aspects of their work. ...
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Via: Seeing Both Sides
Former entrepreneur turned VC at Flybridge Capital, author o |
I'm sure you've heard it before, traffic isn't important, targeted traffic is. In this post I'm going to give you some very specific results that show how much you would be missing if you focused solely on traffic volume and not at the type of traffic you are getting. ...
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Via: Think Traffic
Founder of http://webcontrolroom.com (launching soon) and ho |
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 |
It was the second week of TechStars and I was doing office hours. I was sitting across the table from Adam Wilson and Ian Bernstein who each looked tired and dejected. In front of them were three slides. I asked them what was wrong. They said they were having trouble deciding which of three different products to pursue. They'd had a dozen meetings with different mentors and were getting wildly con ...
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Via: Feld Thoughts
I'm a managing director at Foundry Group. I live in Boulder, |
The Lean Startup model created by Eric Ries has been applied to a lot of different industries. Turns out, it's the most efficient way to approach community building as well. I've been taking a lean approach to building community after 4 years of learning from things that worked and, more importantly, things that didn't work. ...
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Via: Social Fresh
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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 |
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 |
One thing people don't tell you when you start a business is how emotionally attached you become to it. The ability to change some part of the world with your team, product, and customers ties your mind and soul to the startup you're building. Because of our single-minded focus on our customers, our "baby" became the acquisition target of a huge enterprise. ...
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Via: Venture Beat
Co-Founder of Do.com (formerly Manymoon): developing app, sl |
In my previous post I explained the three reasons why we need to be fast in launching an MVP. Now I want to explain how I did that with my own MVP experiment. ...
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Locaweb product development and product management. And open |
Last time, I outlined the thought process behind the Lean Stack and provided a 3000-foot overview of the toolset. In this post, I'm going to dive a little deeper into the process flow and end with a concrete case-study. ...
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Via: Ash Maurya
Founder Spark59 - Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed. |
I have worked with the Slideshare team, as a user, investor and board member at different times, from 2008 till late last year. After the Slideshare LinkedIn announcement last week, I have been reflecting on how much has changed and how much (or little, depending on your perspective) I have learnt from this experience since starting out in the venture business several years ago, as well being a ...
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Via: VCCircle
Indian investment news website |
First, let's take a look at what Eric is really talking about. He's really advocating learning. To learn as much about your products as possible, to learn whether or not there is, in fact, a customer at the other end willing to pay for it. After all, he learned the hard way the damage not figuring out who your users are can cause. His early startup crashed and burned because he didn't figure out w ...
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Via: ZURB Blog
ZURB is a close-knit team of product designers who help comp |
I've written a bunch of posts over the years about how I manage my Board at Return Path. And I think part of having awesome Board members is managing them well - giving transparent information, well organized, with enough lead time before a meeting; running great and engaging meetings; mixing social time with business time; and being a Board member yourself at some other organization so you see t ...
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Via: AVC
Founder and CEO of email deliverability company Return Path. |
When David Tran stepped onto the scene at Lean Startup Machine Toronto, he wasn’t interested in creating a minimum viable product. He wasn’t even interested in developing what would be his award-winning idea, one he’d been keeping in his back pocket for the past few months. He was interested in validating his beliefs about management [...] ...
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Via: Lean Startup Machine
Account Manager @Contently, Former Editorial Assistant @Tell |
Everyone may be wondering why Facebook paid $1 billion for what appears to be just a simple photo-sharing app, but the biggest lesson to learn from Instagram's success is just how important it is to build network effects into the core of your service. ...
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Via: Gigaom
I'm a senior writer at GigaOm, a former columnist with the G |
Instagram was initially "Burbn", a check-in app where you could also add photos. They launched after 8 months of private beta, and saw little engagement from customers – apart from photo sharing, which was used actively. At some point they actually sat down and built a prototype of "just photos" – but discarded that again without launching it. ...
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Via: Spark59
My Mission: Bringing the Customer's Perspective into Enginee |
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 |
To me, Lemonade Stand Startups are practice runs, proof of concepts or smaller companies that never grow big, but serve as a basis for future startups. To me, my Lemonade startups taught me more than any other experience I’ve been through, including University. ...
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Via: Alex Blom
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As you probably missed it on HN's front page three months ago, my post entitled "A Tale of a Miserable Product Launch". In it, I described our major face plant when launching illico, a little chat application. At the time, my intention was mainly to share our failure with fellow programmers on HN, and let the steam go off a little bit. After all, there's nothing better than a good laugh to compens ...
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Via: Stangeek
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Five lessons that marketers could learn from a lethal weapon designed by Gaston Glock, "an obscure Austrian curtain-rod manufacturer" and inventor of the Glock semi-automatic pistol. ...
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Via: Marketing Profs
Writer, ironist, doctor of philosophy. Also, editor at Marke |
Tracy DiNunzio isn't your typical Silicon Valley startup founder. She's a painter and a self-proclaimed Bohemian. She did her first tech startup after the age of 30. And she didn't start her company in Northern California. Tracy built her company, Recycled Media, out of necessity. She hasn't raised any venture capital. ...
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2x entrepreneur. Sold both companies (last to http://salesfo |
Harvard Business School undertook a recent study to determine the factors that lead to success in startups and, while nothing succeeds like success, a previous failure can still help an entrepreneur make it. Paul Gompers and Josh Lerman studied over 30 years of data from venture funded businesses under the title "Performance Persistence in Entrepreneurship". ...
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Via: HackFwd Blog
We're experienced tech entrepreneurs looking to support and |
This is an interview I've been waiting to do a long time. When I first talked to this guest, I urged him not to do an interview and we both agreed. Now I think it's time to do it... ...
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Via: Mixergy
Startups and Online Marketing enthusiast |
Based on the title of this post you might be thinking I have mad stacks of money in the bank. That I’ve had a few “exits” and instead of hunkering down and writing code for 6 months I opted to talk to a few of my buddies at the yacht club and purchase a primed and growing social network for somewhere in the mid-seven figures. ...
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Via: Software By Rob
Lessons learned by a Solo Entrepreneur. www.SoftwareByRob.co |
In my last article I wrote a few of my realizations and how I plan to adapt myself in 2012. In this sequel article I will share some of my personal inspirations, which have shaped me to become who I am, and how I think. I will also share with you one of my latest projects and my… Read the rest of this entry » ...
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Blogger and Internet business entrepreneur from Australia |
You can’t go very far without running into Drew Houston’s company Dropbox. It considered one of the hottest tech companies and its rise since 2006 can teach you a lot about marketing and business. Let’s take a look at six lessons you can learn from the rise of Dropbox. Lesson #1: Create a profitable model [...] ...
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Via: Quick Sprout
I'm Kind of a Big Deal |
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