February 2012
17 posts
2 tags
2 tags
In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and... →
Angry Birds is the first waste of 75 millions people’s time that can be accurately quantified. Every day, users spend 200 million minutes — 16 years every hour — playing the mobile game. Three trillion pigs have been popped. It has filled billions of those interstitial moments spent riding the bus, on a plane or in important work meetings, and it is or has been the number-one...
2 tags
Domainr Blog: How to Acquire a Domain Name (That... →
domainr:
Background: We created Domainr almost four years ago, and since then many people have contacted us asking how to buy domain names that other people already own. We’ve not yet been through that process ourselves, so we asked our friend Julian Shapiro, founder of NameLayer, to write a guest…
2 tags
Get Unstuck | 2012-02-06 | SUCCESS Magazine | Your... →
How much more dynamic, successful and funcould your business be if you cultivated your creativity? Here are 17 ideas to get you started.
Play. When we were young children, creativity was all we knew, as we filled all that we didn’t know with imagination. When we started school, facts and rules began to edge the imagination out, making it harder and harder for us to be truly creative, says Smith....
2 tags
The anatomy of a startup, illustrated - The Next... →
2 tags
Are You a Zen Coder or Distraction-Junkie? →
What you do when compiling can ruin your life. And not just when compiling, but when waiting for any short computer operation to finish.
That time is ridiculously tiny compared to the rest of your workday, yet it can have a huge impact on your productivity and well-being overall. Yes, that’s a big fat claim.
And by the way, this article is not just about coders or programmers. It’s...
“Clarke’s Three Laws are three “laws” of prediction formulated...”
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke’s_three_laws
2 tags
How to Know If Your Startup Idea is the Next Big...
How To Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur How to Know If Your Startup Idea is the Next Big Thing
APRIL 25, 2011 COMMENTS How do you know if your startup idea is the next next big thing? It’s easy. It isn’t. Most Great Companies Started With Bad Ideas Most great companies started off with very different ideas that were either not very good or impractical. Very rarely does a startup actually start with the idea that makes them the next big thing. Here are just a few examples of successful companies that had very different and troubled initial ideas: Initial idea: Allow groups of people to band together to accomplish a goal called ThePoint
Eventually: Groupon
Initial idea: HTML5 supported location-based service
Eventually: Instagram
Initial idea: Web-based massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending
Eventually: Flickr
Initial idea: Compare two people’s pictures and rate which one was more attractive
Eventually: Facebook
Initial idea: People to share photos and get grouped based on locations in an app called Color
Eventually: To be determined
At Yipit, our initial idea was a local search site focused on furniture in New York. Today, we are the leading aggregator of daily deals like Groupon, LivingSocial and the 485 others. What Does This Mean For You? When you stop expecting that your startup idea has to be the next big thing, you can draw some valuable conclusions: Stop waiting for the perfect idea. The perfect idea isn’t coming. You just have to pick a problem you are passionate about and start working on it. Over time, you will evolve your startup into the next big thing
Your idea isn’t the real value, it’s you. The value lies in your ability to learn from potential customers, iterate based on those learnings. Those iterations will determine whether or not your startup will be successful, not the initial idea
Don’t worry that your first idea will fall flat. It falls flat for almost everyone. Your idea is based on so many assumptions, it’s bound to be full of issues. Figure out what’s wrong and fix it.
Get your prototype out there as soon as you can. Don’t spend six months releasing your first prototype. It’s going to fall flat. Instead, get a prototype into the hands of your potential customers as soon as you can. You need to learn as quickly as possible what’s wrong with the idea so you can fix it.
Don’t write a business plan. Within a month, your business plan will be irrelevant. Instead of spending that time writing a business plan, spend it getting your prototype into customers hands.
Your initial startup idea isn’t the next big thing and that’s okay. Just get out there and start working on a big problem that you’re passionate about and you may eventually turn it into the next big thing.
2 tags
How To Make Innovative Ideas Happen - Smashing... →
In one of his recent presentations, Frans Johansson explained why groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas than their counterparts. After watching his presentationThe Secret Truth About Executing Great Ideas, my thoughts began to surface about how meaningful the presentation was regardless of a persons industry, culture, field or discipline. Anyone can come up with an amazing...
4 tags
The questions all founders must ask themselves →
Last year I wrote an article on GigaOM about the ultimate lesson [learned] from my last startup: Knowing what matters to everyone involved is the most important thing when founding a company.
Knowing what matters requires you to:
Think through your own values. Few people do. Ask yourself the really hard questions, and be brutally honest.
Make sure you understand which values your fellow...
5 tags
Infographic: What the Heck is an LLC? →
6 tags
The Secret To Pinterest's Astounding Success: A... →
A site called Pinterest is growing like crazy and none of us are talking about it enough.
What Tumblr was to 2011, Twitter was to 2007, and Facebook was to 2006, a site called Pinterest is to 2012.
Launched in 2009, the site had 11 million visits during one week in December of 2011. You can safely figure its monthly number is around 40 million by now. That’s impressive 40% growth year over...
7 tags
How To Write A Winning Pitch Deck →
(The original post in French can be found here. Because of its success, we are translating it in English and hopefully in other languages. Do not hesitate to leave comments and suggestions)
Since the launch of Kima Ventures with Xavier Niel in February 2010, we received thousands of pitches from around the world. The vast majority of business plans are received via our website, which is linked to...
4 tags
10 Ways to Leverage Facebook for Startups: Part... →
Yesterday I discussed how to improve user acquisition, activation and activity by building Facebook directly into your web experience. There is of course another half to the equation: leveraging Facebook.com to expand your reach and engage your users.
On-Facebook success is less product-heavy than success off-Facebook, although they both ultimately aim for the same outcome: engagement. While it...
4 tags
10 Ways Your Startup Can Hook Into Facebook, Part... →
Having already covered how startups can use search and Twitter to find customers, here’s 10 steps for finding people on another key marketing platform: Facebook
Facebook has evolved from a social network into the fabric with which much of the web is constructed: identity, product, data, experience and so on. Even if you chose to no longer use it as a social destination, you would still find...
6 tags
The simple secret to beating clones and copycats →
In an industry where opinions are sharply divided on all manner of things — whether it’s PC vs Mac, Ruby vs Python, open vs closed — there’s one topic almost everyone agrees on: clones.
The idea of creating copycat businesses is almost universally derided, whether it’s a small company ripping off a larger one — for example ,when design sales site Fab.com this week called out German clone...
2 tags
How Gojee Got 300,000 People To Sign Up For Its... →
The co-founders of Gojee say they landed $1.2 million in funding by Kapor Capital in September because Mitch Kapor understood where they’re headed for the next 10 years.
Mike LaValle and Tian He created Gojee, which curates food and drink recipes from around the world, with a vision of an entirely new online experience. It’s a food site you’ve never seen before and that’s...
January 2012
6 posts
3 tags
Want A Great Team? Focus On Talent, Not Hiring →
One of the questions most founders always ask is about the key secrets to hiring. What they need to understand is that there’s a big difference between “hiring” and “talent”. I’m continually surprised how rarely I see people put down their strategy for talent compared to hiring. It’s so prevalent, in fact, you’ll often see on a company’s priorities a bullet of “hiring”. And that slight shift in...
5 tags
How to Register Your New Business Name →
You’ve brainstormed, polled your family and friends and conducted some kind of focus group testing. You’ve come up with a cool domain name. Finally, you’ve crossed one of the trickiest hurdles for any new business — finding the right name for your new brand.
But not so fast. Before you unleash your name on the world, you’ve got to dot a few administrative “i’s” and cross a few legal “t’s.” There...
3 tags
9 Ways to Dramatically Reduce Email Unsubscribe... →
Email marketers have to accept a certain amount of expected email list depreciation every year, but when that list dwindles down more and more due to unsubscribes, it’s time to press ‘pause.’
Unsubscribes are, in very technical terms, a huge bummer. Sure, a certain amount of self-scrubbing is good for every email list, but you can’t help but wonder if there’s...
1 tag
4 tags
Unlearn Your MBA by David Heinemeier Hansson →
David Heineimeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals in Chicago, says that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. He argues that constraints—fiscal, temporal, or otherwise—drive innovation and effective problem-solving. The most important thing, Hansson believes, is to make a dent in the universe with your...
5 tags
Why are you starting something? →
Alex Bainbridge, writing for Tnooz, in Why travel startups always seem to suffer from the same problems wonders why so many entrepreneurs fail in such similar ways. Bainbridge argues that the root cause of their failure goes to starting companies for the wrong reasons. He posits that there are five reasons people start something:
Innovation
Disruption
Enjoyment
Profit
The friggin sucks — fix...
December 2011
31 posts
2 tags
Eight Ways To Go Viral →
What do Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Dropbox and Skype have in common? Except for being ridiculously successful, they all enjoyed a strong viral effect that helped accelerate their growth.
How did they do that? Here’s the thing; most people assume that these companies grew by pure word of mouth. Well, that’s only half of the story. The other half is that they deliberately built viral features...
4 tags
What Startup To Build? →
If you’re asking which startup to build, not whether to build, you probably have several half-baked ideas and don’t know which one to devote yourself to. Or you have no idea at all.
Max Levchin and Peter Thiel would tell youinnovation is dead and that you should go work on real, world-changing, notable problems. They say too many young companies are solving small problems and creating features....
3 tags
A Few Tips For Developers On How To Get Hired By A... →
Not everyone is cut out to work for a startup. It involves a lot of hustling, a lot of nail-biting, pizza-eating, sleeping at your desk, tears, failure, confusion, and on and on. And wearing your startup’s t-shirt. All the time. That being said, it can also be extremely rewarding and, with all the cash flying around Silicon Valley (and beyond), aspiring entrepreneurs are flocking to startups..
...
5 tags
Fab.com’s amazing 2011 journey from zero to hero.
Fab 2011 timeline
View more presentations from Jason Goldberg
3 tags
How Zynga grew from gaming outcast to $9 billion... →
Zynga has turned the video game world upside down in its short five-year history. As it’s poised on the verge of a massive initial public offering, the social game startup is now one of gaming’s great success stories.
But its success was never a foregone conclusion. In fact, most game industry veterans didn’t view it as a real game company. Mark Pincus was a four-time entrepreneur, but had no...
2 tags
What SOPA means for business & innovation... →
Several tech companies and online communities have come out against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a recently proposed piece of legislation that many feel will bring unnecessary censorship to the web. But much less attention has been given to how the bill will affect the overall landscape of business and innovation.
The bill, introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith in late October, gives both the U.S....
3 tags
Here Are The 11 Biggest Pivots Of 2011 →
Just about every company has a few good pivots in it before it finally goes big.
2011 was a particularly active year for huge pivots. A few companies, like Fab, completely rebuilt their business strategy to suit a different audience and saw huge success come with it.
For some others, a little tweak was more than enough.
6 tags
Want To Make A Killing In 2012? Then Use This... →
Ever wonder what makes some small businesses take off like a fire in a paper factory, growing and innovating year in and year out…even in a bad economy?
What is it about the Dropboxes, Skullcandys and the Menlo Innovations of the small business world that makes them so successful? How did they get where they are? And why is your business where it is this year?
It’s not because you lack fancy...
5 tags
An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry →
When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself—for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test...
6 tags
5 tags
6 tags
Health Tips for Web Developers →
Before helping others, you have to help yourself
As members of a growing, thriving, and super-collaborative community, we have grown accustomed to selflessly sacrificing our time and efforts to create new and exciting projects that assist, educate, and inspire our fellow web designers and developers. And the amazing part of this is that many in the community do these things for what is apparently...
2 tags
What It Takes to Build a Thriving Design Business... →
jess3:
The Leaders in Design Series is supported by Volvo. Jesse Thomas founded the creative agency JESS3 as a student in 2007. In a few short years, he managed to climb an impressive entrepreneurial ladder. The company has completed projects for Facebook, Google and Nike, among dozens of other tech …
8 tags
5 tags
The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at... →
“Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.” - Albert Einstein
Very often you’ll see blog posts or books teaching you to “master” a skill in only 10 days, or 3 days … in fact, it used to be 30 days but the time frame to master something seems to be shrinking rapidly.
I’ve even seen tutorials...
2 tags
Equity Equation →
An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup. Should you take it? You’re about to hire your first employee. How much stock should you give him? These are some of the hardest questions founders face. And yet both have the same answer: 1/(1 - n) Whenever you’re trading stock in your company for anything, whether it’s money or an employee or a deal...
4 tags
Please, please, please stop asking how to find a... →
How to Earn a Co-Founder
Learn to Code Stop everything else that you’re doing right now for your startup and learn to code. If you take the time to learn enough to build some small project, you’ll learn the language of talking to hackers, and you’ll earn some respect. 99% of non-technical guys looking for a technical co-founder won’t put in the effort. This is your...
4 tags
How to find a business cofounder that doesn't suck →
Here are three types of non-technical cofounders that rock:
The Camp Director (motivation)
A camp director has this magical way of getting talented people to provide help. It’s mostly just sales, but being a straight-up salesman is not enough. Camp directors sell a vision. All the freakin’ time. If you’re not good asking for help or don’t enjoy it, this is the...
5 tags
WatchWhen Shane Snow co-founded Contently a year ago he had just 48 cents in his bank account. Fast forward to the end of 2011 and the startup is on track to clear over $1 million in revenue.
Watch Shane’s interview to hear about his experience going through the TechStars mentorship program, raising money and how his experience of losing a big sale helped him better understand Contently’s business...
6 tags
Forming a new software startup, how do I allocate...
This is such a common question here and elsewhere that I will attempt to write the world’s most canonical answer to this question. Hopefully in the future when someone on answers.onstartups asks how to split up the ownership of their new company, you can simply point to this answer.
The most important principle: Fairness, and the perception of fairness, is much more valuable than owning a...
8 tags
4 tags
How to Email Busy People →
So a few email etiquette tips:
Subject Lines Matter
A lot. Your subject line should be uber-concrete and descriptive. Bad: ”Re: fundraising advice”. Good: “Seeking fundraising advice for my startup FlightCaster (as per intro from John Smith). If you can fit the entire question into the header, just do it and include #eom at the end, which means ‘end of message’....
4 tags
25 User Experience Videos That Are Worth Your Time →
We’re all mostly accustomed to educating ourselves by reading articles. Rare are the opportunities to attend conferences or watch live shows on subjects that we’re interested in. That’s why we are presenting here phenomenal videos and related resources on the topic of user experience (UX) by different presenters at different events. We have focused on current content but have included some older...
3 tags
CULT CREATION →
For many founders, hiring the initial team is one big chicken and egg problem. Investors want to see a group of super talented people committed to your idea before you have any money. Employees, who are much more risk averse than founders, want to see that you already have money, or that your money is nearly assured before joining. It’s a common challenge.
So who wins this chicken and...
2 tags
The Real History Of Twitter →
“Mr. Williams says that all successful businesspeople make enemies along the way.” – The New York Times, October 30, 2010
How Twitter’s owners and top executives say Twitter was founded is different than how Twitter was actually founded.
Mainly, the official version leaves out the role of a major cofounder. Some early Twitter investors also wonder if it also leaves out a...
6 tags
Your startup needs to sell experiences, not...
Entrepreneurs often want to highlight every single feature on their landing page. I’ve seen landing pages filled to the brim with cliches, buzz words, and jargon that simply don’t convert visitors into customers. A lot of consumer facing landing pages are focused on the wrong things.
I’ve discovered that’s it not your products features that sell people on your software, it’s their perceived...
3 tags
The Seven Principles You Need to Know to Build a... →
Social products are an interesting bird. For even the most experienced product designer, social products prove an elusive lover. While there are many obvious truths in social products, there are also alot of ways to design them poorly. Especially when you are deep in the moment making pixel-level decisions trying to remember what’s important, things may not be so clear.
The only magic I’ve found...