December 2011
31 posts
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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...
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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....
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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..
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Fab.com’s amazing 2011 journey from zero to hero.
Fab 2011 timeline
View more presentations from Jason Goldberg
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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...
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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....
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 …
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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’....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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How We Got To 40,310 Facebook Fans In 4 Days →
When we took over the Facebook Fan page for Weekly World News , they had 3,244 fans. 4 days later, we had 40,310 fans– 10 times larger. We’re going explain exactly how we did it in this exclusive article for AllFacebook.com. In the coming days, we’ll demonstrate how fans translate into trackable revenue, how to perform analytics, integrating social widgets (Open Graph Protocol) with your site, and...
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Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a... →
The usual question: Over the past 30+ years as a consultant in the field generally known as human factors engineering (aka usability engineering), I have been asked by hundreds of clients why users don’t find their company’s software engaging. The answer to this persistent question is complex but never truly elusive. This question yields to experience and professional usability analysis.
The...
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Proof M.B.A.s Are Overrated, by 20 People Who Are... →
Most business schools would love for you to believe that an M.B.A. is the ticket to huge paychecks and unlimited career growth. However, a large number of businesspeople have achieved success without a business school’s stamp of approval. In fact, BusinessWeek reports that fewer than one of three executives who reach upper- echelon positions hold an M.B.A. Before the decision is made...
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How to Make Your Startup Go Viral The Pinterest... →
On Thanksgiving, Pinterest’s co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009. Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV. Pinterest officially launched to the world 4 months later.
Some startups go crazy with...