February 2012
18 posts
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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...
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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…
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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....
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The anatomy of a startup, illustrated - The Next... →
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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
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How to Know If Your Startup Idea is the Next Big...
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.
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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...
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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...
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Infographic: What the Heck is an LLC? →
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...