How to Write an Elevator Pitch. If you're like most entrepreneurs, you think an "elevator pitch" is a one- to three-minute sales pitch that you could presumably give during a very long elevator ride.
How to Make Your Startup Go Viral The Pinterest Way. 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 hype and users right after launch. And some don’t. Take a look at Pinterest’s one-year traffic on Compete from Oct 2010 to Oct 2011, which is the picture in this post, and shows Pinterest rising from 40,000 to 3.2 million monthly unique visitors. Backing out of Compete’s numbers, we see Pinterest grew about 50% month over month from a base of zero since its inception (on average, smoothing the curve). Note these numbers are approximations and also do not count the significant traffic the service sees from mobile (Pinterest’s app currently takes the #6 social spot in the iTunes store). Groupon Vs. Zynga: Which Company Will Be More Valuable Post-IPO? ‘Tis the season of the IPO.
So far, 2011 has seen companies like LinkedIn, Pandora, Yandex, Zillow, and RenRen come to market. As you’ve heard, Groupon and Zynga are next up in the IPO pipeline, with both companies arriving on public markets within weeks of each other. Groupon, barring some catastrophic event, will begin trading publicly on NASDAQ November 4th, with shares set at $20 a pop at a valuation of $12.7 billion. Zynga, too, is expected to trade on NASDAQ beginning the week before Thanksgiving, and according to its revised S-1 filing with the SEC, a “third party” has valued the company at approximately $14 billion.
In the same ballpark as Groupon. So, the question becomes this: Notwithstanding their potential overvaluations at the time they go public, which of the two companies stands to be the most successful and the most valuable in the long run, post-IPO? The Big Picture (i.e. Of course, everything sounds picture perfect if you put a full stop there.
Cashflow Management. How a few simple push notifications helped data shrinking app Onavo go viral. One of the great things about Onavo, the hot mobile app that compresses your iPhone’s data, is that most of its magic happens in the background.
But while that makes Onavo a breeze to use, it also makes it easy for users to forget that they’re receiving the benefits of the app. The company’s solution: simple push notifications, powered by the mobile services company Urban Airship, that keep Onavo users in the loop with the app’s data saving progress. After implementing the push notifications, Onavo reported a 75 percent increase in awareness and 50 percent increase in overall satisfaction from its users, according to a case study released by Urban Airship today. The 7 Best Times to Start a Company. Now that you know my belief that starting a company is your best hope of living the life you want, here's the next logical question: When should you get started?
1. You're young The best time to start a company is when you are young. The younger, the better. Youth is a beautiful thing. 7 Undeniable Truths of Employee Pay. Your employees are your business, so ignore the following truths at your peril: 1.
Policy, schmolicy: Employees talk. Many companies actively discourage staff from talking to each other about their salaries. I even know companies that require employees to sign agreements stipulating they won’t disclose pay, benefits, etc. to other employees. Doesn’t matter. Never assume raises, bonuses, starting salaries, perks—basically anything related to compensation—will stay confidential. 2. Employees think about pay all the time. Each week spend a little time thinking about ways you can improve employee pay and benefits. Building a Premium Product? Check Your Price Ceiling. What is Lean Startup?
“Lean Startup” is a term coined by Eric Ries while an Advisor to the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. It’s based on the new management processes he employed while Chief Technology Officer at IMVU, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups. What is Customer Development? “Customer Development” is a process pioneered by Steve Blank and written about extensively in Four Steps to the Epiphany. It emphasizes “Getting Out of the Building” for in-person feedback and focusing early product development efforts around early-evangelists. What is Lean Startup Machine’s relationship with Eric Ries? Eric Ries is heavily involved as an advisor to Lean Startup Machine. Is Lean Startup Machine a hackathon?
Lean Startup Machine is a workshop & educational series. What is your relationship with Startup Weekend? We love Startup Weekend but unfortunately do not have any official relationship.