Startups. Advice. One startup. 60 seconds. Go! - TechCrunch Elevator Pitches. A Two-part Rule for Naming Your Startup - GigaOM. What’s in a company name?
Plenty. It’s your first opportunity to brand yourself. Get it right and you’ll stand out as clever, useful, and memorable to potential users and investors — even if your product isn’t any good. But get it wrong and you’ll flame out before your product even gets out of beta. So, what makes Brightmail, PayPal and IronPort great names, but Lycos, Xobni and Vidoop really lousy? Look at many of the most successful brands and you’ll notice they’re often compound names, consistently made up of two components: a word that relates to the company product in a direct, literal sense, establishing a clear association between the brand and what the company does.a word not literally related to the product, but rather a metaphorical adjective to evoke a differentiating characteristic or “feeling” about the company’s product. Our minds are built to make connections, mostly at a subconscious level. Search company Lycos tried a made-up word, to ill effect.
Consider Twitter. When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal. There is no shortage of discussion about Internet business models these days.
And they almost always focus on revenues. But revenues are only half of the value creation equation. The other half is costs. Let me explain. Businesses are worth the net present value of future cash flows. So with that simplification, the value of a business is approximated by 10 x (revenues – costs). Chris Anderson wrote a very good piece in today's WSJ called The Economics Of Giving It Away. Meanwhile YouTube is still struggling to match its popularity with revenues and Facebook is selling commodity ads for pennies after its effort to charge for intrusive advertising led to a user backlash. Chris goes on to suggest that Internet entrepreneurs are going to have to get people to step up and pay for something instead of just giving everything away for free because advertising isn't going to foot the bill for every company.
Let's look at Craiglist. The web can do that in more than one company. 270+ Tools for Running a Business Online - Mashable. Last August we featured a post with more than 230 online apps for running your business.
Since there are hundreds of new apps coming on the market every year, we figured it was time for an update. This year we came up with more than 270 additional apps. Some are completely new since last year, others might have been overlooked, and still others made significant improvements that gained them a spot on the list. Accounting, Billing, Invoicing, Estimating & Contracts LiteAccounting - Invoice and track payment from your customers without a bunch of extra, useless features. Invoice Journal - Free invoicing program. endeve - Issue invoices, manage clients and check revenues all in one place. ContractPal - Take your contracts and forms paperless and have them completed, validated, signed and processed online.
Bootstrap - Online bookkeeping software that lets you track sales and expenses, organize your records for tax time, and more. KillerStartups.com™ - The Next Big Thing on the Internet is here.