Preparing Leaders For The Future. Does Your Startup Give Away Too Many Freebies? If you've attended a conference, sponsored mixer or networking event lately, you've likely gone home satisfied, pockets overflowing with your newfound free swag.
From the standard (pens, t-shirts and tote bags) to the more lavish (slightly nicer pens, coffee mugs and phone cases), freebies seem to be a requirement for startups these days. For many bootstrapped businesses, liberal giveaways could be the icing on the cake of financial downfall. If your freebies aren't part of a productive marketing investment, you're probably doing it wrong. Does Your Startup Give Away Too Many Freebies? 14 Ways To Be A Great Startup CEO. Everyone thinks that being a startup CEO is a glamorous job or one that has to be a ton of fun.
On Startups - The Community For Entrepreneurs. With $770K In Seed Funding, Playbasis Wants Businesses In Asia To Gamify. Playbasis, a Thailand-based gamification startup that helps companies engage with customers and employees through cool rewards and social games, has raised $770,000 in seed funding from Ardent Capital, 500 Startups and Axis Capital.
The startup plans to use this funding to expand its footprint in Asia this year. Gamification — the idea of adding game elements to services so younger users are attracted to them — hit the peak of Gartner’s Hype Cycle last year, followed by warnings from the research firm that around 80 percent of gamification apps will end up being losers. Playbasis and several others including Badgeville and Bunchball believe there’s money to be made, as large and mid-sized customers seek newer ways to engage with their target audience who are mostly the millennials. Already, these gamification startups count Ford, Toyota, T Mobile, Marriott, Samsung and AmEx among their customers. How to Recruit Awesome Developers Under $1,000. Our tech clients come to us asking how we can reduce recruitment costs.
The reality is that like our clients, you can implement some simple recruitment methods to reduce spend enormously while increasing hiring quality. I’ll outline a few best practices we tell our clients to help build the most robust development teams without spending $20,000 per placement. Your Talent Pool is Finite One of the most important concepts you need to remember is that your local talent pool of all skilled developers may only be a few hundred. Then figure that only about 5% of them are actively looking. This is critical to keep in mind.
Put Yourself in the Candidates’ Shoes One big issue we see is that some companies can really make the interview process miserable for candidates. I assume you’ve been a candidate many times before. Avoid Diminishing Returns on Job Ads. The Complete Quantitative Guide To Judging Your Startup. Raising capital from investors is often a frustrating experience.
While part of that frustration will always be present when working on high-risk projects, a lot of the aggravation comes from the lack of clear signposts that allow founders to judge their company’s performance. The reality is, most founders only ever hear a “yes” or a “no” from a venture capitalist, without a lucid understanding of the factors that influenced that decision.
There have been fantastic essays written about the fundraising process itself, such as Paul Graham’s guide posted last year. Start-Up Israel. Congratulations, Crunchies Winners! Kickstarter Wins Best Overall Startup. The startup fundraising cookbook (8 steps to raising a solid round) I do a significant amount of startup mentoring and I’m often asked about fundraising.
How Startups Can Tap Into Google's Secret Sauce: OKRs. Innovators push the boundaries of the known world.
They're change agents who are relentless in making things happen and bringing ideas to execution. As startups tend to focus on scalability and profit, often employee goal setting is put on the back burner. But this move can be detrimental to a company, its culture and employee morale. So taking a page from search-engine giant Google, our startup has focused on a new milestone strategy. Last year, Google Venture's Rick Klau lifted the veil on the internal goal-setting system the internet giant has used since 1999, a time when it was less than a year old and employees numbered in the dozens. Required Reading: The Economist’s Special Report On Tech Startups. It’s not every day we here at TechCrunch just point to someone else’s work and say, “Here, you should go read this.”
But today’s an exception, because The Economist has put together a 16-page Special Report on the rise of technology startups around the world. The report, which is written for the magazine’s general news audience, could serve as a sort of “State of the Union” for the industry. That means a lot of what’s reported there won’t really be news to those of you who are deeply involved in the startup world. There are no big surprises or gotcha moments, for instance, in its various stories on the boom in accelerators, the move by hardware startups and suppliers to embrace Shenzhen, or the growth of tech ecosystems in communities around the world. Business Insider India.