4 Pricing Mistakes You Need to Stop Making | THEsmallCOMPANYBLOG. 12 Excellent Examples of “Lazy Registration” Signup forms have long irked the casual visitor. During the process of discovery, nobody wants to stop and fill out details before they can “unlock” the rest of the site’s potential. As web users become more and more fickle, signup forms are becoming an increasingly large barrier that repels many prospective visitors from great sites. Fortunately there’s a new signup system in town that is making it much easier for the visitor to interact with the site and it increases signups. I give you: Lazy Registration. Lazy Registration Helping the web visitor only helps your site. The Old System So let’s contrast the lazy registration system with the crufty old signup forms most sites use today.
Contrast the antiquated signup form method with lazy registration. Increasing Engagement and Trust Think about what kind of engagement sites would get if the user could get his hands dirty playing with the site’s features, and then later ask for his registration details? Great Examples of Registration Systems. The VC Pitch – Confusing the Destination with the Journey. Too often we are so preoccupied with the destination, we forget the journey.Unknown Entrepreneurs hear that VC pitches ought to be short, 10-20 slides. What most don’t know is that there is no way they can deliver a presentation that short by just “writing” the slide deck. You Got to be KiddingAn entrepreneur I’ve known for a long time came by the ranch over Thanksgiving break to show me the first pass of his new startup slide deck. My eyes were glazed by slide 9. My first reaction was, “you got to be kidding.” Then I remembered, every slide deck I ever wrote started out just like this.
The Slide Deck As A Brainstorming ToolMost startups ideas are not built in an afternoon, typically they are the sum of seemingly disparate and discrete pieces of information, and a pattern recognition algorithm continuously running in a founders head. What I was seeing was an entrepreneur using a slide deck as a way to collect his thoughts. Lessons Learned Listen to the post here: Download the Podcast here. HOW TO: Attract Early Adopters to Your Social Startup. Shane Snow is a technology journalist in New York City. Follow him on Twitter at @shanesnow. One of the main challenges for social networks stems from a question ancient philosophers have debated for centuries: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In social media, the dilemma often takes the form of, "We need users for our network to be useful, but users won’t join the network unless it’s useful.
" A social network’s utility is derived from the people belonging to it. The second great challenge in social networking is spreading to new users at a fast and sustainable pace, i.e. viral growth. This month, a social startup called Hashable (no relation!) How does a new site like Hashable get past the chicken dilemma, when others can’t? How Facebook Did It: Start Small and Exclusive When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004, he positioned his social network as private and exclusive. How Tumblr Did It: Make It Useful Even If You’re Alone How Foursquare Did It: Use Game Psychology. 10 Things I Know For Sure About Building a Business.
5 reasons start-ups are entering a golden age. (Editor’s note: Scott Albro is CEO of Focus.com. He submitted this story to VentureBeat.) Are start-ups entering a new golden age? Ask a venture capitalist or banker that question and you’ll probably get “no” for an answer – and given the lack of recent IPOs, as well as the changes we’re seeing in the venture industry, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Ask an entrepreneur, though, and a very different picture emerges. That’s because today’s start-up owners are generating ideas, building products, and scaling their businesses better and faster than they ever have before. There seem to be five key drivers for this: The velocity of good ideas – There has been a lot of talk recently about “lean start ups” and “pivoting”, but if you don’t have a good idea to start with, all the pivoting and lean thinking in the world won’t amount to anything.
In the early days of a business, the power of a good idea, no matter how rudimentary, is what gets you started down the right path. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Conflicting Advice. Joe Heitzeberg, AKA Aquaman (@jheitzeb) is a 500 Startups SuperMentor and Chief Piston at MediaPiston, a new crowdsourcing platform for content projects (pre-launch). Prior to MediaPiston, Joe was the CTO at WhitePages.com and co-founder and CEO of Snapvine.com (acquired by WhitePages.com in June 2008).
Congratulations! You’ve decided to take the startup leap. One of the best parts? One of the challenges? I polled some friends and fellow entrepreneurs and they all agreed — you’re going to receive 180-degree conflicting advice on just about every aspect of your company. So here it is: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Conflicting Advice! #1) Remember, it’s your companyYou’re the rainbow-chasing entrepreneur. Nobody knows your business better than you do.
. #2) Be goal-drivenThere is no recipe for how to get a startup off the ground. Most advice can’t be followed like a recipe. Here they are…. Fundraising 1) Take the money if and when you can get it vs. Hiring 1) Build a balanced team up front vs. Agile for Lean Startup dummies by Raphaël Pierquin on Prezi. The Algorithm + the Crowd are Not Enough. Accelerate Your Startup: Spend to Scale the Business: Tech News « In my two previous blog posts, I’ve discussed the first two of three key phases in a startup life cycle: finding a product/market fit, then determining a repeatable and scalable sales model. Once you’ve determined that the sales funnel process you’ve designed is working in a repeatable and scalable way, with a viable business model — i.e. for SaaS businesses, the cost to acquire a customer (CAC) is less than a third of customer lifetime value (LTV), and CAC is recoverable in less than 12 months — then you’re ready to scale the business.
At this stage, you should ramp the company up as fast as you can possibly afford. If your cost of acquiring a customer is less than the customer’s lifetime value (based on gross profit, not revenue), then you have a clear return on investment for sales and marketing expenditures. To be clearer, you know now that every dollar you spend on sales and marketing will result in more dollars in gross profit flowing into the business.
Dear Facebook, Please Return Our Social Networking Space. The following is a guest post by David Dalka. Dalka is a digital business strategist and keynote speaker who was a member of BlackRock (BLK) during its hyper-growth phase of 80 to 800 people. He is a top ten contributor to CrunchBase, strategist to senior executives on how digital marketing tactics are transforming business strategy and revenue generation, blogger and is currently working on a nonfiction business book proposal. According to TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington, Dalka currently lives in a location of “horrendous weather eight months out of the year”. (Editor’s note: Maybe you can entice him to move somewhere else?
Seriously, we really do pity him.) Photo courtesy of 2010 Internet Hungary conference. About a month ago there was a loud outcry when Facebook inexplicably introduced a smaller font size to its News Feed. This conversation is about much, much more than Facebook. The same is true of social networking sites. “Google, Yahoo! 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. That's what I now refer to as the "glamour brain" speaking aka the startup life you hear about from the press. You know the press articles I'm talking about... the ones that talk about how easy it is to raise money, how many users the company is getting, and how great it is to be CEO.
Very rarely do you hear about what a bitch it is to be CEO and how it's not for every founder that wants to be an entrepreneur. I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about what it takes to be a great Startup CEO that is also a founder. Be A Keeper Of The Company Vision The CEO is the keeper of the company's overall vision. Absorb The Pain For The Team A startup CEO needs to be the personal voodoo doll for a startup. Find The Smartest People And Defer On Domain Expertise A startup CEO has a great knack for finding talent.
Be A Good Link Between The Company + Investors Be Able To Learn On The Job.