The Vendor Client Relationship In Real World Situations. How to write a killer deck, and get funded. Immad Akhund is the CEO and co-founder of Heyzap, the leading Social Games distribution platform beyond Facebook. Heyzap has raised $3.5 million to date and is Immad’s third Startup, He will be writing a series of articles for Lessons Learned. I have advised a number of Web companies on their way to raise money. I am often mentally ‘face-palming’ as they stagger through their initial pitch. Helping entrepreneurs is something I am passionate about. Knowing how to comfortably raise funding removes the distracting worry of money.
Not having to worry about money allows entrepreneurs to focus on the important things, like creating a multi-billion dollar company. The key preparation material that most people create for pitching potential investors is a presentation deck. The two most important aspects of pitching are: 1) being confident and 2) conveying a consistent powerful story. Confidence You must firmly know that you are doing a great thing for the potential investors. Story Structure. Fire. Aim. Load. Repeat. « Opportunity Cloud. Hacker News | How much to charge a big business? How I Built a $600 / mo Product In One Day | kpkaiser.com. I’ve been working on a few big projects recently, and became frustrated with the inertia built into launching anything big. Sometimes it seems like things will never be ready; like there’s just too much to do. So I decided to take a break, and really challenge myself. The Challenge: Building a $500 / mo Product in A Day For some reason, I’m most motivated by absurd goals.
Could I really find a market, pick a niche, and build a product in a single day? And what about marketing? I decided that a single day wouldn’t afford any time for marketing, and so decided to just focus my efforts on finding a simple market inefficiency. Deciding to Build Something Small I decided to build some sort of plugin for an Open Source web project. But which Open Source web software? As you can see, WordPress turns out to be the great big old winner. A perfect market to search for inefficiencies. Total Time Spent Finding Market: 2 hours Narrowing It Down: Finding Unserved Pain Points Having the Aha! Success! Ivan Zhao, web & iOS hacker, UI/UX/visualization designer, photographer, Vancouver. Is it OK to Want to Make Money? Slaying Some Silicon Valley Myths. This past October I was invited by Steve Blank to speak at Stanford for their Enterprise Thought Leader (ETL) series. The topic I chose to speak about was “lessons on starting a company” but I created the sub-title in class “a Silicon Valley heresy” since my goal was to slay many of the myths I believe exist right in the heart of Silicon Valley!
The truth is that I love Stanford, Palo Alto and the Bay Area in general. I grew up in NorCal and I formerly lived in Palo Alto. But I think that the “group think” that can sometimes form there creates a sense that there is but one way to skin a cat. Myths such as ”real companies raise venture capital,” ”you’re selling out if you sell your company for JUST $15 million,” or “companies need two co-founders” need closer examination. I disagree with all three of these. Lessons on starting a company – The group discussion was led by Tina Seelig who asked some very direct and well prepared questions during the session.
Yes. There. True, that. How to Kill a Bad Idea. Are you in the software business? I bet most of you would answer no. So let me put it another way: Do you have a website? If the answer is yes, you're in the software business. A website is software. It has utility, and that utility is accessed via an interface on a computer or mobile device. Given that today most businesses -- and plenty of individuals -- have websites, far more of you are in the software business than you probably realize. Being in the software business is a wonderful thing. However, it's also a curse. Let's start by looking at a physical object -- say, a standard 16-ounce water bottle. You don't have to analyze the bottle like I just did to understand that it is well designed.
Contrast that with software. This is why most software goes bad over time. Software -- websites included -- usually starts out pretty good. As time goes on, customers send feedback, and the business evolves. The software grows. But over time, yet more stuff is added. Guess what? Fixed income attribution. Attribution is therefore an extremely useful tool in verifying a fund manager’s claims to possessing particular investment skills. If a fund is marketed as being interest-rate neutral while providing consistent returns from superior credit research, then an attribution report will confirm this claim. Conversely, if the attribution report shows that this same manager is making non-zero returns from interest rate movements, then his exposure to interest rate risk is clearly not zero and his investment process clearly differs from his stated position.
Fixed-income attribution therefore provides a much deeper level of information than is available from a simple portfolio performance report. Typically, such a report only shows returns at an aggregated level, and provides no feedback as to where the investor’s true skills lie. For these reasons, fixed-income attribution is rapidly growing in importance in the investment industry. Sector-based attribution[edit] Yield curve attribution[edit] and. For DecorMyEyes, Bad Publicity Is a Good Thing.
Cash Cow Disease: The Cognitive Decline of Microsoft and Google. Watching the recent product retraction of Google Wave convinced me that Google is fully infected with the same protracted, end-stage wasting disease that has consumed Microsoft for years: cash cow disease. Cash cow disease arises when a public company has a small number of products that generate the lion's share of profits, but lacks the discipline to return those profits to the shareholders. The disease can progress for years or even decades, simply because the cash cow products produce enough massive revenues to distract shareholders from the smaller (but still massive) amounts of waste.
For example, with Microsoft, Windows and Office carry the company, roughly speaking, allowing the company to lose billions (that's with a 'b') on failed projects without incurring any serious backlash from stockholders. Without cash cows, Microsoft could not have launched a new cellphone, then canceled it a few weeks later, all while pouring more money into yet another generation of cellphone.
Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition. How I met our first investors - Top Hat Monocle. Startup Marketing Lessons Learned Part 3: Scaling Up To Massive Traffic « insight.io blog. When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars. When It’s Darkest Men See the StarsRalph Waldo Emerson This Thanksgiving it might seem that there’s a lot less to be thankful for. One out of ten of Americans is out of work.
The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including outsourcing the manufacture of America’s physical goods. The United States is now a debtor nation to China and that the bill is about to come due. The pundits say the American dream is dead and this next decade will see the further decline and fall of the West and in particular of the United States. It may be that all the doomsayers are right. But I don’t think so. Let me offer my prediction. I believe that we will look back at this decade as the beginning of an economic revolution as important as the scientific revolution in the 16th century and the industrial revolution in the 18th century. There’s Something Happening Here, What It Is Ain’t Exactly ClearThe story to date is a familiar one. How to build discipline and brainwash yourself with the Greatest Secret in the World.
At the beginning of 2010, I started reading a book called The Greatest Secret in the World which is basically a motivational book that teaches you to brainwash yourself The book was originally written in the 1960s as a motivational tool for salespeople, and was titled The Greatest Salesman in the World. It was republished later as The Greatest Secret in the World, due to its wide appeal beyond the world of sales.
Despite the title, the book bears no resemblance to The Secret; you won’t be conjuring up your dreams by invocation of the “Law of Attraction” or any such nonsense. The basic idea is pretty simple, actually: to repeatedly read some short passages about important concepts like time management or avoiding procrastination. The book is made up of ten “scrolls” which are 2-3 page sections based on a principle, like “Today, I will be master of my emotions.” or “Today, I will multiply my value a hundredfold.” Stuff like that. So would I read this book again?
The Irrefutable Laws of Marketing - Home. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Boston Tech Community 2011 - robgo.org. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Boston Tech Community 2011 November 9, 2010 Boston is a great place to start and build a company. There is a wealth of resources that are unique to this town and a vibrant community of hackers, business people, and investors at various stages in their career. It occurred to me however that Boston is a transient town. Especially for the student population that refreshes a large population each year. This is obviously released before 2011 in order to allow folks who are planning to arrive in Boston to get a head start. Large Tech Meetups: Web Innovators Group: Quarterly Demo-Style meetup in Cambridge draws over 1000 members of the startup community each time. Online Resources and Newsletters: Greenhorn Connect: Excellent hub of BOS tech events and resources. University Resources Smaller and High Quality Meetups PopSignal - My favorite regular tech gathering.
Coworking Spaces Dog Patch Labs - Free workspace run by Polaris Ventures. Entrepreneurial Development Firms. Hip-Hop Star Soulja Boy Appears on Weekend Conversations, talks Social Media and Performs. How I Incorporated My Startup - hey hamza. Launching a New Website: 18 Steps to Successful Metrics & Marketing. The process of launching a new website is, for many entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners, an uncertain and scary prospect. This is often due to both unanswered questions and incomplete knowledge of which questions to ask.
In this post, I'll give my best recommendations for launching a new site from a marketing and metrics setup perspective. This won't just help with SEO, but on traffic generation, accessibility, and your ability to measure and improve everything about your site. #1 - Install Visitor Analytics Nothing can be improved that is not tracked. Google analytics, or any other package (see some alternatives here), needs to be placed on every page of your site and verified. . #2 - Set Up Google & Bing Webmaster Tools Accounts Both Google & Bing have webmaster tools programs that monitor data about your site and message it back to you through online interfaces. That said, the numbers inside these tools are not always perfect, and often have serious flaws. P.s.