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A Power Point template for the Lean Canvas - Digital Evolution. Experiment Archives - Digital Evolution. “When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail” -Bernard Baruch Here, the hammer is your solution and the nails are your customers. I am sure you have already found lots of nails for your hammer. But please take a closer look at those nails. They are screws. Put the hammer down and look at that poor screw. Many entrepreneurs start by building the solution they have imagined (a hammer) and then come up with a list of potential customers that could be interested (screws that look like nails) and hit them with their solution. And the screw says ouch. The entrepreneur should really look at the screw, understand what type of screw it is, how the head is, the thread, the length, the alloy. So put the hammer down and take a close look at that screw and decide what the solution should be.

That’s called Customer Discovery. Here is what he said that I liked: Most startups fail (still). Referring to his book Running Lean, he said he can’t tell when the launch date was. WOW. Enjoy! 7 Tools to Fix Your App's Deadly Retention Problem | Inc.com. It is 7x more expensive to acquire a customer than to keep one. A study by Bain and Co. shows that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company's profitability by 75%. And if that's not enough, another recent study shows that 80% of your company's future revenue will come from 20% of your current customers. In short, retention is probably the absolutely most important part of your business. And yet, bizarrely, it's also one of the most overlooked aspects of building a successful company. Startups pour all of their efforts into growth and new customer acquisition, and they lose half of those customers out of their leaky bucket faster than they can add new ones. That's how promising companies die.

But it doesn't have to be this way. 1. Email is the #1 way to drive users back to your app again and again. The foundation of your app's new user experience is the email drip campaign. And to do all of this successfully, you need to make your emails incredibly personal and targeted. 2. Advice and Insights for Entrepreneurs | OnStartups.

Launch6 | How to Start a Business Online. How to Start a Business Online 7 tried and true steps for attracting visitors to your site–and getting them to buy. Article written by Allen Moon, a contributing writer for Entrepreneur.com There is a proven sequence of steps you can follow to guarantee your success when you’re starting a small business online. I’ve seen thousands of people start and grow successful businesses by doing the following: Find a need and fill it.Write copy that sells.Design and build an easy-to-use website.Use search engines to drive traffic to your site.Establish an expert reputation for yourself.Follow up with your customers and subscribers with e-mail.Increase your income through back-end sales and upselling.

Anyone, from newbie to seasoned online entrepreneur, can benefit from this process in learning how to start a business online. Step 1: Find a need and fill it Most people who are just starting out make the mistake of looking for a product first, and a market second. Step 2: Write copy that sells. How to Build an App Empire: Can You Create The Next Instagram? Chad Mureta runs his seven-figure app business from his iPhone. (Photo: Jorge Quinteros). I first met Chad Mureta in Napa Valley in 2011. Two years prior, he had been in a horrible car accident. He’d lost control of his truck in at attempt to avoid a deer, hit a median, and flipped four times, nearly destroying his dominant arm in the wreckage. While in the hospital for a lengthy recovery, a friend gave him an article about the app market.

“In just over two years, I’ve created and sold three app companies that have generated millions in revenue. After finishing rehab, Chad was able to leave his real estate company, where he’d been working 70 hours a week, to run his app business from his iPhone… in less than 5 hours per week. “Apps” are the new, new thing, thanks to major successes like Draw Something (bought by Zynga for $210 million) and Instagram (bought by Facebook for $1 billion), among others. Last but not least, don’t miss the competition at the end. Enter Chad Mureta. Startup Grind. Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies. Welcome to the most comprehensive list of psychological pricing strategies. Whether you’re marketing a new product, selling items on eBay, or negotiating a deal on your house, you’ll learn how to choose a price that will maximize your profit.

PDF Bonus: This article is 10,868 words. Click to download the full PDF so that you can reference it later. Step 1:Determine Your Price Large companies have an advantage. They can afford cream-of-the-crop marketing research (e.g., conjoint analysis) to find the optimal price for their product. Fortunately, that’s where psychology can help. Based on research in cognition and behavior, certain prices are more effective than others. In this section, you’ll learn how people process numerical values (and how to choose the numbers in your price, accordingly). Related Resources: Use Charm Pricing For the past couple decades, the marketing world has been inundated with charm pricing — prices that end in 9, 99, or 95.

And the results speak for themselves. Duh. 1. You'd Like to Be an Angel Investor? Here's How You Can Invest In My Deals… Most deals get done in informal settings. Now, I’m inviting you to join me. (Photo: Russell Yip) Please note that my syndicate investing in Shyp has now closed. You can still back me on AngelList to gain priority access to future deals. On September 23, 2013 (that’s today), the world of startup financing changes forever. Previously, I couldn’t publicly share deals with you. Previously, you had to be part of a small club to see such deals. Starting today, I’ll share some of my favorite deals with you, beginning with a start-up called Shyp. Notable companies I’ve advised include Uber (pre-Series-A), Evernote, Automattic (WordPress.com), Shopify, and TaskRabbit, among others. In this case, I used a “Spearhead Capital” blog post to my ~1.4M monthly blog readers to find promising startups.

Shyp is the fastest and easiest way to ship packages. Investing alongside me–and potentially you–in this round are: …and more So, how can you join us? Before I tell you, remember: The Short Version. The 5 Early Mistakes That Almost Killed This Founder’s Startup — and How He Survived - First Round Review. After Clark Benson sold his company eCrush in 2007, he had two choices: He could either take a sabbatical or he could jump right in and start building his fifth company, Ranker, a site that would crowdsource rankings of everything from movies to athletes.

Feeling self-inflicted pressure, he chose the latter — and, in his words, it turned out to be a colossal mistake. “I didn’t take nearly enough time off to unwind after 12 years of an all-in entrepreneur lifestyle. I also didn’t take enough time to think in much more detail about the team I needed to hire and the resources we’d need before the pressures of overhead came into the mix,” says Benson. “I had this great concept, and I just couldn’t handle the idea of seeing someone do it before we did.” This was the first of many mistakes he admits to — despite having nearly 20 years experience as an entrepreneur. Hiring ‘smart’ engineering talent that is wrong for your startup. “That was a huge mistake on the overhead front,” he says. 50 Quick Productivity and Business Tips for Early-Stage Entrepreneurs. At Techstars, we talk a lot about productivity, email, getting things done, basic business development and fundraising culture.

Below is a collection of general tips we give our founders. While nothing is ever universal, these are generally helpful for any startup, especially for first-time founders. Productivity 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Related: The 3 Worst Things You May Be Doing When Setting Goals 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. Email 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Asking for introductions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Related: Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Way to Move Forward 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Scheduling meetings 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Intro call: 15 minutes -- people will love you for sending invites for 15 minutes and sticking with it.Intro meeting: 30 minutes -- one hour is a lot, stick with 30 minutes for most in-person meetings you are traveling to unless the other person is asking for more time.

If you are not sure, ask them if you’d need more than 30 minutes. In the meeting 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.