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How to Keep Your First 1,000 Users. Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. So, you have a startup idea. It’s going to be big. You can see it now. The only problem is that your vision is based on having hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of happy users and, currently, you have zero happy users. If your startup plan is directly based on this vision, you will struggle. You need a different plan; a plan that doesn’t assume millions of happy users. You need a first 1,000 users plan. Unfortunately, looking at how successful startups are currently executing (Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare) doesn’t help because their growth plans are based on the fact that they already have millions of users.

You have to look at their history. Focus on a Niche. On your way to millions of users, don’t forget you have to get 1,000 happy users first. Slowcop - Make your website faster. Tools. New Presentations From creating story and design concepts to developing entire presentation templates and systems, Duarte can make sure your presentation makes the right impact on your audience.

Existing Presentations Using the building blocks you already have in place—your content, presentation system, and visual assets—Duarte can enhance, revise, or redesign your existing presentations. Device-Based Presentations Your content must be compelling on all platforms. Whether you’ve got a presentation, book, sales tool, technical publication, or other type of collateral, Duarte can transform your message into a visually rich, easily navigable eBook, iBook, or dynamic document tailored for use on tablets and smartphones. Multimedia Sometimes your idea is best showcased and shared through multimedia, including motion graphics, videos, and animated demos. Events. Duarte Design's Five Rules for Presentations by Nancy Duarte. Failing well. Failure sucks. Nobody wants to fail. But in the start-up world, most people are doing just that. I’m not sure I’ve read much about “how” to fail, since failure is so depressing and negative.

But I’m here to tell you that there is a good way to fail and that there are steps for positively managing the aftermath. I’ve seen it done well, I’ve seen it done poorly and I’ve done it myself, so I certainly have some well-formed views on the topic. Thank your investors for their faith and confidence in both you and the mission, and express how truly sorry you are that it didn’t work out.Work hard to leave on good terms with all other key constituencies - co-founders, employees, service providers, etc. You don’t need to be best friends, but you should be civil and able to move forward with a clean slate.Think deeply about how it went wrong, and write it down.

While it’s poetic to say “do it again,” maybe that’s not necessarily the right thing for everybody to do. The Top 20 VC Power Bloggers Of 2010. Great Alternative Online Business and Monetization Models. My 2010 Mentors. I was going through my reader this morning and it occurred to me; I learned a lot from a lot of smart people in 2010. There were a number of people I looked to for brilliance, insight and perspective. These people are smart, funny, energetic and definitely worth following and reading in 2011.

My mentors of 2010: Rosabeth Moss Kantor – Leadership and Business Fred Wilson – Start-ups and Entreprenuership Paul Dunay – B2B Marketing David Brock -Sales Mark Suster – Sales, Start-Ups, Entreprenuership Seth Godin – Marketing, Personal Development, Leadership Jill Konrath – Sales Steve Chihos – Change, Change Leadership, Organizational Change S. Wally Bock – Leadership Dan Waldo – Passion, Energy, Life Tibor Shanto – Sales Seth Levine – VC, Start-ups TechStars Companies and Founders – Pure Grit, Passion, If there are folks you found super valuable in 2010 share them in the comments. Relefit. Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions Of 2010.

Kuler. 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. Here are some of the traits I've found. 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. In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm. How I Built a Web 2.0 Dating Site in 66.5 Hours. Please note: As many of you know Mingle2 was bought by JustSayHi (another dating site) in 2007. JustSayHi’s infrastructure runs on Ruby on Rails, and as such Mingle2 was eventually ported over to that framework as well.

For those curious what the original Mingle2 was like, I’ve preserved the original CakePHP version of Mingle2 here: Let this be a testament to Web 2.0 and the effectiveness of rapid development frameworks: I built a full-featured dating website, from concept to launch, in 66.5 hours. In a typical 9-5 job this would amount to about a week and a half. Deliverables included: The Idea – Cooking up a brand with a name, identity, and purposePlanning – Creating functional specifications, visual wireframes, and information architectureDesign – Creating mock-ups and defining aesthetics, typography, positioning, and colorDevelopment – Writing the actual codeTesting – Ironing out the kinksLaunch – Going live Keep.

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