Startup Marketing Blog - By Sean Ellis

Lessons Learned Advice and Insights for Entrepreneurs | OnStartups GrowthHackers - A Community for the Growth Obsessed to Connect and Get Inspired Arnaud de La Taille's PostPost A Brilliant Touchpad Mouse for Touching Yourself [SFW Video] | Co.Design Famous designers love doing vibrators. Designing them, we mean! Tom Dixon, Arik Levy, Marc Newson, Yves Béhar: They've all dabbled in the sex-toy biz, and sure, it sounds a touch gimmicky -- a vanity project for the designer, a cash cow for the manufacturer -- but it actually makes a lot of sense. This is your most intimate object. Anyone who can make a floor cleaner sexy can easily make silicone sexy. So Béhar and Jimmyjane, a year after giving the lonely-hearted world his first vibrator, FORM 2, is back with FORM 3. The key is a flexy membrane at the center of the vibrator. Béhar created FORM 3 for the high-design sex depot Jimmyjane along with company founder Ethan Imboden. For more steamy design coverage, peep here. [Images via fuseproject]

Venture Hacks - Good advice for startups Performance Marketing News | PerformanceIN Marketing You asked for it Arnold and 84 others (so far). So I'm gonna talk about marketing. I believe that marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks or when you make so much profit on every marginal customer that it would be crazy to not spend a bit of that profit acquiring more of them (coke, zynga, bud, viagra). A very experienced and successful entrepreneur came into our office a week ago to pitch his latest company. So a few days later, I called him. Zynga has spent millions on customer acquisition and continues to do so. In my talk at Harvard Business School, I said "Early in a startup, product decisions should be hunch driven. Early in a startup you need to acquire your customers for free. So if you need to acquire customers for free early in a startup, how do you do that? For the consumer/free part of the web, there are some obvious things you will want to do: 1) Twitter – so many entrepreneurs have asked me "how did you start a company before Twitter?"