“Did you hear about XYZ.com? I just read about them yesterday. They raised a $5 million round from a top tier venture firm at a crazy valuation. It’s like they popped up overnight!”
Ah, the familiar refrain of “instant success.” The press loves you, investors love you, everyone wants to high five you and join your mission. You’re on your way to becoming the next Google, right?
Not exactly.
Well, unless in that same minuscule time period you’ve managed to build a profitable business with a sustainable customer base and cornered your market, you haven’t proven anything.
Success doesn’t come instantly, and it sure as heck doesn’t come from big announcements. It comes from a long term dedication toward building something real.
Launching Isn’t S...
One of the sayings I hear from talented managers in product development is, “good enough never is.” It’s inspirational, always calling the team to try harder and do better. It works to undermine excuses for poor or shoddy work. And, most importantly, it helps team members develop the courage to stand up for these values in stressful situations. Especially in teams that are managing by objectives (or OKRs), the pressure to deliver is intense. Under such pressure, the temptation to cut corners, to quit prematurely, or to hand off shoddy work to another department is overwhelming. It requires courage to stand up and say: “this work is simply not good enough. Sure, we could get away with it, but that’s not how we work.” Good managers work hard ...
When beginning a crowdfunding campaign, it’s important to evaluate your network and establish exactly who will make up your base of support. The success of your crowdfunding campaign will largely rest on how effectively you communicate your launch within your various networks. Once you’ve identified a group of potential backers – it’s also important to structure your rewards tiers in the most compelling way possible. Take into account what is most interesting to your group of potential backers and structure your rewards tiers in the most compelling way possible.
Your network can be divided into four main groups: friends, family, customers, professional contacts, and audience.
Your friends include those you see on a regular basis.You...
Crowdfunding is an incredible tool for entrepreneurs seeking capital at any stage of their business. Startup businesses can validate their idea through a rewards crowdfund, giving them great traction to share with potential investors through a follow-on equity crowdfund.
A successful rewards crowdfunding raise (typically offering pre-orders of a product), is becoming a common precursor to raising equity investments from prominent angel investors seeking an equity stake in the company.
Angel Investors and Equity Crowdfunding
Before crowdfunding, angel investments were often found within an entrepreneur’s own network. Family, friends, and close business associates were all pivotal in an entrepreneur’s search for capital, due to a ban on the p...
The rise of the Growth Hacker
The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itself into Silicon Valley’s culture, emphasizing that coding and technical chops are now an essential part of being a great marketer. Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. On top of this, they layer the discipline of direct marketing, with its emphasis on quantitative measurement, scenario modeling via spreadsheets, and a lot of database queries. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. After pr...
“Use a Facebook page to promote your business, and keep your Facebook profile for actual friends and family only. Many people make the mistake of blurring the line and they’re left with the worst of both worlds: They can’t promote on Facebook because they’ll annoy their friends, and they can’t be too personal for fear of coming across as unprofessional with prospects. Separate the two.”
— Laura Roeder
MeetEdgar.com
@lkr
“Reserve personal time in your schedule for activities that allow you to recharge and that add value, such as daily exercise, a weekly date or social night, family acti...
Mark Robinson and Sam Lee, the founders of Class.Travel, sat down with us to discuss how to launch and create apps that users love. The two met over tacos and Mexican beer, and stumbled upon the idea to create Class.Travel, a platform allowing you to easily book hotels.
Both have a background in computer science and have always wanted to start their own companies. Below they share their top ten tips on creating a user-friendly mobile app.
As an expert SEO, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades.
You need to understand link building, marketing, public relations, psychology, and technology.
At a certain point, there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything you’d like to do.
But you can save quite a bit of time and effort on small things by using browser extensions.
You can install them with one or two mouse clicks and access them with ease to the right of your address bar.
They will help you:
I’ve put together a list of 28 browser extensions I consider to be the best. I encourage you to give a few of them a try.
A quick heads-up: most of thes...
Startup entrepreneurs face the daunting task of getting everything in order and taking care of even the minor thing precisely. Ranging from finances, back-end, front-end development to marketing and product launches, a startup entrepreneur has to take care of everything possible. Most of the time and personnel is wasted on administrative tasks which can be completely automated through the use of some powerful tools. Getting your idea developed into a full-fledged business is the primary task of an entrepreneur and a startup is no way endowed with hordes of cash to hire more personnel, unless backed in millions by a VC or angel investor.
Every startup has to operate in the financial constraints imposed on it and has to limit the personnel wo...
Clicking the “Publish” button is one of the highlights of my day.
Working hard on a post and then putting it out there to help others is extremely rewarding. It’s one of the main reasons why I continue to write so much.
But it’s not the only reason….
Content marketing remains one of the most effective strategies to grow a blog – any blog.
Eighty-six percent of marketers in North America use content marketing, and 71% of marketers (overall) are planning to increase spending on content marketing.
Creating great content is an extremely important part of any successful content marketing strategy. But it’s just one part.
If all you do is hit “Publish” and then move on to the next article, your blog won’t grow as quickly as it should.
And if you...