We share stories about building a framework for building awesome startups. You should follow us on twitter here.
This blog is written by Tyler Willis, a startup marketer and advisor who is the director of marketing at Involver.
The first marketing person you hire should have a solid product background (or the ability to pick it up quickly) so that they brief analysts, build presentations, write white papers, do a competitive write-up as well as manage the vendor building the web site and execute a lead gen program.”
Scale Well: funding traction in scalable businesses »
“$1000 for your company. No strings attached.”
chitown buddy and ex-coworker Andy Angelos just launched this project.
ScaleWell is designed to provide entrepreneurs and startups with capital to reach milestones and gain traction. sounds awesome.
How it works: $1000 and coworking space for you company
Applications are now open and will close on January 31st 2010.
awesome. also dig the simplicity and straightforwardness of the site. way to go Andy!
The biggest lesson that I’ve gotten is about testing. It’s about set high goals and then test. Assume you’re going to get it wrong. Build this leveraged approach.”
— Marc Pincus on Metrics - Bronte Media (via hiten)
Usually, new projects are measured and held accountable to milestones and deadlines. When a project is on track, on time, and on budget, our intuition is that it is being well managed. This intuition is dead wrong.
Most startups fail because they are building something that nobody wants. Enamored with a new technology or a radical new product, many entrepreneurs never find a set of customers who will buy it. Each new feature added to such a product is actually wasted effort, even if it’s done on-time and on-budget. In product that nobody wants, all the features get thrown away.
— Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? - Harvard Business Review
The case of the United Kingdom provides a good example of such a program. Launched last year, the tier 1 “Entrepreneur Visa” category [1] allows entrepreneurs to enter the country to create new startups. The eligibility criterion for this visa is based on the point system used by the UK to evaluate new immigrant applications. In addition to traditional attributes, such as language proficiency and educational qualifications, applicants are awarded points for access to capital (above £200,000) and for adhering to appropriate financial regulations. While the initial program allows entrepreneurs to stay for 2 years, it is subject to a review whereupon the applicant may be eligible to be granted immediate permanent residency.”
I hope the @foursquare people don’t mind my sharing this screenshot, but I want to give credit where it’s due. I’ve seen (or helped build) a few dotcom superuser programs. They aren’t easy, and this looks one looks well executed. The “(Superuser! - Level 1)” designation is a nice touch. My sneaking suspicion is that there’s no Level 2 quite yet, and that’s just how it should be.
My usage spiked when I started using the Foursquare Blackberry app, which is pretty good. I can’t wait until mobile browsers get interesting enough for us to forget all this app foolishness.
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Analyst: Can you share some of the metrics of your business—ARPU, conversion rate between paying versus non-paying user?
Siqi Chen: In the case of Friends For Sale, conversion rate is about 1%, which is really low. And out of the people who pay for the game, we extract most of our revenue from users who pay us thousands of dollars and in some cases tens of thousands of dollars at a time. Our blended ARPU works out to about $0.45 per DAU per month.
—
Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog
To be a profitable company you need a 1% conversion rate of paying game players if you have a million daily players and some of those paying members spend 10s of 1000s of $ a year. Seems kooky, but there it is. Scale creates models. (via tedr)
How I Built my Minimum Viable Product »
The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a key lean startup concept popularized by Eric Ries. The basic idea is to maximize validated learning for the least amount of effort. After all, why waste effort building out a product without first testing if it’s worth it.
