This is a brilliant case study of someone using Customer Development, Pirate Metrics and Lean Startup principles to develop their startup. If you’re not familiar with these three concepts, here are the 3 links you need: Steve Blank’s blog on Customer Development Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR! by Dave McClure Startup Lessons Learned by Eric […]
YourVersion Sign-Up Process Works
YourVersion is a newly launched web application from the Techcrunch50 conference. YourVersion is a discovery engine that looks to provide you with good content from all over (blogs, multimedia sites, social sites, Twitter, etc.) in an easy-to-use, aggregated way. It also has a toolbar for bookmarking (and categorizing) content, plus sharing. Tracking all the content […]
Changing Equity Structures for Early Startup Employees
Recently someone asked me for advice on how much equity they should give to their early employees. His company had just closed an early round of funding and he wanted to cement the employee relationships. I gave him similar numbers to what I had been given when I was hiring the first few employees for […]
Why I Switched Instigator Blog to Thesis WordPress Theme
I’ve known about the Thesis WordPress theme for some time, having followed its launch and use by a lot of friends and colleagues. I always knew it was a worthwhile theme, but never had a project to use it on until recently. Recently my wife launched her own site – I Spy Montreal – for […]
The False Promise of One More Feature
How often have you said (or heard someone say), “If we just add that one new feature, we’re going to hit a home run with this thing!” I’ve heard it a lot. I’ve even said it a lot (more times than I’d care to admit.) It’s easy to get lured into the feature creep trap […]
Is Linkbait Dead?
The simplest definition of linkbait is a blog post that attracts people’s attention enough to get them to link back to the post. Getting links to a blog post is crucial for SEO. Generally speaking: more links = better SEO. And better SEO = more traffic. I’m simplifying, but the basic premise is there. For […]
Key Thing to Ask When Hiring Designers
Hiring designers is tough. The term itself has such a broad definition, and a wide array of accompanying skills. A lot of people associate designers with people who “make pretty pictures.” But it’s really so much more than that. In my mind a designer has to have a number of skill sets that together will […]
Do Your Customers Link Value to Price?
A lot of people equate value with price. The higher the price, the higher the value must be, right? I’ve seen this repeatedly in the B2B world selling software to mid-to-large enterprises. It’s certainly not always the case, but it’s more common than you might realize. And it speaks to the possibility that you can […]
Web Apps Don’t Motivate New Users Enough
Building a successful web application is not easy. And one of the areas I find particularly lacking in many new web apps is the experience immediately after signing up. Thankfully, signing up for web applications has gotten a lot simpler and faster with authentication through Twitter or Facebook, but it’s not even the standard sign-up […]
How to Get the Most Value out of Twitter Links
I’m not Fred Wilson (who posts ideas and sees them built almost instantaneously) but I’m going to post about something I’d like to see as a Twitter application and maybe, just maybe … someone will build it. Fred (and many others) are certainly right — the value of Twitter is in the links. We’re seeing […]
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