Continued from Part 2 Marc: On viral, one in a hundred or one in a thousand. Safe assumption is: your product ain’t viral. The number of things that are actually viral is very small. I love the magic business models but it’s really hard to find an example of someone who goes to get the [...]
Continued from Part 1 3 gradations of this thing Founders who build the product for themselves have a huge advantage: founder market fit. HP theory (in the old days) - the “next bench theory” - each bench would make the product for the next: voltmeters -> oscilloscope -> down the line; adjacent markets. Hardest, and [...]
“We pivoted twice, which is like 8 fewer than we should have needed to.” 1. Interactive television. Time warner had rolled out 60 homes in Florida (40 thousand dollars), gave up on that idea. gave up on that. 2. Xboxlive or psnetwork for… n64! We were slightly premature. Luckily we punted on that one. And [...]
Scott Cook from Intuit: In this age of innovation, the role of a leader has to change. The leader has four roles: The leader has to set the grand challenge. The leader has to install the systems and culture to enable people, even junior people, to run fast experiments to achieve that grand challenge. The leader has [...]
Lean marketing: if you had $1 to spend, where should you put it? Early on, when starting a company, there are lots of shiny things you want to go after — but it could be easy to spend money on lots of channels without realizing what sort of impact you could have on your business. [...]
Living beyond your means, spending energy merely to look successful and exaggerating your accomplishments are often a derivative of vanity metrics. What numbers not to use: - Pageviews - New members - Total members - Unique visitors/visits - Conversion Rate - Percent Growth - Conversion rate - Twitter followers - Facebook friends/likes Instead measure: - [...]
In Testing MVPs with Crowdfunding, Justin backed the position that your startup isn’t a business, it’s a hobby. Both hobbies and businesses are easy to get obsessed over and can cost a lot of money. Justin’s approach: Come up with idea > Interview Customers: Does this solve a real problem? > Use paper prototypes > [...]
We are very pleased about the buzz around the release of AOL’s new about.me iPhone app. Blazing Cloud engineers worked collaboratively with the sumptuous designs of Aaron Martin and the fabulous David Brock of the about.me server team within the media giant. Founder Tony Conrad tweeted that there were 50k downloads in the first 3 [...]
When Blazing Cloud needed a solution for a daily standup conference call, I looked no further than Twilio. I’ve heard great things about Twilio, most appealing of which is its simplicity to implement. As a non-developer who was increasingly frustrated with using free conference services, I decided to take on the task of creating a [...]
In the not so distant past, iPhone users had limited options when it came to their choice of cell providers. Until Verizon received the iPhone 4 in February 2011, AT&T was the only contender in the iPhone market. With the recent release of the iPhone 4S on Sprint, consumers now have another option, but each [...]
