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Start Your Marketplace Engines

Genuine VC

Communities like those of uTest (software QA testers), as well as NextView portfolio companies GrabCAD (mechanical engineers) and thredUP (parents), which resulted in marketplaces had origins in this approach. Often this focus can be on a specific geography or vertical. Brute force a mini-market and expand.

Engineer 201
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Sponsored Poolfunding: A New Way To Think About Maximizing Advertising Dollars

YoungUpstarts

It works by compiling a list of the best vendors in a specific vertical that share some commonality – location, for example. Every vendor ranked benefits from the traffic, audience, and leads produced through top search engine rankings at zero additional cost. How is Sponsored Poolfunding Better than Other Advertising Options?

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Scaling is Hard, Case Study: TripAdvisor

Seeing Both Sides

I first met Steve when he was VP of Engineering at Centerline software, a software development tools startup, and I was a junior in college. In founding TripAdvisor, Kaufer wanted to take his hard core engineering skills and apply them to vertical search in travel. Big Data meets travel…in 2000.

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37 Entrepreneurs Explain Why They Started Their Businesses

Hearpreneur

Since coming to Australia in 2004 my passion for creativity was further boosted and was well alive while still doing my business degree and working in corporate world until 2011. And this was at a prestigious engineering school. It’s a problem that all weather driven sports have. You couldn’t read it.

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25 Best Startup Failure Post-Mortems of All Time

www.chubbybrain.com

If you are an entrepreneur seeking funding, try our free Funding Recommendation Engine to identify a list of angels, venture capital and state grant programs that best match your business. If you’ve read this far, you definitely should : Try out our Funding Recommendation Engine. Think of it as 7 bonus post-mortems on the house.

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20 Entrepreneurs Explain How They Came Up With Their Business Names

Hearpreneur

The final word, media, helped to define the vertical we were to operate in. maid service) can provide a HUGE boost in the search engines. This small little trick has allowed us to dominate the search engines in our area for years. The brand name has stood out and acted as an earworm of sorts during the sales conversion process.

Naming 84
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CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire.NET programmers

blog.expensify.com

I am the VP of Engineering at a cutting-edge startup that sells software built on the.NET platform. You whine about how hard it is to find good engineers, then go on and on about how you intentionally avoid at least half of the market for skilled people? It’s like arguing against vertical software. How about ABAPer?

Java 107