A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'You’re a builder, a creator — whether a back-end programmer, a Linux hacker, a Javascript ninja, a UX magician, a designer. You make stuff. That’s great of course, because in a new startup everyone needs to be either making stuff or selling stuff — there’s no room for managers and executives and strategists. But this also produces a natural weakness , and when I look at what made me a successful entrepreneur — not just a great coder — it’s that I

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The Next Web

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'This post was originally published on the Thoughtbot blog. There has been a lot of talk about empathy with the end user in UX design over the last few years. The importance of understanding what type of product you are building and for whom you are doing it, what needs and knowledge the intended user group has. While this is important, and really hard to get to, there is another type of empathy, that is almost as important during the development of a product and that is the communication and

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Design Naming Email Restful 133

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'Every so often a promising entrepreneur seems to freeze in the oncoming headlights and gets run over by his competition. Why is it that his idea which seemed so fundable only months ago fails to attract investors today? The team is the same. The company''s market is the same. The only change might be a visible new competitor, or another economy downturn, resulting in investors holding their money, and that makes all the difference.

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Startup Demand Entrepreneur Business Plan 226

deal architect

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'This blog loves disruptors so it caught our attention when BusinessWeek called T-Mobile’s strategy “wacky”. It says “(John Legere, CEO of the US unit) is a midway barker, promising something marvelous if we’ll just step through the curtain.” Nothing wacky.

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Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

Startup

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'by Thomas Moran, CEO of Addison Group. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. This saying is never truer than when applied to a person starting a new job. While the thrill of landing a dream position can be exciting, joining a new company can also be quite overwhelming, and it can lead to awkward social interactions and overstepped boundaries.

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Chicago Reputation Restful Finance 183

deal architect

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'In the Pulitzer prize winning "The Soul Of A New Machine", Tracy Kidder wrote of an ad that Data General produced but never ran. It read "They Say IBM''s Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome".

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'This post was co-written by Sarah Milstein & Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. We’ve just published the program for this year’s Lean Startup Conference , December 9 to 11 in San Francisco, and we can say without hesitation that it’s completely unlike any other entrepreneurship conference in existence. The difference matters, because while there are more than enough conferences aimed at startups—more of them every year it seems—so many of them look the same: a succession of

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Mike Michalowicz

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'Being an entrepreneur is hard – the relentless questions, the insane demands, and the occasional hate mail. And I am not talking about your clients, I am talking about your spouse. Maybe you married the wrong spouse (it happens), but more often than not it is a communication breakdown. If your spouse doesn’t support your business, here are five ways to get your relationship back in shape.

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The Next Web

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'In case you hadn’t heard, photo storage startup Everpix is shutting down. We’ve heard nothing but praise for the product, but, in the end, Everpix said it was “unable to secure sufficient funding in order to properly scale the business.”. The Verge has an illuminating behind-the-scenes look at what went wrong for the team. If you’re building a startup of your own, it’s definitely worth a read, especially the Lessons Learned section where the founders explain some of the mistakes they made: They

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The Equity Kicker

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'I’m a big believer in continuous self-improvement and hence I read a lot of articles like You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximise your cognitive potential which appeared in Scientific American yesterday. This is a great one. It’s reasonably accessible whilst also containing enough science to be convincing, and I love that scientists are now concluding that intelligence is teachable.

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Networking Entrepreneur 104

Start Up Blog

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'Last night we announced at Tomcar Australia that we’d be accepting bitcoin as a payment method when selling our vehicles. Not surprisingly we got a lot of coverage globally in news and technology circles. The reason I came up with this idea was multi-layered. Firstly, as a new car startup ( the first in over 30 years in Australia ) our budgets are skinny and our brand awareness is low.

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Australia PR Global Technology 93

Duct Tape Marketing

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'How to Anchor Your Brand With a Great Story written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing Shinola is a hot brand. The start up retailer has recent appearances in CBS News, Entertainment Weekly, GQ, New York Times and a host of daily newspapers and news shows to prove it. First off, let’s face it, Shinola is doing something a little unique.

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Detroit Kansas City Kansas New York 71

Rob Go

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'I was chatting with Nick Chirls from Betaworks recently and we talked a bit about Angelist syndicates and the incentives surrounding it. Betaworks was one of the first investors to use Syndicates on the platform in their investment with Estimote (a really cool company, BTW). Nick reminded of an interesting perverse incentive that syndicates creates.

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Syndicate Syndication Early Stage Portfolio 68

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'SXSW Accelerator returns for its sixth edition to showcase some of the web’s most exciting innovations – do you know a company that could be one?

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Early Growth Financial Services

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'Originally published in Upstart Business Journal. What is the most difficult question that VCs ask and what is the best way to tackle it ahead of time? What is your hole? “The classic VC role is that of an interrogator, trying to break you for a key secret. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Folks who watch the TV show “Shark Tank” know this feeling.

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Equity Revenue Founder Entrepreneur 44

Version One Ventures

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

'Last week, I attended a fascinating talk about Customer Obsession given by Kim Rachmeler at version one’s portfolio company, Frontdesk. Kim spent 10 years at Amazon.com , where she served as VP of Worldwide Customer Service, CIO International, among several other critical roles. While it’s no secret that Amazon.com is a customer-centric company, Kim shared a few interesting insights into the role of customer service at Amazon.

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Customer Portfolio Metrics Programming 147