article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: SEM on five dollars a day

Startup Lessons Learned

BillSeitz - yes, but that was already true back in 2004. Have AdWords rates increased too much for most common phrases like this to have the numbers work? May 8, 2009 2:27 PM Eric said. The absolute essential key is to bid only on low-volume low-value keywords. Take a look and let me know what you think.

SEM 164
article thumbnail

How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people

Startup Lessons Learned

This was 2004, and we had never even heard of MySpace, let alone had any understanding of social networking. So the natural comparison, we thought, would be to other 3D avatar based products, like The Sims and World of Warcraft. But the early customers all compared it to MySpace. Take a look and let me know what you think.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Why PHP won

Startup Lessons Learned

When we started IMVU in 2004, we could rely on a staggering amount of open source software that jumpstarted our initial product offering. At IMVU, when wed hire a new engineer, we could get them to ship code to production on their first day, even if they had never programmed in PHP before. I am CTO of a SaaS vendor, and we use PHP.

PHP 166