September, 2012

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Is Going for Rapid Growth Always Good? Aren’t Startups So Much More?

Both Sides of the Table

I think I’ve read Paul Graham’s post on “ Startup = Growth ” three or four times now. And of course on Twitter I’ve seen the Tweets, ReTweets and superlatives on what a great post it is. Viewing the article through the lens of a venture capitalist there’s much to agree with under the mantra of “growth!” And when you read the article carefully it allows for a period of discovery in your business.

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Accelerate Startup Growth by Looking Outside the Box

Startup Professionals Musings

Every entrepreneur tries to maximize his startup growth by building and selling more product and services for the widest geographic area that he can support. This strategy is called “organic growth,” yet it alone may yield only a fraction of the potential you could achieve, unless you add the additional strategies of partnerships and M&A (mergers and acquisitions).

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Why Too Many Startups (er) Suck

Steve Blank

This is a guest post by my Startup Owner’s Manual co-author Bob Dorf. ——————-. While statistics are weak on startup success rates, the worst one I’ve seen suggests that 2 in 1000 venture backed startups will ever achieve $100-million or more in valuation. Another stat puts that number at 2% rather than 0.2%. Either way, the “hurdle” for successful, scalable startups is high, and it gets higher every day as customer acquisition challenges continue to increase.

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The importance of being disciplined

The Equity Kicker

Personal discipline is one of my hallmarks. I have thought a lot about how and why I do what I do so that I can get a lot of important stuff done. Doing stuff inefficiently or spending time on unimportant stuff sends me round the twist a little. Staying disciplined is an ongoing process of self improvement and I’m always looking for new tricks and tactics, so when I saw a link to Achieving top mental performance for software developers I clicked straight through, and to my delight I found

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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

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

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SkyDrive Is Great and No One Has Noticed

Feld Thoughts

In July I wrote a post where I was Searching For A Collaborative Writing Tool. I got a bunch of suggestions – some people suggested their startups, some suggested Google Docs, and one person (a friend who works for Microsoft) suggested Microsoft SkyDrive . Amy and I were deep in working on Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur.

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Facebook Advertising / Marketing: Best Metrics, ROI, Business Value

Occam's Razor

Facebook has an incredible audience, 950 million strong and counting. This audience is immensely attractive to Brands and Marketers around the world. We've seen explosive growth in brand pages, types of advertising and other fun ways to monetize this audience. Increased investment in Facebook as an engagement/acquisition channel has translated into requests from CEOs, CMOs and other CxOs about the return on that investment.

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Too Many Small Businesses Still Ignore Social Media

Startup Professionals Musings

When my friend’s small business was struggling a while back, I suggested he add some social media marketing initiatives, and his answer was that he was “too busy.” His business has since closed, but his mindset is still out there. According to a recent Harvard Business Review article , only 60% of companies today use social media for marketing, and only 12% of those feel that they are using it effectively.

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How Not To Run Your Own Technology Startup

YoungUpstarts

by Ian Smith of Captricity. This is not about running a startup badly, it’s about not doing the things that are not core to your business. The world has changed a lot lately and just about every aspect of a technology company – and especially a web-based company – can be “moved out” to a web-based application provider at a lower cost than doing it yourself.

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13 tech trends to adopt before the year’s end

The Next Web

Though it’s incredibly valuable to be an early adopter of 2012′s tech trends, it won’t hurt your company to be right on time with everyone else who is just discovering them now. It’s not too late to set up a presence on Pinterest and Instagram, and mobile apps aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, as always, new tech trends are on the horizon.

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The only 2 ways to build a $100 million business

Version One Ventures

With tens of thousands of new start-ups being created every year, the potential of a company to truly scale and become a large, stand-alone business is more crucial than ever before. A great product is always the foundation but a clear distribution strategy becomes essential to cut through the noise. So most early-stage VCs have started to evaluate investment opportunities with an imaginary benchmark in mind: can this company become a $100 million opportunity?

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How to Relate Your Technology to Business Values

Gust

Steve Forbes image via Wikipedia. Presenting your startup vision as a founder to a potential investor, or presenting an idea as an employee to an executive, requires that you effectively communicate, or “translate”, the value proposition into terms that the receiver can fully understand and appreciate. If you fail, it’s your loss, not theirs, no matter what the reason.

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How To Get Tons of Amazon Reviews For Your Book (Or Product)

Mike Michalowicz

Unlimited Real, Legit Amazon Reviews. Being that I am an, admittedly, relatively unknown author of business books, it was clear that I needed to show credibility immediately. A pretty book cover with a catchy title may get someone to look at your page on Amazon , but it is unlikely to get them to buy it. Ultimately, for a consumer to buy your book, product or service, they want to trust they are making a good decision.

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There Are Only 3 Ways to Increase Online Sales (Are You Optimizing For All of Them?)

ConversionXL

There are three ways to grow sales – online and offline both. Only three. However, most companies focus only on one – and are missing out on revenue opportunities. So what are these 3 ways to increase online sales? increase the number of customers, increase the average order size, increase the number of repeat purchases. #1: Increase the number of customers.

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The 10 Best Teams Ever Assembled (And What We Can Learn From Them)

YoungUpstarts

No man is an island. From time to time, we all find we’ve gone as far as we can go on our own. Therein lays the beauty of teamwork: a helping hand to pick you up and see you through to the end. To celebrate the joy of working together, we’ve compiled the definitive list of the best teams ever assembled, along with what each of them has to teach us. We made our picks from all walks of life, from sports to space and from fictional to factual.

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Everything you need to run your business… from your iPad

The Next Web

This week, TIME Magazine editor-at-large Harry McCracken interviewed himself as a follow-up to his piece on how he had been using his iPad as his primary computer. During the interview he mentions that he still uses his iPad a lot – so much so that it is still his favourite computer. Yes, he’s a journalist. But he points out that others have taken up the charge of becoming “big time” iPad users: “I’m pretty sure it’s not just journalists who are using iPads as computers.

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A full day of Lean Startup Workshops on December 4, 2012

Startup Lessons Learned

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. This year, for the first time, we've added a day of workshops and site visits to The Lean Startup Conference. We’re really proud to present the workshops, which we're holding on December 4, and we wanted to tell you more about them. (We’ll talk about the cool site visits in a separate post.

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Instead of sticking a fork in the venture market, realize. there is no fork

This is going to be BIG.

The other day, I noticed an eye-catching headline: "Internet Funding Boom Ends as Fast as It Began". It was from the Wall Street Journal--a publication I count on for emphasizing quality journalism over empty linkbaity headlines above hollow stories. Perhaps I need to rethink that. How else can you explain this headline matching a story about a professional social network still trying to explore revenues raising $17mm on an $80mm valuation?

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Twitter Link Roundup #145 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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Startup Founders: What To Do When Your Company Fires You

ReadWriteStart

There are a number of certainties in life. There’s death. And taxes. And if you’re the founder of a successful startup and you’re not named Mark Zuckerberg, there’s the day when you’re replaced as CEO. Don’t pout - your ouster is actually the ultimate validation of your company. So says David Feinleib , author of Why Startups Fail: And How Yours Can Succeed.

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Tips for building a minimum viable product

The Equity Kicker

UPDATE: Step 2 added following feedback on Twitter. The developer behind Appbot – a service for app developers who want their app store reviews and features in their email inbox – has posted the lessons he learned when building his minimum viable product. There is nothing revolutionary here, but it is a good list of things to do. This is my summary: Build something for yourself, that you would use, especially if you are a first time entrepreneur.

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Amsterdam-based Rockstart Accelerator’s first graduates head to Silicon Valley

The Next Web

Amsterdam-based Rockstart Accelerator , one of the many, many startup accelerators in Europe, is taking the first class of startups who’ve graduated from its six-month program stateside this month. The accelerator, which counts Amazon CTO Werner Vogels among its startup mentors , will be showcasing its first batch of startups (see list below) in Silicon Valley on the 20th of September, followed by a panel discussion about “The Future of the European Startup Community” Sounds ri

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State of Creativity Forum is an Innovation Accelerant

Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

I’ve been involved* these past two years with a creativity conference in Oklahoma, now called the State of Creativity Forum. This conference has energy to spare, it feels like an accelerating fire of innovative energy. Last year’s event (for a summary look at this post ) exploded with dynamic speakers, cultural, and artist happenings. Even the governor, Mary Fallin, was there to support the notion that creativity and innovation is how Oklahoma moves forward.

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How and Why to Make Your WebsiteTablet and Mobile Friendly Now

Duct Tape Marketing

Talk about mobile and tablet usage dominates computer hardware conversations and the implications are one of the hottest topics in marketing right now as well. photo credit: waferbaby via photopin cc. Website visitors are now consuming content from our sites in a dizzying array of devices, formats and orientations. There was a time when browser compatibility was a designer’s primary concern.

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Twitter Link Roundup #144 – Small Business, Social Media, Design, Copywriting, Marketing And More

crowdSPRING Blog

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!

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TechCrunch Disrupt: Where Are They Now?

ReadWriteStart

With TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012 in full swing this week, it’s only a matter of days before a new winner is crowned. We decided to check in with previous Disrupt winners to see how they’ve fared since their victories - and try to determine how it means to ace a high-profile startup contest. Startup contests like TechCrunch Disrupt can generate a lot of hype and interest, but does that translate into any lasting benefit for the startups involved?

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The Real Deal: Praveen Desai on Gamification in an Enterprise Context

deal architect

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well. This time it is Praveen Desai, in Cognizant Application Services (CAS) who works closely on innovation projects with the Office of the CIO.

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Here are the secrets to giving an engaging presentation

The Next Web

Giving a presentation is as much an art as it is a craft. And it’s becoming increasingly important in today’s world of startups that those who are going to pitch and present need to have a sense of what to do not just when they’re up in front of everyone, but what to do before and afterward as well. There’s much to do when putting together a presentation that just can’t be covered up by the passion the speaker feels for their subject matter, and I’ve seen plenty of presentations and pitches both

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The Misstep of Quora and The Importance of Trust Amongst Your Community

Both Sides of the Table

You know the old saying about trust … “It takes years to build and seconds to destroy.” And once destroyed it is very difficult if not impossible to repair. You need to be the guardian of your own reputation. You need to constantly ask yourself whether your actions in rapidly scaling an online community are worth the potential downsides of destroying trust amongst your users.

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Introducing The Commitment Engine

Duct Tape Marketing

Introducing The Commitment Engine. As you can see from the image here, my third book – The Commitment Engine – Making Work Worth It is just about ready to go. And, I would like to give you a free copy! A bit more on that in a minute, but first, what’s the book about? This book is undoubtedly the riskiest thing I’ve ever written, but it contains a message that I think needs to be spread and shared.

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Rediscovering Atlanta

Jeff Hilimire

I’ve lived in Atlanta since I was about five years old. Like most people, I’m a transplant from the North, with family roots in Chicago and New York and none in the South. If I’m being honest, while growing up the allure of Chicago and New York always left me with the “grass is always greener” syndrome. Those cities are massive and bustling, and surrounded by water and bridges.

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“Stealth mode” and other f’ing brilliant strategies

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

Here’s some of my super-secret winning strategies from fifteen years of building startups. Stay in stealth mode until the last minute. The last thing any startup needs is people finding out about it. You can get attention later — that’s not difficult. You don’t need the distraction of customers clamoring outside your office while you’re still refactoring your NoSQL database structures.

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The Force at Salesforce

deal architect

Dreamforce was extremely enjoyable as I have written earlier – and a key reason was a chance to renew acquaintances with many previous Salesforce contacts and meet several new ones who continue the smart, charitable HR culture that defines the.

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Don’t Let Passion Destroy Entrepreneur Objectivity

Startup Professionals Musings

I’m sure we have all seen entrepreneurs with high levels of passion and confidence touting an idea that seems to make very little sense to us. Of course, we never see ourselves in this mode, yet we need to recognize that all humans see reality differently through a built-in set of “cognitive biases,” based on their own unique background of experiences, training, and mental state.

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Lagging Indicators

Rob Go

I’m always amazed at how much short term decisions are driven by lagging indicators. For instance, when Yammer was acquired by Microsoft, the tech market saw this as a major validation of “enterprise 2.0″ In the months leading up to the acquisition (and the months prior) I’ve seen a surge in companies and fundings in and around that theme.

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Playbook for Incoming MBAs to Start a Company Out of School

Genuine VC

Like a lot of students, I went into business school a decade ago with a set plan to start a company coming straight after graduation in co-founding an internet startup (… again ). During the following two years I did a number of things which prepared me for that endeavor, but then also in retrospect, I completely missed out on a number of opportunities and valuable resources immediately in front of me which I didn’t recognize at the time.

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12 Compelling Reasons Your Teen Should Work

YoungUpstarts

Working teens can be a double-edged sword. Research shows that some teens may get lower grades and even get into trouble with drugs and alcohol as a result of after-school jobs, but for many, the benefits outweigh the potential risks. Building experience, self-reliance, and important skills are among some of the best benefits many teens see from part-time work, and they’re among the best reasons for teens to get an after-school job.

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