Sat.Nov 21, 2015 - Fri.Nov 27, 2015

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Framework Benchmarks Round 11

TechEmpower

Round 11 of the ongoing Web Framework Benchmarks project is now available! We'll keep this blog entry short and sweet. The highlights for Round 11. Three new languages are represented in Round 11: Crystal , D , and Rust. Meanwhile, the total number of frameworks has increased by 26. The new frameworks are: silicon (C++). aleph (clojure). pedestal (clojure). crystal-raw (crystal). moonshine (crystal). vibed (d). jawn (java). mangooio (java). koa (js). sails (js). clancats (php). limonade (php). a

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6 Reasons Startups Should Skip the Big-Bang Launch

Startup Professionals Musings

Big-bang hard launches make sense for large enterprises like Apple or Microsoft, who are building on existing revenue streams and have the resources for lavish events, Superbowl ads and large inventory buildups. But for startups with limited resources and experience, I always recommend a soft launch or toe-in-the-water approach in a local market -- and scale up later.

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Website Building Checklist: Supporting Your Brand

YoungUpstarts

By JR Reichl, Senior Director, Marketing Communications at Hostway Services, Inc. Right now, there are more than 858 million registered websites for users to visit, according to Tech Made Easy. This means you have a lot of competition to deal with when creating and building out your brand’s online presence. A website is an essential piece of the business puzzle, helping a brand connect with its customers and offer potential for the organization.

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Startups and IP Ownership Issues

Scott Edward Walker

For many startups, intellectual property (IP) is their most valuable asset. Below are the three most common IP-related mistakes that startups make — the first of which I discuss in this brief video with Jason Calacanis. //www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqL3Xm5iUCY Mistake #1 – Moonlighting at a Prior Employer. Startups must ensure that none of the founders’ prior employers have any rights to the venture’s IP because a founder was working on the venture while previously employed.

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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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How to Launch a Product: A Startup-Friendly Process

View from Seed

The journey between an initial idea and actually shipping can be summed up with one word: agony. It’s agonizing because you care — a lot. It’s agonizing because you’re building from zero, and that can be daunting. It’s agonizing because of all the thinking and rethinking, talking to customers and talking to the team, debating and kicking and screaming.

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7 Key Maxims of a Mindset Focused on Growth

Startup Professionals Musings

Based on my experience advising entrepreneurs, I’m convinced that success is often more a mindset than a specific set of skills or intelligence. The mindset I’m looking for is one that sees challenges as exciting rather than threatening, setbacks as learning opportunities and that effort and perseverance will overcome any obstacle. Most experts call this a growth mindset.

More Trending

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7 Social Media Marketing Habits That Lead To Failure

Brandanew

George Washington said, “99% of failures come from those that make excuses.” If your campaigns are using a range of social media marketing habits that lead to failure, then it's time to make a change. Social media marketing (SMM) not working is simply a sign that you need to identify what's going wrong and try again. Trial and error is the only way you will consistently improve and grow your campaigns.

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Why Google created Primer

The Next Web

This post was written by Jason Li and Herbert Lui. It’s a sample strategic side project teardown. Jason and Herbert will be doing monthly comprehensive teardowns of strategic side projects in this mailing list. Sign up to learn more In an age when attention is scarcer than ever, side project marketing gets your company eyeballs. Yet because side projects by definition are exploratory and unconstrained, the term isn’t thoroughly defined.

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8 Myths That Can Inhibit Innovation In Your Business

Startup Professionals Musings

Starting an entrepreneurial business, or maintaining the competitiveness of a mature business, requires innovation. Yet everyone I know seems to have a different perspective on what constitutes real innovation, and why is seems to happen so rarely. Another challenge is to debunk some of the common myths that seem prevent many from even assuming they can innovate.

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Small Business Loan Lingo: Terms You Need To Know

YoungUpstarts

by Jocelyn Baird, NextAdvisor. It can be daunting for young or new small business owners to consider taking out a loan, especially if they haven’t had much experience with this type of financial transaction. You probably wouldn’t try and open up a new credit card or take on a mortgage without learning the terminology specific to those financial products are.

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Happy Thanksgiving From Our Family To Yours!

Brandanew

All of us here at Brandanew, wish you a great holiday. Happy thanksgiving from our family to yours. We’re immensely grateful for your support and love. “Thanksgiving is here, so our minds have turned. To what time has taught us, to what we’ve learned: We often focus all our thought. On shiny things we’ve shopped and bought. We take our pleasure in material things, Forgetting the pleasure that friendship brings.

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VCs AS EMCEES: LA EDITION

Mucker Lab

(Guest post by Mahbod Moghadam ). Several months ago, I wrote an essay for Mucker Blog about the nexus between venture capitalists and rappers. I opined that the strong relation between the two “professions” is that they are not actually real jobs, they are both just what you tell your friends you’re doing when you don’t actually have a job. (“Entrepreneur” also fits into this category – I’ll write about that in my next essay!

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7 Principles Define A New Win-Win Model Of Business

Startup Professionals Musings

As an entrepreneur, it’s never too early to set the culture you need for a thriving business, as well as thriving employees, customers, partners, and vendors. In fact, in my experience, cultures are very hard to change, so if you don’t get it right the first time, the road ahead will forever be difficult. “The Art of War” culture as an analogy for business just doesn’t work anymore.

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How To Keep Costs Low For A Startup Business

YoungUpstarts

Keeping costs low is important for any business, no matter how large or small. However, for startup companies, the need to keep costs down is even greater, especially if your business is not yet turning over a profit. Increasing costs spiraling out of control have become the death of many a small business, and if like most new business owners you want to prevent your startup from succumbing to this fate, you’ll need to work hard on keeping your costs to a minimum.

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How To Generate Leads Through Business Blogging

Brandanew

Business blogging has been around for quite some time. Generating leads through business blogging has become key to accepted content marketing ROI. Yet, some companies maintain business blogs even without knowing what to do with them. As a “me too” strategy or just because it has become the norm. The good news is: business blogging is not a mere hygiene factor or a “good to have” It can not only be a major promotional tool but can also generate effective leads for your bu

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The evolution of the online marketplace: six big changes since Ebay

Version One Ventures

It has been twenty years since Ebay arrived on the scene and showed what happens when you bring people together over the Internet to do commerce. Since then, there has been tremendous innovation within online marketplaces. Startups have honed in on every vertical imaginable, branched out from product to services, and tested out new paths to profitability.

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7 Criteria For Selecting an Entrepreneur-Confidant

Startup Professionals Musings

Most entrepreneurs are too stubborn to seek a mentor for guidance: They have so much confidence in themselves and their ideas that they don’t see the need to ask anyone for advice. The best entrepreneurs, however, actually claim multiple mentors : Mark Zuckerberg relied on Steve Jobs at Apple and Washington Post chief executive Donald Graham, almost 40 years his senior.

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5 Tips For Gen Ys Managing Older Employees

YoungUpstarts

By Nicole Laurrari, President, The EGC Group. One of the biggest challenges facing young leaders today is managing members of their teams who are literally old enough to be their parents. The age difference becomes a gauntlet that Gen Y managers aren’t comfortable taking on and instead they tend to handle the situating in a limited number of ways. From what I’ve seen of the youthful managers I’ve worked with in the NY ad agency scene, they generally fall into two groups.

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Why Small Businesses Can Take Up the Content Marketing Opportunity

Brandanew

The Content marketing opportunity is here. It is going to be an inherently strong marketing trend in the 2016 and beyond. Production of quality content, distribution and return on investment are aspects many small businesses and startups struggle with. This does lead to disenchantment and the question, if all small businesses should join the bandwagon.

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How Startups Can Build a Recruiting Machine (Webinar)

For Entrepreneurs

The competition for hiring the best top talent in startups has never been higher. The best people are almost never on the market, so it’s imperative to develop recruiting processes to find and sell passive candidates. It may take months or years of relationship building with these candidates to find the right moment when they are open.

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The second problem with bubbles: overfunding

The Equity Kicker

The first problem with bubbles is well known. Valuations crash, lots of companies aren’t able to raise money and go bust, and most of the good ones are only able to raise smaller amounts of money and have to layoff staff. Bubbles are brilliant for companies that exit before the burst, but for the rest they bring a lot of pain. There’s a second problem though, and that is overfunding of whole industries.

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5 Tips For Marketing Your Store For Small Business Saturday

YoungUpstarts

By Nicole Larrauri, President, The EGC Group. Now in its sixth year, Small Business Saturday, the holiday shopping day that falls between seasonal icons Black Friday and Cyber- Monday , is finally coming into its own. This November 28 th , an estimated 88 million consumers will shop locally – and inject some 14.3 billion dollars into their community economies.

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Back from Sabbatical

David Cohen

I spent the last month completely offline, not working. I hadn’t done that in the 8 years since i founded Techstars. Last year, we raised a new venture fund and I was on the road twice as much as normal. When we closed it in January, I promised myself and my family some time for rejuvenation last this year. Needless to say, it was amazing. I feel very refreshed and energized, and I’m raring to get back at it today.

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Curtana Seeks to Cure Brain Cancer

SiliconHills

By EVA RUTH MORAVEC Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News Dr. Gregory Stein had never been to Austin when he relocated his fledgling drug development company here from San Diego, a city rich with life sciences and its related ecosystem. “Entrepreneurs will do whatever it takes to make it work,” said Stein, president and CEO […] The post Curtana Seeks to Cure Brain Cancer appeared first on SiliconHills.

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Hiring for Fit Gets You to IPO, but Over Time, Hiring for Potential Wins

Hunter Walker

I was DMing Wharton Professor Adam Grant before he even finished delivering the talk describing different startup hiring models and their correlation to success or failure. “Adam, what was the research you were referring to?” I was almost afraid to look at his reply, like Indy averting his eyes when the ark is opened. This is too much for us to know!

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It’s the questions not the answers

Eric Friedman

Slack recently had an outage, which happens to every company, and people noticed on Twitter – wow what a reaction! Slack being down for a long time is kind of a bummer when you a) pay for it b) your whole team is remote. — Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) November 23, 2015. I was reminded a lesson I learned from Brad Burnham while I was at Union Square Ventures ; it’s the questions and conversations that are important, not the answers. .

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Is Your Mindset Sabotaging Potential Client Relationships?

YFS Magazine

Starting with the clean slate is the best thing you can offer yourself and your business. 

No judgments, no emotional luggage from the past, no self-defeating money story.

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The modern management mindset

The Equity Kicker

I’m a keen follower of Steve Denning and his writing on strategy, leadership and the future of work. He writes in what might be described as ‘strategy speak’ and is rarely a quick read, but there’s a lot of insight in his words for those that take the time to look for it. In a post earlier this month he wrote a list of ‘common characteristics of the modern management mindset’ which emerged from a study by the Learning Consortium for the Creative Economy : Goal

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Do you know what you’re really selling?

Start Up Blog

I’ve become convinced the reason businesses get overthrown, is that they get confused with what they actually sell. They define their business by what they make, instead of the problems they solve. The problem with defining a business by outputs instead of solutions, is that companies can fall in love with their infrastructures. Which makes it nearly impossible to transition to new solutions which come from different systems.

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Everything you wanted to know about creating a $300k course

The Next Web

In part one I covered how I built my freelancing course, Creative Class. I talked about software, my online course setup and what was involved in creating it. It made $100k+ in the first 6 months. Then it did a LOT better… Now, with almost 1,700 students, it’s grossed $294k in its first year (the above screenshot doesn’t include payouts from partners, PayPal and deal sites — clocking in at $57,634.94 combined).

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Constructing Pricing Strategy For Subscription Products

ConversionXL

When it comes to subscription product pricing, you’re not just guessing…are you? A while ago, an HBR study famously claimed that a 1% improvement in price would increase operating profit by 11%, making it the most effective thing you can tweak for increased business performance. Pricing is important. It’s also one of the most difficult Ps of marketing for folks to wrap their heads around.

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From survival to excellence

The Equity Kicker

Much of this week I’ve been thinking about how the life of successful startups falls into two phases: survival and excellence. In the early life of a company success is all about getting to the next milestone. The team is small, everybody has to turn their hands to multiple tasks, cash is short, and time is short. In this environment survival is the name of the game.

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Rackspace’s 9th Annual Thanksgiving Day Food Drive Helps Families

SiliconHills

Tania Jess joined her husband and daughter to volunteer at Rackspace Saturday morning to giveaway turkeys and food boxes. It’s an annual family tradition. They wait for a line of cars to come through their stations in the parking at Rackspace’s headquarters and then they load up each car with a turkey and box of […] The post Rackspace’s 9th Annual Thanksgiving Day Food Drive Helps Families appeared first on SiliconHills.

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The problem with Steering Committees

Start Up Blog

Is that they have too many hands on the steering wheel, and they try to determine their destination after they start driving. By the way, one set of hands always provides the best direction. You should totally read my book – The Great Fragmentation.

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3 Tell-Tale Signs You Need A Small Business Accountant

YFS Magazine

A skilled accountant then, is your lifeline to sanity when running your own business. They help juggle the problems that you simply don’t have the expertise in dealing with.

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Disney’s new streaming service is the way of the future

The Equity Kicker

I’ve long thought that producers of TV and movie content should build direct relationships with their customers over the web. It’s been slow to happen though, largely because the content producers were wary of retribution from their cable, satellite and IPTV partners if they launched properties that competed with them. So instead of content owners moving to the web we got new web companies stepping into the void – largely Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.