Peter Thiel's Secret, Startup Employee Onboarding, Community Growth, Digital Watches back in the 70s. Employee Onboarding at Startups Is Broken – Here’s How to Fix It. The four types of users you need to grow a community — Volley Works. Over the past week, I spent some time trying to segment Volley’s user base.
There is quite a bit of overlap between the segments, but I was able to identify the source of each member, and the impact of different types of users on the community’s growth. I narrowed it down to four types of users: early adopters, wait list, VIPs, and referrals. Even though these were generated from Volley’s user base, I’ve seen the same pattern in most successful communities. Unfortunately, there are also some startups that come to mind that have shut down partially because they were unable to acquire and retain all four categories. A better understanding of the different segments will help you attract these users to grow your community. Early Adopters Who are they? The early adopters of Volley were people who joined the first iteration back when it wasn’t invite-only.
Why should you care? Listening to these users helped us understand what features we needed to build or remove. How do you get them to join? VIPs. Peter Thiel's Contrarian Strategy. Why Amazon Has No Profits (And Why It Works) Amazon has a tendency to polarize people.
On one hand, there is the ruthless, relentless, ferociously efficient company that’s building the Sears Roebuck of the 21st Century. But on the other, there is the fact that almost 20 years after it was launched, it has yet to report a meaningful profit. This chart captures the contradiction pretty well – massive revenue growth, no profits, or so it would seem. But actually, neither of these lines gives you a good sense of what’s really going on. Amazon discloses revenue in three segments – Media, Electronics & General Merchandise (‘EGM’) and ‘Other’, which is mostly AWS. Splitting out the detail, we can see this trend both in North America (NA) and internationally… Though the takeoff is particularly strong in the USA. Media overall was only 25% of Amazon’s revenue last quarter, and 20% of North America. Digital Watches and Pet Rocks.
One reason why it’s hard to predict the fate of a new technology is that it’s too tempting to focus on bugs in an early version.
We forget to look for the bigger underlying idea that will become apparent as the problems get solved. Take something as ordinary as a digital watch. As absurd as it may seem now, when the first ones emerged in the early 1970s, people wondered whether consumers would be able to make the mental leap to telling time by digital numbers. Besides that, the contraptions had problems that made them seem as if they might become a passing fad. In January 1977, Technology Review weighed in on the situation. But even by then, success was no sure thing. For a while, it appeared as if our headlong race into the 21st century would be timed with a digital watch. Many complained that the digitals are hard to read. Watch companies solved some of those problems, but in the process they ended up creating new ones. Of course, the digital watch did eventually succeed. When Smart People are Bad Employees. And I always find, yeah, I always find somethin' wrongYou been puttin' up with my sh#t just way too longI'm so gifted at findin' what I don't like the mostSo I think it's time for us to have a toastLet's have a toast for the douchebags,Let's have a toast for the a@%holes,Let's have a toast for the scumbags,Every one of them that I knowLet's have a toast for the jerkoffsThat'll never take work offBaby, I got a planRun away fast as you can—Kanye West, Runaway Kanye West - Runaway | Listen for free at bop.fm In hi-tech, intelligence is always a critical element in any employee, because what we do is difficult and complex and the competitors are filled with extremely smart people.
