Real Money for Virtual Coin “Virtual goods” are imaginary playthings that exist only inside computer games. But their rising popularity is creating billions of dollars in very weal wealth and might even establish a beachhead for a new payment system for physical goods. Different kinds of virtual goods are available in different types of games. Role-playing adventure games might offer shields and swords; a car game might have new racing courses for sale. The research firm In-Stat projects that the global market for such goods will be over $14.6 billion by 2014, more than double its 2010 value. Virtual goods first became widely known about a decade ago in the online virtual-reality platform Second Life. The poster child of this new market is Zynga, the San Francisco company behind FarmVille and other popular games. See the rest of our Business Impact report on The Business of Games. Game companies typically say that fewer than 5 percent of players ever make a purchase.
Growth - Brian K Balfour · Traction vs Growth Traction The traction phrase is where more startups are. GoalThe one and only goal should be to find product-market fit among some audience segment. Part of this is understanding how large that audience segment is to make sure you can build a compelling business. MetricPlain and simple your eye should be on retention. VolumeThe primary goal is to just turn on the faucet and get a steady/consistent stream of users coming in the front door. In addition, your CPA will likely be greater than LTV. ChannelsTry a few to find that steady stream, but once you find one that provides that stream focus in. OptimizationFocus on large macro optimizations. TeamYou should have one person leading growth (probably a founder) who is thinking about it 80%+ of their time. Transition The transition phase is like the awkward teenage years. GoalThe primary goal in the traction phase is to identify, define, and understand the growth levers for your business. VolumeNow is the time to start turning up the faucet.
How to Influence Purchasing Decisions On The Web [INFOGRAPHIC] When savvy consumers are in the market for something — a new pair of kicks, a sweet DSLR camera, hair pomade, a toaster — they turn to the web, knowing there's a wealth of knowledge and information to be had. But where on the vast Interwebs do they look? Well, that depends on what they want to buy. According to data from M Booth and Beyond, different product categories compel people to seek information and reviews from different sources on the web. Consumers tend to go the company website for electronics, they rely on search for travel and they go to discussion forums to see what people think about different car models. Consequently, consumer electronics companies better have a pimped-out website, travel brands ought to put some dough into SEO and car companies better pay attention to what people are saying about their vehicles' performance. SEE ALSO: Social Consumers and the Science of Sharing Infographic courtesy of M Booth and Beyond
How to Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. If you want your start-up to become the next big thing, it’s not good enough to just build a great product. The difference between getting one of your new users to convince one friend to sign up and that person getting two new friends, is huge. Below are 9 ways your start-up can grow virally: Get Your Users to Spread the Word Get users to tell others about your app simply by using it. Get users to push content they create on your app to Facebook, Twitter. Increasing Conversion Adjust your product to become more mainstream. Conclusion Building a great product is only half the battle.
PHP Pick 'Em - Free PHP Football Pool There's only a few ways to scale user growth, and here's the list Scaling growth is hard – there’s only a few ways to do itWhen you study the most successful mobile/web products, you start to see a pattern on how they grow. Turns out, there’s not too many ways to reach 100s of millions of users or revenue. Instead, products mostly have one or two major growth channels, which they optimize into perfection. These methods are commonplace and predictable. Here are the major channels that successful products use to drive traction – think of them as the moonshots. Paid acquisition. These channels work and scale, because of two reasons: They’re feedback loops. It might seem like it’s best to crack one of these channels right away, and then ride then into glory. New products often only have months, or a year, to live, so these strategies are often not a real option. High-risk, high-reward Attacking one of these scalable channels is high risk but also high reward. This essay by Paul Graham gives us a clue, as he writes about Startups = Growth: Good luck. PS.
(6) How to Write a Persuasive Email from Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab Google interviews: would you get a job with the search giant? | Technology We live in an age of desperation. Never in living memory has the competition for job openings been more intense. Never have job interviews been tougher. For some job seekers, Google is the shining city on the hill. This is most evident in the interviews. The style of interviewing at Google is indebted to an older tradition of using logic puzzles to test job candidates at technology companies. Most of the time, the job applicant stumbles around, gamely trying to make sense of a series that gives every indication of being completely senseless. How would you weigh an elephant without using a scale? Forget maths. Now for the payoff: what number comes next? At many of these companies, the one and only correct answer is 96. That's not the best answer, though. Puzzles such as this have drawbacks as interview questions. You and your next-door neighbour are holding car-boot sales on the same day at the same place. You simply want the neighbour's item off the market. Try this one. " Uh, right.
Survey: Online social games drawing bigger crowd By Mike Snider, USA TODAY Updated 2011-11-14 3:17 PM The logo for PopCap Games The number of people who play online social games is on the rise. Based on anecdotal evidence, most of us probably already assumed that as a fact. More than four out of 10 U.S. The number of devoted social gamers rose, too, with 16% saying that they play at least six hours weekly, compared to only 8% in 2010. Younger gamers coming to social games has brought the average age of a social game player in the U.S. down to 41.2 from 45 in 2010. Other findings from combined U.S. and U.K. data: -- In addition to playing social games on a desktop or laptop computer, more than one-third (38%) also play on a mobile phone, 20% use a game console and 10% play on a tablet. -- More than four in 10 (42%) said they have played more games over the past three months, compared to 35% last year. -- More than half (56%) of avid players -- those playing more than six hours weekly) have played more in the past three months.
What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO?: CEO, Culture, Growth Stage Successful startups go through three broad phases as they scale, and a startup CEO’s job changes dramatically in each phase. A CEO’s first job is to build a product users love; the second job is to build a company to maximize the opportunity that the product has surfaced; and the third is to harvest the profits of the core business to invest in transformative new product ideas. This blog post describes how to become a great Phase 2 CEO by focusing on the highest leverage tasks that only the CEO can accomplish. Your First Creation is a Product, Your Second Creation is a Company A CEO’s first job is to build a great product and find a small group of people who love it and use it enthusiastically. Most startups fail because they are not able to create a product that users love enough to abandon existing alternatives. As a Phase 2 CEO, you need to transition from “Doer-in-Chief” to “Company-Builder-in-Chief.” Three Tasks That CEOs Can’t Delegate 1. 2. 3. Pixar provides a helpful example.
Robert Scoble - Google+ - MUST WATCH FOR ENTREPRENEURS: An hour with great company… The Secret to Facebook's IPO Value Share There is one thing missing in most of the hype over Facebook’s massive IPO. Everyone knows the company is popular, with 845 million users, and successful, with a potential valuation of $100 billion dollars. (That’s five times the size of Google’s 2004 debut.) But what exactly makes Facebook so valuable? You. In fact, in the modern era, Facebook’s IPO will constitute one of the largest voluntary transfers of property from a large group of people to a corporation. And “voluntary” is a pretty charitable gloss. If you read them, though, you learn that all content which users previously owned as intellectual property, like photos and videos, is granted to Facebook under a “a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license.” This is a truly galling power for a service provider—like an e-mail company asserting copyright over every piece of writing sent through the system. There is no way to take your intellectual property back from Facebook, either.
What To Look For In A Technical Co-Founder This is the second part of a two part series of posts. The first post was entitled What To Look For In A Business Co-Founder. It seems that potential technical cofounders are approached by business cofounders a lot more than business cofounders are approached by technical cofounders. I thought about why that was after writing the post. In essence, I think it comes down to the fact that it’s a lot easier to identify the tangible skills of a technical cofounder from a high level perspective. A past record of building things Potential technical cofounders should have a past record of building things. A past record of building things just for the fun of it You have to love what you do, and the same should hold true for your technical cofounder. An Understanding of The Intersection of Business and Technology Decisions Some technical decisions are deeply rooted in business decisions. A strong expertise in a specific language Are you solving something in the payment space?