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How to Create a Distribution Strategy ...That Banks by THOM HOLLAND How many times have you heard marketers talk about creating a distribution strategy? …You can probably count the numbers of times on one hand. The truth is, marketing “gurus” love to tell you how to promote your products. They get stuck on things like pay per click advertising and building a social media presence. Now, I enjoy talking about the marketing and sales process just as much as the next guy, however, there’s certainly much more to marketing than simply promoting your product.
Guide If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists. If you have time, the President of Stanford will throw in a tour, and then you can drive by Intel or some Clean Tech firm for a photo op standing in front of an impressive looking piece of equipment. The “official dignitary” tour of Silicon Valley is like taking the jungle cruise at Disneyland and saying you’ve been to Africa. Because you and your entourage don’t know the difference between large innovative companies who once were startups (Google, Facebook, et al) and a real startup, you never really get to see what makes the valley tick.
AppMakr Raises $1 Million To Help You Build Custom iPhone Apps AppMakr, a service that makes it easy to generate your own custom, native iPhone application, has closed a $1 million seed round. The round includes angel investors and VCs: Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus), Bill Lee, Rich Chen, Charles River Ventures (George Zachary & Bill Tai), Brian McClendon (angel, VP of Engineering at Google), Kima Ventures (Jeremie Berrebi & Xavier Niel), Warren Hellman (previously at Lehman Bros), Ben Narasin (TriplePoint Ventures), Pietro Dova, Sean Glass (Top Floor), Transmedia Capital (Chris Redlitz & Peter Boboff, of Kicklabs incubator). We’ve written about AppMakr a few times in the past — the startup launched in early 2010, allowing users to put together an iPhone application with a surprisingly small amount of work involved. COO Daniel Odio says that applications built using AppMakr now represent around 1% of the apps on the App Store — or around 3,000 applications.
Blog « Categories « Lean Startup Machine What is Lean Startup? “Lean Startup” is a term coined by Eric Ries while an Advisor to the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. It’s based on the new management processes he employed while Chief Technology Officer at IMVU, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful startups. How To Create A Brand With Values Brands That Are Born With Values The great stories of the oral tradition have always contained lessons encouraging people to pursue their higher values. In comparing myths across cultures and times to develop his "Hero’s Journey" model, Joseph Campbell found that higher values were the key ingredient to story success. Today, digital tools are spawning a new peer-to-peer oral tradition in communications. To succeed in this new digitally empowered oral tradition, marketers must heed the lessons of the past and orient their brands to higher human values--or face being ignored.
Important Marketing Lessons From Outrageous Vintage Advertisements I absolutely love looking at old ads from the early to mid 20th century. The themes covered and claims that are made are often so completely outrageous that you wonder how they ever made it to print. Looking at these, you can’t help but marvel how far advertising has come. How much advancement have we really made in this area though? Aren’t the advertising ploys of past generations still the same tricks used by marketers today? Follow along as we take a look at some truly ridiculous ads and how they really aren’t so different from advertising we see today. Startups Wiki: Ask YC Archive This pages is an archive of quality Hacker News "Ask YC" posts grouped by subject. "Quality" means posts that are a) generally relevant to startups and b) contain a decent amount of useful discussion/advice. All posts on this page have been looked at manually. Within groups (and sub-groups) stories are sorted in descending date order because newer stories are more timely (in addition to often having more comments). For a more up-to-date listing (that includes postings where this one left off), check out the Ask HN Archive. When referencing this page, don't copy and paste the links to table of contents sections, as they are numerically designated and thus subject to change.
Lean Startup Lean startup is a methodology for developing businesses and products. The methodology aims to shorten product development cycles by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. The central hypothesis of the lean startup methodology is that if startup companies invest their time into iteratively building products or services to meet the needs of early customers, they can reduce the market risks and sidestep the need for large amounts of initial project funding and expensive product launches and failures.[1][2] History[edit] Although the lost money differed by orders of magnitude, Ries concluded that the failures of There, Inc. and Catalyst Recruiting shared similar origins: "it was working forward from the technology instead of working backward from the business results you're trying to achieve.
The OODA Loop: Playing chess with half the pieces Nivi · November 20th, 2008 You might know John Boyd as the OODA Loop guy. I never really “got” the OODA Loop so, based on Eric Ries’ recommendation, I read this book. In a software startup, the OODA Loop looks like this: (1) Come up with an idea, (2) Code it, launch it, (3) Learn from usage data. Keep repeating the loop, each time using the Learnings to influence your next idea. This is the Idea-Code-Data loop. 5 reasons why the UNTHINK Experiment is over – and 6 pieces of advice for new start-ups « interacter When I received an invitation to join the latest social network as it took its fledgling steps, I promised that I’d give it a month to see how it worked out. Fast forward six weeks – not only have I discontinued use but I’ve deleted my account as well. Here are the five reasons why – and some advice for future social media start-ups.Reason One: The technology wasn’t ready. When I originally blogged about UNTHINK, I criticised the load times. This hasn’t improved – today’s load for example took around 8seconds on IE over a 10mg broadband line.
The Art of Bootstrapping Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic. Let's say that you can't raise money for whatever reason: You're not a “proven” team with “proven” technology in a “proven” market. Or, your company may simply not be a “VC deal”--that is, something that will go public or be acquired for a zillion dollars. Harnessing Entrepreneurial Manic-Depression: Making the Rollercoaster Work for You The sky is falling! Ever since the media’s Chicken Little response to the tremors in the financial markets, I’ve felt like shouting from the rooftops “now you know how it feels to be an entrepreneur!” I just lost 9% overnight?!
Business - Start a Startup Brand Name A brand name is a name that you use to identify a family of products, services, or a single line of products or services that a company offers. For instance, Apple is the brand name used on most products manufactured by Apple, Inc. In this example, the business name and brand name are the same, a common use case.