no_tag - Vincent Chan on Diigo

26 Nov 09

IKEA's brilliant Facebook campaign | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10404937-71.html - Preview

Then it put out word that the first person to tag their name to a product in the pictures, won it.
Before Facebook could take credit for its own wonderful ingenuity in creating the world's most needed Web site, thousands of Swedes were spreading pictures of IKEA showrooms all around the personal galaxy known as their profile pages.
1 more annotations...
- Please look at the video I have embedded, as this idea is, as the best always are, simple and inspired.

22 Nov 09

Finding the natural size for your company - (37signals)

37signals.com/...-natural-size-for-your-company - Preview

Popular perception holds that companies must always be growing or they’re dying
Not all companies are meant to have thousands of employees or a billion-dollar market cap
2 more annotations...
- We haven’t found the natural size for 37signals yet, but I can tell you that it’s not a thousand people. It’s highly unlike to be a hundred. Right now it’s 10 and it’s been in that vicinity for quite some time.
- Growth begets growth and you’ll end up chasing even bigger numbers and never have the time to do what you really want.

Bezos Expeditions invests in 37signals - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

37signals.com/...tions_invests_in_37signals.php - Preview

Someone with a long term outlook, not a build-to-flip mentality.

You don't have to sell your company to have financial security and the freedom to do what you want - (37signals)

37signals.com/...he-freedom-to-do-what-you-want - Preview

they don’t have to worry about running out of money
they can spend their time how they want
7 more annotations...
- Getting your company to the point where you can pay yourself a decent salary is a great milestone
- You created something sustainable that doesn’t rely on spending other people’s money
- I would want to sell a company built like this too. But there are other ways to build companies. Lots of self-made millionaires made their money selling products for a profit.
- Most successful business owners could walk away from their business tomorrow and still live very comfortable lives off the money they put away.
- If you’re building a company to flip, though, and feel like you have to put in endless hours to please investors and potential acquirers, I can certainly appreciate that there’ll often be something you’d much rather do.
- I don’t personally think that’s a rewarding way to live, but to each his own.
- I think it’s hard to be truly happy if the only reason you work is to win a paycheck. Whether it’s as an employee or a business owner.

Sizing Up Jack Welch: Is "Too Big to Fail" Really Too Big to Succeed? - Bill Taylor - HarvardBusiness.org

blogs.harvardbusiness.org/...g_up_jack_welch_is_too_bi.html - Preview

isn't the problem that too many organizations are too big to succeed
size itself is becoming less of an advantage and more of a curse
15 more annotations...
- In a world where the Web levels the playing field
- where customers expect organizations to be quick, responsive, and flexible
- Are we moving to a world where small is not just beautiful, but powerful
- For one thing, it's evidence that you're winning in the marketplace. For another, it gives you the opportunity to bring in more people, which gives you access to more talent, which allows you to tap into more ideas, which you can then spread more widely — and start winning all over again.
- he made the case for size based not on market power but on brain power, which puts a lot of pressure on the talents of management
- "I want to be big
- but then run the company like it's the corner grocery store.
- at least for big-company executives who aren't as adept as Welch at tapping the idea-enhancing virtues of scale without suffering the mind-numbing costs
- it speaks to just how disconnected big companies can get from their customers.
- "No Thumbs, No Prints, No Service.") Would the corner grocer do something like that?
- relationship between size and success.
- If you can figure out, as Jack Welch did, how to add to your company's muscles without atrophying its brain, then maybe you're not too big to succeed
- The strong take from the weak
- "but the smart take from the strong."
- But most big-company leaders, who don't share Welch's fervor for staying close to customers, better figure out how to make their organizations smarter — or they will keep getting weaker.

19 Nov 09

Good Question! The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Venture Capital

www.techcrunch.com/...-while-raising-venture-capital - Preview

invests in companies that let consumers indulge in one of the seven deadly sins.
“You don’t want to be the site that people should use,” Roelof said. “You want to be the site they can’t stop using.”
16 more annotations...
- made us realize that half of our potential revenues lay in the eight markets we’ve already opened.
- not just greedy, but disciplined. Time is short.
- what really matters is whether we make more money from a customer than it costs us to get and serve that customer.
- if a business works on a large scale, VCs first want to understand it on the smallest scale.
- For us, this meant explaining what Redfin made this summer on a single home purchase, with a per-transaction account of what we spent on marketing to get customers ($27), on local data ($153), on customer service ($2,906) and so on. We also calculated how much annual revenue we got for every monthly unique visitor.
- Numbers are just numbers if they aren’t simple enough to act on
- ut Roelof asked us to annotate each graph with what statisticians call an explanatory event. What change in our business had caused revenues to shoot up?
- Making a simple picture of a business trend and then correlating that with a big decision helps you understand what levers really move your business.
- When there are no explanatory events, you’re just getting lucky.
- Then Redfin’s Sasha Aickin quietly pointed at the headcount line of our projections and said our rate-limiting factor is probably how quickly we can hire top-notch real estate agents.
- What separates a potential colossus from other businesses is the capacity to keep growing at that rate in years four, five and beyond. When Reid Hoffman looked at Redfin, his primary question was whether there were “accelerating effects,” where growth begets more growth.
- For companies like Zappos and hopefully Redfin, it’s word-of-mouth about our customer service.
- not the usability of the site itself, but the data we gather from visitors to that site, and the rave reviews we get from those visitors who become clients.
- the pressure on us to do something proprietary helped us prioritize game-changing features that we’d put off in the past
- Thinking constantly about world domination can give you a little vertigo. The way I usually get through my day is by limiting my horizon to serving the next few customers, or increasing revenues in the next few months.
- But the essential job of a CEO is to tell that story, to everyone who will listen, making it better all the time

17 Nov 09

Ooga Labs

oogalabs.com/about.html - Preview

We look to Apple,
Disney in the 30's, Toyota, Pixar, Southwest Airlines, and HP-in-the-60's as our
cultural models. We communicate openly and honestly, and enforce a strict no-assholes
policy. The organization is very flat -- everyone works directly with the CEO at some
point during every month.
Do you want spend all of your life wearing modest habits of
charcoal grey, driving your Volvo on the salty roads of the drab East
Coast, paying 50% of your earnings to taxes, and hanging out with narrow
minded people, congratulating yourselves on improving a feature of a
widget of version 12.1b.4 of some software, or maybe improving the
financial return of some rich bald dude in Greenwich
6 more annotations...
- "Wait! You're about to waste 10
  years of your life figuring out the path you chose out of college is
  crap!"
- Don't
  make my mistake. Save yourself now. Even if you don't work for me. I
  mean it.
- Out here, you think about the future. Out here, you are surrounded by
  colorful, dynamic technologists and entrepreneurs who are really making
  a difference, pushing the edge.
- Sure, it's an experience, but there
  are life paths where you don't have to have dental surgery, or
  work for a big company, to have the best life. In fact, I would argue
  that you learn the wrong things working for a big company, and
  that it's actually not good experience. A good experience is
  when you really make something happen in the world. Big companies teach
  you how to work through layers of bureaucracy and how to solve problems
  in very risk-averse ways -- in short, how to make something happen in
  their organization. A big company is not the safe career
  choice. It's the risky choice. It risks your mind and your life.
- Initially, your friends and family may not
  understand why you didn't take that "safe" cube-job with the company
  whose name they know, but in two years they will understand. They will
  love using the websites you build, and they will talk often with their
  friends about it. They will see you having a vibrant life, pushing the
  edge of what's happening, and they'll be proud to know you.
- It sets up a direction that takes some time to change. Aim
  yourself in the right direction.

How A Quiet Developer Built Goodreads.com Into Book Community Of 2.6+ Million Members – with Otis Chandler

mixergy.com/goodreads-otis-chandler - Preview

But people started to get burned out on those big generic sites. They wanted more of a community.
you went from big generic to lots of little niche ones and the niche ones worked because they were tight around a community and the interests that people liked.
4 more annotations...
- If the product is going to be viral it has to be more useful if there are friends then if there are not. So Goodreads was built to do this, our position is not catalog your books, our position is see what your friends are reading, or get excited about reading through your friends.
- everywhere on the site you go we don't show you like book reviews about Harry Potter, we show you here's what your friends thought of Harry Potter, and we show you here's what everybody else thought of Harry Potter
- everywhere you go you're seeing activity from your friends.
- if you're on the site and you have no friends, then everywhere you go it's saying you have no friends who've read this book, add some friends. You have no friends who are discussing this right now, add some friends. So you know this idea is kind of built into it, and everywhere you go on the site you're kind of getting this reminder that there's stuff happening here and your friends are talking about it, and that just kind of helps get the concept across that hey, I should add friends.

14 Nov 09

The worst things startups do

scobleizer.com/...the-worst-things-startups-do - Preview

Have plush offices in the most expensive part of town
You can’t tell me what you do in a single Tweet.
11 more annotations...
- If I look around and don’t see programmers
- you have 18 months to build your business. You have figured out how to get some programmers to work with you. Make them as absolutely productive as they can be.
- (This should be #1) They don’t fire fast enough
- In those situations it doesn’t really matter who is right, either, you gotta pick one direction and go with it, startups don’t have enough resources to try out two directions
- Always bad because the best people get pissed and/or leave
- You say yes too often, particularly in engineering decisions.
- Because they set priorities on other things that mattered more.
- If there’s one thing I like about Evan Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter, is that he doesn’t try to do it all. In fact he prides himself on NOT doing things
- It takes great leadership to say “no, Scoble, you can’t have more than 500 members on a list.”
- Startups pick old technology because it’s familiar.
- 12. You don’t change direction fast enough. Every startup should be looking at its direction every month or so. Are things going according to plan? If not, fix them. But sometimes you just made bad assumptions about what the market would want from you. That’s OK! But don’t take a year to change directions, change quickly and you’ll have a chance to save the company.

Pitch yourself, not your idea cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog

cdixon.org/?p=1893 - Preview

There is a widespread myth that the most important part of building a great company is coming up with a great idea.
All of this reinforces the myth that the idea is primary.
5 more annotations...
- First of all, in almost all startups, the idea changes – often dramatically – over time. Secondly, ideas are relatively abundant. For every decent idea there are very likely other people who’ve also thought of it, and, surprisingly often, are also actively pitching investors.
- What you should really be focused on when pitching your early stage startup is pitching yourself and your team. When you do this, remember that a startup is primarily about building something. Hence the most important aspect of your backgrounds is not the names of the schools you attended or companies you worked at – it’s what you’ve built.
- The story you should tell is the story of someone who has been building stuff her whole life and now just needs some capital to take it to the next level.
- come back when you have a demo
- They aren’t wondering whether your product can be built – they are wondering whether you can build it.

13 Nov 09

untitled

www.readwriteweb.com/..._pieces_of_content_a_dayp2.php - Preview

It's a question that ReadWriteWeb has raised a few times and which Wired picked up on in its October profile.
Firstly Rosenblatt claimed that many of Demand Media's content creators are professionals. He said that 75% of them have been published in magazines or newspapers, 25% have written a book, and 25% have held professional marketing roles.
4 more annotations...
- Secondly, Rosenblatt noted that Demand Media content creators have choices in the market - but they choose to work for Demand Media.
- quality is based on relevance
- It's relevant content to many people, but is it good content? Apparently it was to the people who've read it, as it has 5 stars...
- Demand Media contacted us to explain that above article is what they call a "user-generated article." This is marked in the screenshot below as "user submitted article," whereas a Demand Studios article would have "eHow Contributing Writer" as the attribution. Demand Media advised that "this UGC does not flow through the full Demand Studios editorial process - and is not counted in our 4,000 pieces of content."

How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day

www.readwriteweb.com/...ew_pieces_of_content_a_day.php - Preview

Demand Media currently produces 4,000 new pieces of content a day.
Demand Media is becoming a very large content production factory for third party sites such as Yahoo.
6 more annotations...
- Behind this remarkable growth is a very large output of content each and every day, fueled by thousands of freelance writers and content creators.
- Demand Media produces so much content with a system it calls Demand Studios. It's a proprietary editorial system which is part human-processed and part automated
- The system starts with an automated process, crunching data and running it through an algorithm to identify story ideas that have the best chance of success. The algorithm factors in audience type, ability to attract advertising and potential for traffic.
- For a written piece of content, human editors will then check the top story contenders. Potential titles are placed into a pool for writer selection. Once a writer picks up a story, it gets written up, goes through a fact checking and copy editing process (including a plagiarism check), and finally the editorial team approves the completed article. The article is eventually published and the writer gets paid.
- There are more than 6,000 active Demand Studios freelance creators - including writers, filmmakers, title proofers, copy editors.
- average of 11 people - and 15 unique roles - touch a piece of content as it flows through Demand Studios.

12 Nov 09

“Lessons Learned” – A New Type of Venture Capital Pitch « Steve Blank

steveblank.com/...2%80%93-a-new-type-of-vc-pitch - Preview

raise their second round of funding
got an 8-digit term sheet that same afternoon.
7 more annotations...
- Fail fast and cheap. And learn from it
- Rather than a traditional VC pitch I suggested that they do something unconventional and tell the story of their journey in Customer Discovery and Validation
- Lessons Learned from our Customers
- Market/Opportunity
  Lessons Learned Slide 1
  Lessons Learned Slide 2
  Lessons Learned Slide 3
  Why We’re Here
- Telling the Cafepress Customer Discovery and Customer Validation story allowed Fred and Maheesh to take the VC’s on their journey year by year.
- After these slides, these VC’s recognized that this company had dramatically reduced risk and built a startup that was agile, resilient and customer-centric.
- There was no proselytizing about any particular methodology, yet the results are compelling.

Balsamiq Company Blog

www.balsamiq.com/...g-advice-from-balsamiq-studios - Preview

how to get a major blog to cover you
In preparation for launch, I sent maybe around 40 direct emails to bloggers I thought might want to cover me
14 more annotations...
- but I sent 40+ of these puppies and efficiency is a must for a one-man startup like mine!
- informative enough, respectful (not begging), it includes a way for the blogger to contact me (look at the signature), and offers the blogger something special (a free license), which is an incentive to reply and start a conversation.
- And they are always, always looking for interesting content.
- I sent most of those right before launch, but I occasionally still send emails like that out once in a while if I run into a site that I like and seems relevant.
- This is really a case of “the more you give, the more you get”.
- Everyone likes free stuff, but you have to be careful, as giving free stuff to journalists can be considered a form of bribery.
- If you are a blogger, you get a free license. Period. You have no obligation towards me. I have no control on what you write: in fact, a critical review is sometimes more useful to me than a glowing one.
- Bloggers love to give away free stuff, as it makes their blog more popular. In preparation for the 1.1 release, I emailed all the bloggers who had requested a license and offered them an extra license key to give away to their readers, as a promotion.
- I give these away because I believe people should have access to my tool if they really need it and can’t afford it, and to allow people to try before buying.
- Hi there, here’s your license info:
  
  Download URL: http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups/desktop#download
  
  Organization name: test test
  
  Serial Key: [redacted]
  
  I have some assets you can use here: http://www.balsamiq.com/company#forbloggers if you’d like.
  
  I’ll add test test to my Customers page in the next few days.
  
  Enjoy Balsamiq Mockups and thanks for the good you’re doing in the World!
  
  Enjoy Balsamiq Mockups and thanks for spreading the word, I am looking forward to reading your review!
  
  Peldi
- The chart above shows the number of visitors to balsamiq.com since launch. The two highest peaks happened the day after two blog posts, both about Balsamiq’s financial results.
- Some of my blog entries get a lot more traffic than other site pages, and I suspect this post will as well.
- Sure I have put some serious time into the website and the marketing efforts described above, and given lots of free licenses away, but out of pocket, I have spent nothing so far.
- anyone can reach a very wide audience, all it takes is a computer, an Internet connection, some readily available know-how and some old fashioned elbow grease

How to Learn (Almost) Anything

litemind.com/learn-anything - Preview

Cone of Learning
- The least effective way to learn something is to listen to a lecture on the topic or read information about it.
- The most effective way to learn something is to teach others and use it in our own lives.
3 more annotations...
- more likely to remember parts of a movie then you are from a book on the same topic
- Although receiving a lecture is one of the worst ways to remember what you are being told, giving a lecture is one of the most effective.
- If you have a blog or a website you could spend time putting together an article on what yoga is all about and the movements that are often used in this meditative practice

11 Nov 09

Realize a Higher ROI by Creating, Reading and Understanding Goal Funnel Reports | The Adventures of PPC Hero

www.ppchero.com/erstanding-goal-funnel-reports - Preview

Goal Funnel Match Types
Exact match
15 more annotations...
- exactly match the URLs shown in the reports.
- ^/1/thanks\.html
- Head Match:
- enter http://www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1
- Head Match as your Match Type
- Regular Expression Match
- page=1 will match http://sports.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002 as well as http://fishing.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=119.
- File Name vs. URL
- if your goal URL is “http://www.mysite.com/thankyou.html” you enter “/thankyou.html” into the Goal URL field
- Funnel visualization
- how users arrive at your contact form
  how they interact with your contact form
  how many users don’t complete your form, and where/how did they leave
  how many users completed the form
- Knowing this data can help you determine where the weak points are in your conversion path.
- Then you can really see where you lose your audience, and how you can optimize your site in order to keep people moving toward your end goal.
- Abandoned funnels
- As you optimize your site and enhance your conversion path, you should see these numbers decrease.

In Google AdWords, Bidding Wars Are a Thing of the Past: Beat Your Competition with These 4 Tactics | The Adventures of PPC Hero

www.ppchero.com/mpetition-with-these-4-tactics - Preview

This monumental shift allowed advertisers the ability to increase rank without necessarily out bidding the competition.
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize: It is important to plan the strategy for beating your competition on solid groundwork.
9 more annotations...
- account structure, and more importantly keyword organization within ad groups, is of utmost importance when optimizing for Quality Score
- Precisely grouping relevant keywords together with the right ad texts and landing pages will help you avoid losing your keywords!
- having campaigns and ad groups that are easily navigated can economize account management time giving you an edge
- When you have ad groups with 5-10 similarly themed keywords, the ad texts should practically write themselves!
- Keywords in your ad copy will immediately and dramatically improve your click-through-rate, which as we all know is a direct piece of the Quality Score formula.
- if your landing page doesn’t contain the keyword – it’s all been for naught.
- If your landing page doesn’t contain the keyword that got the user there in the first place, you’re doing something very wrong (not to mention you just wasted money on a click)
- if done right, will allow you to pay lower CPCs for higher ad ranks.
- Use the Ad Preview Tool to see where that positions you against your competitors. If you can continue to lower your max CPCs while still besting your competitors – do so!

2 Ways Account History Can Affect Your Quality Score | The Adventures of PPC Hero

www.ppchero.com/-can-affect-your-quality-score - Preview

your account history doesn’t directly affect your quality score; however, they also insisted that your account history is incredibly important to the success of your campaigns.
Poor performing keywords can affect an entire ad group
6 more annotations...
- The answers to these questions rely on how much you want to affect your account’s history.
- In fact, you SHOULD be moving your keywords periodically because you should always be improving your keyword grouping.
- Deleting and re-inserting your keywords may erase important aspects of your history, and this can hinder your account. If you want to give certain keywords a “fresh start” you may want to try this method.
- if you have many under-performing keywords within your account you should definitely get rid of them from a quality score stand point.
- if you have under-performing keywords you should delete them to zero out their score,
- and give them another shot at life

Keywords Inactive Due to Quality Score in Google AdWords? Here are 3 Actions to Take! | The Adventures of PPC Hero

www.ppchero.com/rds-here-are-3-actions-to-take - Preview

The good news is there are ways to improve your keyword Quality Score status!
When Google labels your keyword inactive for search, they will automatically choose a new minimum bid.
3 more annotations...
- If the keyword in question is completely off the relevancy mark, Google may very well begin playing cat and mouse with you. After increasing your max CPC, Google may find that the keyword should still be inactive and could increase the minimum bid yet again!
- If it isn’t possible to include your keyword on the landing page or in the ad text, little red flags should be popping into your mind. Create a new ad group that can support this keyword with appropriate ads and landing pages.
- General keywords are far more likely to be labeled inactive for search and will benefit from special attention. It is recommended to use descriptive phrases over one-word keywords!

3 Components of the Quality Score Everyone Should Know | The Adventures of PPC Hero

www.ppchero.com/ity-score-everyone-should-know - Preview

Your keywords are first and foremost the most important aspect of increasing your quality score. Your keywords are the only component in your account that will actually give you a rating of poor, ok or great.
All keywords have a minimum bid. The goal is to get the lowest minimum bid that Google will allow. In order to do this you have to improve your quality score.
4 more annotations...
- relate directly to your landing page and ad text.
- The more you use your keywords in your ad text and landing page the more likely your quality score will improve.
- Relevant and original content
- Easy navigation is an integral part of anyone’s website that is looking to sell a product or service. But making the direction you want customers to take clear is also essential to improving your quality score. People who find it easy to move around your site are more likely to move forward with a sale or service.

Vincent Chan's Library tagged no_tag → View Popular

IKEA's brilliant Facebook campaign | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

Finding the natural size for your company - (37signals)

Bezos Expeditions invests in 37signals - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

You don't have to sell your company to have financial security and the freedom to do what you want - (37signals)

Sizing Up Jack Welch: Is "Too Big to Fail" Really Too Big to Succeed? - Bill Taylor - HarvardBusiness.org

Good Question! The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Venture Capital

Ooga Labs

How A Quiet Developer Built Goodreads.com Into Book Community Of 2.6+ Million Members – with Otis Chandler

The worst things startups do

Pitch yourself, not your idea cdixon.org – chris dixon's blog

untitled

How Demand Media Produces 4,000 Pieces of Content a Day

“Lessons Learned” – A New Type of Venture Capital Pitch « Steve Blank

Balsamiq Company Blog

How to Learn (Almost) Anything

Realize a Higher ROI by Creating, Reading and Understanding Goal Funnel Reports | The Adventures of PPC Hero

In Google AdWords, Bidding Wars Are a Thing of the Past: Beat Your Competition with These 4 Tactics | The Adventures of PPC Hero

2 Ways Account History Can Affect Your Quality Score | The Adventures of PPC Hero

Keywords Inactive Due to Quality Score in Google AdWords? Here are 3 Actions to Take! | The Adventures of PPC Hero

3 Components of the Quality Score Everyone Should Know | The Adventures of PPC Hero

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