Posts
Number 1 Rule for Startups (via Biz Stone on Howard Stern)
"If you're going to do a startup and you're going to take that risk, you absolutely have to be emotionally invested."
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Infographic: History of Social Networking
I came across an infographic outlining the history of social network, marking famous and influential milestons. My favorite is the birth of "trolling"! Read on.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
3 simple things I learned as a newbie exhibitor at SxSW 2011
MVP = minimum viable product. I've also heard the QoU (quantum of utility) variety or the straightforward version - "when you have something that one person wants to use badly." Thank you Paul Graham for that. Simply put, if you have a product, figure out your core competency and iterate on that. V1 is a good way to test and validate your concept and that's exactly what we did.
Our company GetContact.Info was lucky enough to get an exhibitors booth at the 2011 SxSW Trade Show. We had a unpolished stand with a taped together sign that sat atop a TV that wasn't able to loop our promotional video. We had no standing signs or fancy stands to place our brochures and cards, or one of the retractable TV stands that everyone else seemed to have. But what we did have was an interactive way to engage the attendees, show the utility of our service in a 15 second pitch, make registration optional and simple, and give them something to share both passively and actively (their QR stickers).
If they like your product, the state/aesthetic appeal of your stand will have little effect on the foot traffic and waits that you get.
Side note: It didn't hurt to have Justin Bieber's "Baby" in instrumental looping in our promo video. Haha!
2. Be friendly and genuine
This one is simple. If you're friendly and seem genuinely interested in what people do, they'll be more interested in what you do. So be nice, smile, and answer questions, it will pay off.
3. Offer (passive) promotional giveaways
Mentioned this one earlier, but if you give people things that they can walk around with that displays your brand, the better it is. Yes, brochures are nice, but we printed 1500 brochures and came back with more than half. In contrast, we brought about 2000 cards and came back with less than 500. Doesn't that say something?
People would rather take something small the demonstrates your brand so make sure you do your business cards right and build consistency in your brand. This includes logo, colors, font type, text, etc. It ALL matters.
We set people up with QR codes that were branded with our little logo and display stickers that reflected our logo and color. These are passive ways to display your brand and for us, it was THE way start organically sharing what our product could do in the wild.
Trust me, there were more takeaways from being a first time exhibitor. It was a tiring trade show, which is not over yet, so keep hydrated and eat when you can. This was the single most revitalizing and encouraging example of customer development and validation that we could have hoped for.
I encourage anyone with a consumer friendly product to go out and display your product. Bring it to a crowd that gets it and launch early.
My (harmless) plug: to create an account of your own, visit us at getcontact.info to start tracking your business card analytics today. thanks ;)
Monday, March 7, 2011
Startup Lessons Learned: Paul Graham at ST@B Mixer
Hi all,
I wanted to post a quick write-up from today's ST@B event: ST@B Mixer with Paul Graham. To those of you that don't know what ST@B is, it's short for Startup @ Berkeley, an organization that I co-founded with a few other students during our time at UC Berkeley. The purpose of ST@B was to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem on UC Berkeley and within the area, which had not existed in the past. As the first of it's kind, ST@B helped pioneer the development of regular events like mixers, Startup Wednesdays, and the Hackathon that has been sponsored several times by Zynga and other organizations. We've been honored to have the likes of Dustin Moskovitz of Facebook, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress, Mark Pincus of Zynga, and James Hong of HotorNot, to name a few. Ok, enough of the name dropping.
Since then, I've become an Alumni Advisor for the organization and help coordinate events and contribute my input for new segments like the ST@B Dialogues with Ben Parr, Co-Editor of Mashable.
On to the juicy stuff, here's some of the main arguments I got from Paul Graham in his experiences as an angel and running Y Combinator:
- Winners will win and losers will lose
- on differentiating the promise of a great team with a hyped product vs. a weak team with a stellar product
- on establishing a solid team with a history of collaboration
- more on that, if you have a great team with no idea or an idea with no business plan, you should talk to Paul, serious
- on vetting people for YC for persistance through the standard startup struggle
- on launching a product and MVP
- on vetting teams for YC
Well that's all for now. I'm glad we had a chance to pitch GetContact.Info to Paul and get some honest feedback from him.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Friends (of Google) Get Benefits
Ok, the title is a bit misleading, but it has some substance. I was prompted to write this post (after an extended hiatus) because of the latest update to the Android OS on my Nexus One.
GINGERBREAD!
Hooray, it's here with all it's Androidy glory. So what does that mean? Well it means those suckers with the third party OS installations like Motoblur for Motorola Android phones and Samsung Galaxy Android phones don't have it yet!
Ok, well enough of that showboating, but that's truly one of the benefits of owning pure Google phone, with none of those fancy third party developments, the Nexus One and now Nexus S is pure unadulterated Android glory.
So here are some very basic surface things that I've noticed:
- Some basic UI changes
- Native Google widgets like the power monitor
- Notifications bar
- New black and Android green theme for applications and windows instead of the standard grey and black
- Launch bar is in the same color palette as the rest of the OS
- Standard app home menu screen in a darker color palette
- Highlight effect for vertical scrolling
- I've also noticed INCREASES in battery life and strength of WiFi signal, but that must just be a placebo because I don't see any documentation to validate this
All I know is that actions are crisper, more responsive, and feel a bit more intuitive. Can't wait to see what comes next after the S.
Oh, and more more thing. With the release of Gingerbread for Nexus One also came more development for the Nexus S and greater support for NFC. I really think NFC is the future for close contact communication - whether it's transactional or to gather user data to serve customized interactions - but it's definitely going to be a big part of our near future.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
