Growth hacking is currently going through a turbulent adolescence. After being thrust into the public spotlight by opportunistic media pundits and loosely-correlated startup success stories, the innovation community has struggled to define and defend growth hacking as a practice or designation with substance. To borrow from a thoughtful, recent article by Lincoln Murphy, the growth hacker … Continue reading The Five Pillars of Growth Hacking
What Can We Expect from Jelly?
Jelly, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone's new mobile startup, is pretty fascinating. For context, Jelly is a social question app based on mobile photos, placing it at the intersection of Q&A (Quora), local, real-time information (Foursquare), short-form visual content (Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter) and ephemeral, person-to-person swipe-based interaction (Tinder). Creating a visual layer (interlaced with conversation) over … Continue reading What Can We Expect from Jelly?
Easier to Do Well than Good
If you’ve ever been hand-delivered a cease-and-desist, you’ll probably agree with me they’re pretty under-whelming—just a plain manilla envelope of papers that kind of resemble some high school essays teachers return to you at the end of the semester. When I got mine years ago from a former employer saying the startup my friend Josh … Continue reading Easier to Do Well than Good
How I Got My Startup Profitable in 6 Weeks
My previous startup had a sales cycle problem. We sold an enterprise product targeted at agencies and big consumer brands, and — while we could clearly articulate benefits — we could only point to an opaque, fuzzy ROI for the buyer during the sales process. As a result, our sales cycle could stretch for months (including *delightful* hurdles like vendor … Continue reading How I Got My Startup Profitable in 6 Weeks
Quibb: The 10 Right Ways to Launch a Modern App
Quibb is a startup-centric web community for reading and sharing links, created at a time when the last thing the internet needs is another place to read and share startup links. Or, rather, you might think that, right up until the point where it becomes clear that Quibb got its launch strategy exactly right. Unwilling to … Continue reading Quibb: The 10 Right Ways to Launch a Modern App