January, 2017

article thumbnail

7 Basic Tips For App Development

YoungUpstarts

Better app development isn’t hard, in fact it just takes the right mindset and some well thought out planning. Here’s how to do so: 1. Start With A Clear Goal. Any strategy for successfully creating and promoting a new app relies on setting up clear goals for your new software. One of the best ways to think about this need is by concentrating on the problem your app is going to solve.

Developer 174
article thumbnail

7 Rules for Providing Exceptional Customer Service

Startup Professionals Musings

Customer service has traditionally been a support function to respond to customer initiated requests, meaning someone waits for the phone to ring or for a website support request form. Today’s customers definition of service is the sum total of their “experience,” covering all aspects of their relationship, including the shopping and buying process, as well as ongoing assistance.

Customer 199
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Marketing Strategy

Up and Running

Mobile marketing is the promotion of one’s business on mobile and smartphone devices through websites, apps, and social media. It is a sophisticated, technology-driven marketing tactic that fully takes advantage of the increasing mobile trends by designing, targeting, and advertising to the millions of individuals who use their smartphone every single day of their lives.

Mobile 110
article thumbnail

It's Not The Ink, It's The Think: 6 Effective Data Visualization Strategies

Occam's Razor

Ten years, and the 944,357 words, are proof that I love purposeful data, collecting it, pouring smart strategies into analyzing it, and using the insights identified to transform organizations. In the quest for that last important bit, I am insanely obsessive about 1. simplification and 2. pressing the right emotional buttons. The reasons are that we all like complexity, it gives us energy :), we tend to be logical, and we often treat data output as the end when in reality the data output is jus

Audience 119
article thumbnail

Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

article thumbnail

In 2017, GE Will Buy More Tech Startups Than Google

Hunter Walker

When the WSJ and the NYTimes write the same trend story you can assume it’s a narrative that is being pushed by people who want it to be true! And the narrative for 2017 is OLD ECONOMY COMPANIES WANT TO BUY YOUR STARTUP. So, is it true? Largely yes, but the pot of gold might be more modest than some of 2016’s notable transactions suggest (Jet, Cruise, Dollar Shave Club).

article thumbnail

52 Entrepreneurs Explain Why They Started Their Business

Hearpreneur

Share Each business has a story. No matter if the business is a Goliath like Wal-Mart, or a local business owned by a couple or family, the business has roots in an idea. For each business owner, the story of their journey can range from monetary needs or the passion for a unique project. Each story is different though the reasons may be the same. No matter the tale, the background behind each and every business is what fuels each and brand.

More Trending

article thumbnail

8 Disciplines for Transforming Ideas Into Businesses

Startup Professionals Musings

Entrepreneurs are people who dream up new ideas, and then commercialize them into new businesses. Most people believe that the hard part is coming up with the idea, and the easy part is turning it into a business. Yet, in my experience as a mentor to entrepreneurs, the majority of failures I see are related to starting and growing the business, not developing the solution.

article thumbnail

14 Defining Traits That Could Make or Break Your Success As an Entrepreneur

Up and Running

Here at Palo Alto Software, I interview a lot of successful entrepreneurs. Sometimes, I learn how they hit upon a great business idea. Other times, I learn about their experiences with startup culture , or how they conquered a challenging new industry. Sometimes they’re a LivePlan customer , and I get to hear how LivePlan helped them start and grow their business.

article thumbnail

Cryptocurrency’s second act: the rise of Ethereum and what’s in store for 2017

Version One Ventures

Back in 2009, Bitcoin became the first decentralized cryptocurrency. The prevailing thinking then was that the cryptocurrency market was going to be a winner-takes-all race due to the strong network effects around mining. And, most thought that Bitcoin would emerge as the winner in this race. What happened? Bitcoin, and the underlying blockchain technology, never developed a strong use case besides storing value.

article thumbnail

Roundup of 2017 VC Predictions and Tech Industry Reports

VC Cafe

2017 Predictions. “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Niels Bohr. Hope your 2017 is off to a great start. With more VCs blogging, it’s great to see the plethora of predictions being shared. Below is a selection of themes and predictions for startups/venture/tech in 2017. This doesn’t include the various lists of ‘hot startups to watch’ (where normally there’s a correlation between the startup and the recommending VC’s portfolio), but

article thumbnail

35 Entrepreneurs Explain How They Came Up With Their Business Name

Hearpreneur

Share The idea of exactly what your business is going to be usually comes first. Secondly, most often, is giving a title to your idea. What exactly is going to be the name of your business? Some people turn to their childhood for inspiration or a beloved family pet. It could be a made up word you dream of one night and feel it has the right ring to it.

Naming 86
article thumbnail

Entrepreneurs Turned Angel Investors: A Look At Some Of The Best

YoungUpstarts

An angel investor who also has experience in the start-up world has a much greater understanding of how businesses work, what fears and concerns the start-up owner or owners have and much more. They have gone through many of the experiences and situations that people in the businesses they are helping are going through at the moment or will go through in the future. 3 Great Examples of Entrepreneurs Turned Investors. 1.

article thumbnail

7 Work Ethic Elements Will Get You Investor Funding

Startup Professionals Musings

Starting and running a business is hard. Don’t believe the old myth that with a few hours of work a day and a great web site, you can get rich while you sleep. I have found that the most successful entrepreneurs and business executives have an impressive work ethic, and they surround themselves with a team of comparable commitment. Business is more about people than product.

article thumbnail

Potential Pain Points When Starting a Small Business

Up and Running

If you feel restless working for someone else and have come up with your own idea for starting a business, you should consider the challenges that you will face ahead of time. Owning and running a business is incredibly rewarding—but it comes at a price. Stress, painful mistakes, and sacrifice all accompany the pride, excitement, and sense of accomplishment that comes with creating your own money making machine.

article thumbnail

Thoughts on SaaS in 2017

BeyondVC

When we started boldstart in 2010, a core thesis of ours was to invest in next-gen SaaS which we called SaaS 2.0 at the time and best highlighted in our end of 2015 review: SaaS 2.0, reinventing for the mobile first workforce will continue to remain robust. We also see older school SaaS companies being rebuilt with more flexible back-end technologies like microservices and reimagined with a more responsive and beautiful UI.

article thumbnail

Post-Purchase Emails: How to Boost Retention and LTV

ConversionXL

A common mistake ecommerce store owners make is accepting the sale as the end-goal. It is easy for brands to think in such a transactional way; looking beyond each purchase can prove challenging. A 2014 survey by Econsultancy revealed , “Just 42% of companies are able to measure customer lifetime value.” Though the remaining 58% understand the importance of customer loyalty and retention, they may find it difficult to execute and analyze customer happiness and conversion campaigns.

article thumbnail

Hurricane Oracle

deal architect

Three presentations really stood out during the Oracle Cloud analyst day in NYC this week.

Cloud 252
article thumbnail

Top 5 Benefits Of Switching To Cloud Hosting

YoungUpstarts

There are multiple benefits in switching from traditional web hosting to cloud hosting. We will talk about the most important ones below. Business owners should read them very carefully since making the right decision now will help them save money and get more value for their money. If you decide to do that step make sure to choose an SSD cloud server.

Hosting 185
article thumbnail

10 Ways Aspiring Entrepreneurs Are Often Victimized

Startup Professionals Musings

Some aspiring entrepreneurs are so desperate for funding, or naïve, that they ignore the obvious signs of scams and rip-offs on the Internet, praying for a windfall. One would think that with all the sad stories and tools published over the past twenty years, this problem would be behind us. But people are still begging for more technology or laws, often to protect them from themselves.

article thumbnail

11 Tips for Creating a Long-Term Strategic Plan

Up and Running

Strategic planning is a management tool that guides your business to better performance and long-term success. Working with a plan will focus your efforts, unify your team in a single direction, and help guide you through tough business decisions. A strategic plan requires you to define your goals, and in defining them, enables you to achieve them—a huge competitive advantage.

Tennessee 115
article thumbnail

Look what we did

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

“You must be so proud of what you created” — the reflexive conclusion delivered by visitors to our building at WP Engine, struck by a beautiful place teeming with energy and activity, coming upon the little office of the founder. “What we created,” I always respond. It’s not false humility. I didn’t create this.

Engineer 203
article thumbnail

Hacking for Defense Goes National

Steve Blank

Our goal was to scale Hacking for Defense classes across the US – giving students the opportunity to perform national service by solving real defense/diplomacy problems using Lean Methods. In exchange our government sponsors benefit from 1) access to talent that most likely would never have served the country, 2) getting solutions as minimum viable products/prototypes in 10 weeks, 3) exposure to a problem solving methodology used in Silicon Valley and battle tested in Iraq and Afghanista

San Diego 195
article thumbnail

The Application Vendor is dead. Long live the Application Vendor!

deal architect

I have just come back from a round the world trip with frequent reminders of Great Britain's wide influence - Victoria Harbour, Raffles Hotel, Brabourne Stadium, Kipling's Kim in bookstores among others. You could almost visualize the rise and fall.

Software 163
article thumbnail

Marketing Tips For Startup Businesses

YoungUpstarts

Starting up your own business can be a stressful process, with business plans, accounts, company registration and loads of time consuming administrative tasks that seem never-ending. Then there is marketing, which can be as big or small a task as you want it to be. However, your marketing strategy will have a huge impact on the success of your business, so it is definitely worth investing a lot of effort into.

Marketing 139
article thumbnail

Every Startup Needs Intellectual Property To Thrive

Startup Professionals Musings

A large portion of your competitive advantage and your potential value to investors is the size of your intellectual property portfolio. When someone says Intellectual Property (IP), most entrepreneurs think only of patents. In reality, patents are only one of at least eight items that should be in your IP portfolio. You need all these before you start looking for funding.

article thumbnail

6 Tools to Help You Manage a Remote Team

Up and Running

In the last few years, remote work has become an attractive solution for many employees and employers. Around 67 percent of companies allow some employees to work from home on occasion, and 38 percent allow employees to work remotely on a regular basis. The perks of a remote working situation are pretty obvious for employees, but there are also several amazing perks for their employers, too.

article thumbnail

Taking Corporate VC: When It Makes Sense

View from Seed

In recent years we’ve seen more and more corporations become more active or establish strategic VC arms. When there are many waves of innovation (AI/ML, voice, IoT, genomics, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, etc) propagating across many industries, it’s natural for corporations to use strategic investment as one way to harness that innovation for their own purposes.

article thumbnail

Hacking for Defense Goes National

Steve Blank

Our goal was to scale Hacking for Defense classes across the US – giving students the opportunity to perform national service by solving real defense/diplomacy problems using Lean Methods. In exchange our government sponsors benefit from 1) access to talent that most likely would never have served the country, 2) getting solutions as minimum viable products/prototypes in 10 weeks, 3) exposure to a problem solving methodology used in Silicon Valley and battle tested in Iraq and Afghanista

San Diego 170
article thumbnail

The changing outsourcing world: Conversation with Malcolm Frank of Cognizant

deal architect

As he prepares to go to Davos for the annual WEF meeting, I took the opportunity to ask Malcolm Frank, EVP Strategy and Marketing of Cognizant about his thoughts on outsourcing especially in Europe I think there are three lenses.

article thumbnail

[ADV] Putting Time Sense To Place with Digital Correlation

YoungUpstarts

Perhaps no other mystery has ever been as intriguing and evident as that of time. Although life and death are both metaphors of time, yet neither of these realizations can hold on to the reality of time passing away. Apparently, everything important that needs to depend on making the most of the available time. The hours wasted never return in the same way again, and one must start refreshing the task from the point of the last milestone.

article thumbnail

6 Key Leadership Habits Required For Entrepreneurs

Startup Professionals Musings

Starting and building a company is all about leadership – formulating an idea, building a unique plan based on vision and experience, and forging a path over and through all obstacles. Yet the image of leadership in business is at an all-time low, according to national leadership experts, considering the political debacles, record business bankruptcies, and executive fraud cases.

article thumbnail

Entrepreneurship Is Intellectual Immigration

Feld Thoughts

At the MIT Celebration of 50 Years of Entrepreneurship in November, I heard a number of fantastic lines that have stuck with me. One of them was from Noubar Afeyan. “Entrepreneurship is intellectual immigration.” As I sat in an audience of about 200 extremely accomplished MIT graduates spanning over 50 years, I thought to myself “he just f **g nailed it.” I’m a huge fan and supporter of immigration, especially around entrepreneurship.

article thumbnail

The Only Thing an Investor Can Give You that Matters

This is going to be BIG.

VCs promise a lot of things. We've got all these platforms, advisors, special partners, communities, networks.special economic bells and whistles, spaces, programs, partnerships, etc. Meanwhile, they most useful thing we can give you when you're first starting out seems to be the hardest to get: Honesty. VCs see a lot of deals. We see successful companies and others that fall on their face--so getting our actual opinions about something, pass or fund, can be really useful.

Founder 143
article thumbnail

20 Empowering Quotes For Women Building Empires

YFS Magazine

While you're building your fempire keep these wise words in mind.

article thumbnail

Davos preview: Thoughts from Malcolm Frank of Cognizant

deal architect

As he prepares for his annual visit to the WEF event in Davos, Switzerland, I caught up with Malcolm Frank, EVP, Strategy and Marketing of Cognizant on what he expects to hear. I hesitate to even provide a preview of.

article thumbnail

5 Big Problems Faced By Small-To-Medium US Manufacturers

YoungUpstarts

When people think of manufacturing in the US, they often imagine huge plants hiring thousands of workers. While this may be true for some industries, like automobile manufacturers, for example, most manufacturers in the US are small to medium sized enterprises. This trend began in the early 1980s and gained considerable momentum in the early 1990s. Today, more than half of the US manufacturing sector has less than five hundred employees.