Business

Bitcoin And Crypto Currency

Bitcoin is a decentralized, anonymous, digital-only currency that’s lately gotten a lot of public attention. Like any new technology, there are many different aspects and a lot of ‘noise’.
In this 4min video, I tried to focus on the important stuff.

Read more: Crypto-currency 101 and the bitcoin revolution

 

 

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Android, Business, Chrome

The Art of Retaining Users (Video)

This is the 3rd episode of “The Zen of Monetization”.
It covers three principles for users’ retention:

  • Understand user behavior in your app.
  • Identify roadblocks to retention (e.g screen tracking and events).
  • Use tactics & tools to re-engage users (e.g. use a specific method to specific users’ segment).


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Business

Failure Is Part Of The Game

blue in the dessertLast night, I read this article. What I like most was the short paragraph that gave few recent examples of ‘big’ failures:

…With original ideas, failure is inevitable, because it’s impossible to predict how technologies will evolve and tastes will change. Mark Cuban passed on Uber. In the early days of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell their search engine for less then $2 million, but their potential buyer turned them down. Publishers rejected Harry Potter because it was too long for a children’s book. Executives passed on Seinfeld for having incomplete plot lines and unlikeable characters. Pay a visit to Jerry Seinfeld’s bathroom, and you might find a memo hanging on the wall that calls the pilot episode of Seinfeld “weak” and says “No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again.”

We know that most startups will fail. Moreover, in many cases, they will fail even if they had a good idea and executed well (see: “Why Startups Succeed” for more details).
So be willing to fail and try again.
You are in a good company.

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Business

The Art Of Retaining Users

retention is a challenge

One of the driving principles of the mobile marketplace is that users want NEW. New apps, new updates, new content. In fact, over 60% of users who go onto digital marketplaces, do so, because they want to try something new. While this is fantastic for user acquisition, this presents a problem for user retention because if you’re not keeping the user’s attention, they’ll quickly be looking for something that will.

The key to effective user retention can be broken down into three:

  • Understand user behavior in your app
  • Identify roadblocks to retention
  • Use tactics & tools to re-engage users

All of this starts with understanding your users. If you don’t understand what they want, how they act, or their opinions, you really can’t craft a strategy on how to keep them happy. First, check out your Cohort analysis report.
Why?
Because
Cohort Analysis is a powerful report that allows customers to measure and compare users based on their specific customer journey. You can measure the impact of your marketing campaigns on specific days, see how effective they are in generating loyal users, and compare which campaign performed best. Continue reading

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Business

Understand Your Cohort Analysis Report

Cohort analysis reportI know, it sounds scary. But the true is that it’s not complicated, and once you get the logic behind this report, you can gain lots of useful information out of it. It can help you to gain insights and actionable items so let’s see how and when to use it. First, let’s define it.

What?

Cohort analysis is a subset of behavioral analytics that takes the data from a given platform (e.g. eCommerce site, web app, game etc’) and rather than looking at all users as one unit, it breaks them into related groups for analysis. These related groups (=cohorts), usually share common characteristics or experiences within a defined time-span.

See it in action

In the charts below you can see a popular cohort analysis: It groups customers based on the date when they made their first purchase. Studying the spending trends of cohorts from different periods in time can indicate if the quality of the average customer being acquired is increasing or decreasing in over time. You can also see if your marketing efforts at the time made a difference. In the case below, we can see during 2013 (the circles) it was a slow start, but after a new campaign, that took the first two weeks of March, things got better. As for 2014 (the triangles), we had a good start, but between March and May there was no growth, later during May major improvements in the product boost the spending to a new record. Continue reading

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Business, life, Sport

2015 Year Summary – Code, Books And Running

Overall, it was a very interesting and busy year. A quick overview on some of the fronts that kept me busy.

Code

On the coding front, it was a year that the ‘progressive web apprevolution started. It will be interesting to see what developers will build during 2016. You can see the main projects that kept me busy on this blog (e.g. monetizationstartups, web forms) and on my project site. It always great fun to meet developers around the world that are passion on the same topics you are. Here are a few presentations that I gave.

Screen Shot 2016-01-01 at 9.52.52 AM

I started to push the monetization efforts, both in code (e.g. like this demo or this article on Autofill) and with two courses with Udacity . Check out the courses, they both great (and yes – I’m totally objective on this one).

Running/Biking

On the running front, I had the pleasure to run all over the world. From “down under” to Europe, San Francisco, New York, Barcelona, Paris, London and even in the holy land. On the cycling part, I had the pleasure to participate in 110mile event that few good friends in CA organized – It was one big loop, from Mt. hamilton to Livermore and back. There were also, a lot of good rides in Ben Shemen and other woods. Continue reading

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Business

How To Start? The Execution

Build something people loveThis is the last part from four presentations I did to a course for young entrepreneurs. In the last three lessons: Idea, Product and Team I did my best to focus on the things that will move the needle for you at the early stages. This fourth lesson is all about execution and it might be the most critical part. Continue reading

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Business, Chrome

Make Money On The Web (CodeMotion 2015)

Optimize for Autofill

Today I had the pleasure to present at  codemotion TLV. It was a great opportunity to meet so many good friends that are pushing the web forward.

TL;DR

  • Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic and growing faster. So you better pay extra attention to your mobile website and make sure the friction on your forms is as low as possible.
  • On mobile, entertaining apps dominate time but websites capture the bulk of the transactions (=money!)
  • Optimize for Autofill! make sure you are using all the right autocomplete types in your form’s field. From Chrome usage data we learned that you will get 30% increase in form fill speed. It’s quite an amazing stats, no?

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Business

How to Start? The Team

Build something people love

This is the third part of four presentations I did to a course for young entrepreneurs. The slides are as brief as possible because they meant to give just the framework. The real content is pass verbally.
However, the main points to pay attention are:

  • In many aspects, finding a great co-founder is like finding a partner for life. You should do your best to seek for someone you can trust and spend time with during circumstances that will be very challenging. The ‘honeymoon’ will pass quickly, so make sure it’s someone you want to have with you on a deserted island, because this is what ‘startup life’ will look like after few days. It’s important that your skills will complement each other. So if you are the technical person, you should find a partner that is strong in business, marketing, sales etc’.
  • You should pick the initial team members by their resourcefulness and passion (or determination) to the mission of what you are trying to accomplish. A good way to look on the ‘founding team’ is for people that could have been co-founders if the timing was right. Another great way to look on these first hires as people that you would have feel comfortable to report to.
  • Hire only when you desperate – So do everything first and only hire when there is no other option.
  • Hire true experts. The difference between an ‘OK’ developer and a true expert is unbelievable. At the early stages, it’s critical to build an ‘A Team’ because these type of teams create ‘A companies’.

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Business

Campus TLV, Google Cloud, IoT And Some Tips

Accelerating Your Hardware and IoT StartupsToday I had the pleasure to take part in this conference.
The talk covered three topics:
1. Campus TLV offering for entrepreneurs – Every week, I have the pleasure to spend few hours mentoring startups at the Campus. It’s a great way to help others and to hear about new interesting challenges. I wanted to raise the awareness to the (free) programs that the Campus offer developers and entreparnuers, so this was a classic opportunity.
2. Google Cloud offering for the IoT world and for startups for startups.
3. Tips from my experience on ‘how to start’ your startup and make it a succesful business.

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