Category Archives: Business

Business

How to Start? The Product

Build something people loveThis is the second 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:

  • Get users manually at the beginning. It won’t ‘scale’ but that is more than fine. You need at the start to get users (in every way possible as long as you aren’t breaking any laws) and not to expect them to come to you. The notion of ‘if we will build it they will come’ is not working in most cases.
  • Listen to outside users – This is very important in order for you to build something that users love. A lot of users will give you noise, but your role is to extract the signals and shape the product base on that feedback. You should build an engine: Users -> Feedback -> Product improvement

Continue reading →

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Business

How To Start? The Idea

Build something people love

This is the first 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. I hope to have a good recording soon. Continue reading →

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Business

Master Google Drive Search

[update: 9/12/2015] – I’ve just saw that the Drive team did this:

drive_search_update

These new improvements give you the ability to:

  • Narrow your search to a file type from the search box on Android, iOS, and the web.
  • Open advanced search instantly from the search box – See in the gif above.
  • Access recent files or search Drive from the home screen using 3D Touch on iOS.
  • Search Drive using the iOS search bar without opening the Drive app.

google drive logoWhen you searching for old documents in your Google Drive, there are a lot of options. The ‘recent’ option or the ‘starred’ one are giving a nice overview, but it’s not enough if you are working on a lot of documents, presentations and spreadsheets. Over the years, I found the most useful ones to be:

  • type: spreadsheet
  • type: presentation
  • from: an email
  • to: an email
  • after: YYYY-MM-DD

Here is the full list: Continue reading →

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Business

Find A Great Co-Founder

Startup thoughts on changeIn the past, I wrote about hiring for startups and raising money. It’s one of these things that you must do right. Hopefully, on the first try. It’s also, easy to say and really hard to do. There are a lot of things to consider and in most cases, it’s during a time that you are extremely busy with building your product and finding answers to daily fires.

If your core team is not a great one, your chance to build a great business is low. It’s important at the start, when you wish to find a co-founder that will be a good match. This post is aimed to founders and investors. It contains the aspects that I would look for. Continue reading →

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Business

An Important Question To ‪#‎entrepreneurs‬

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  • “Play long enough and you might get lucky – In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today.”

 

  • “Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.”

 

  • …And the one that is true for a lot of other cases, not just startups: “The Struggle is where greatness comes from.”

It’s about grit and your ability to be optimistic 90% of the time and realistic in the other 50%

The startup bridge

– The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

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Business

Monetization Questions For Entrepreneurs #StartupTips

startup office

“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge” – Thomas Berger

One of the critical times for startup is when it needs to define what will be the path to profitability. It’s a real challenge, and one of the ways to come up with the right plan is to ask the right questions.

A set of questions that could lead you in the right path:

  1. How do you define the relationship between ‘growth’ and monetization for your startup?
    Do we need to focus on one first?
    What is the mark to blend the two?
    Can we do both?
  2. What do you think about ‘starting a business’ and not ‘starting a startup’?
    The main point here is to get out of the ‘la-la land’ of startups that don’t need ‘revenue’ and look at the world of building a profitable business from the get-go.
  3. What other bold/good/recent startup(s) are executing a good monetization plan?
    Can we do something similar? Which parts of their plan we wish to test first?
  4. Are there several platforms that we can leverage in our monetization paths?
    In other words, if we are a startup that is building an application for iOS/Android.
    Can we also create an amazing web experience and enjoy it as another platform for engagement?
  5. How your purchasing process (or billing) is working today?
    What pitfalls other should learn from it?
    How you optimize it?
  6. Where are the gaps (or opportunities) in the current state of your online commerce?
  7. What are the top 3 action items that you can take in order to monetize your work better at this stage?
    This might be a great question to ask every 1-3 months.
    Moreover, you might want to keep A/B testing your actions.
  8. Any interesting trends you see in the market around your startup?
    What are the leaders doing?
    What other direct competitors are doing?
    What are indirect competitors are doing?
  9. Can we improve the usage of our analytics in order to gain more insights for our KPIs?

For more thoughts on the subject (with some tips from experience) – Join 4100+ students and check out my course on Udacity “App Monetization“.

Good luck!

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Android, Business, Chrome

App Monetization Course #StartupTips

app-mon-imageIn the past year, I had the pleasure to work with  and the rest of the professional team in Udacity on a course that aim to help developers and entrepreneurs. There is no higher form of user validation than having customers support your product with their wallets. However, the path to a profitable business is not necessarily an easy one. This course blends instruction with real-life examples to help you effectively develop, implement, and measure your monetization strategy, iterating on the model as appropriate. In a nutshell, it will help you make money.

Go try it at: udacity.com/course/app-monetization–ud518

Continue reading →

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Android, Business

Android In App Payments

top android appsAs we know, user like free applications. However, we need to make a living out of our application, right?
One of the most popular method these days is In-App Payments. You can see this in many examples: Clash of clans, Netflix, Spotify and many more.
In this post, we’ll see how to perform common In-appPayments operations from Android applications.

What is this service?

In-app billing is a service hosted on Google Play that lets you charge for digital content or for upgrades in your app. You can request product details from Google Play, issue orders for in-app products, and retrieve ownership information based on users’ purchase history. Google Play provides a checkout interface that makes user interactions with the In-app Billing service seamless and provides a more intuitive experience to your users. Continue reading →

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Business

Crypto Currency 101 – #bitcoin

bitcoin

Is it important?

Bitcoin leverage a powerful and new technology. It is not controlled or issued by any one organization (e.g. bank or government). Instead, it is an open network which is managed by its users. In a similar way that email and WhatsApp improved communication by making it fast and cheap, bitcoin is an improvement on existing payment methods which were not designed for the internet era.

What is bitcoin?

Bitcoin is a decentralized, anonymous, digital-only currency that’s lately gotten a lot of public attention. It was originally developed in 2008 and like in any good mystery, someone using the alias “Satoshi Nakamoto” published a paper describing how Bitcoins could work. (There is a very interesting story about this guy too. He must be very smart but, has never come forward to claim ownership, or any part in revenue.) Just one year later, at 2009, they started being traded and mined. In short, bitcoin represents a way to transfer money anonymously and at almost no cost. And since it’s an arbitrary currency with no nationality attached to it, you’re free to exchange it with anyone in the world. Since Bitcoin’s core protocol is viewable by anyone, it has been vetted by thousands of security researchers around the world and has proven to be robust and reliable. Continue reading →

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Business

Why Startups Succeed #StartupTips

A tree in the wildHow to know if a startup will succeed? Or in other words, when you coming to evaluate a new early stage startup what are the parameters you should consider?

Bill Gross from Idealab did a (limited) research and found out that timing is the most important aspect for startups to succeed. It’s a downer since it’s a factor that we (= entrepreneurs) can’t control. However, a talented team will know how to execute well and ‘buy’ more time. In order to extend the ‘time frame’ as long as we need it to be, a strong business model is another important aspect. It will ensure that we will get to a cash flow positive state. This will enable us to run for years and wait for the right timing.

startup success aspects

 

IMO, a great execution by passionate co-founders is the best predictor.
After that, a solid business model and a good idea are critical success factors. Continue reading →

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