Category Archives: Business

Business

Startups And Running

running on the beach

Last week, I had an interesting talk with a friend about the common set of skills you need in order to create a successful (big) project. In most cases, the planing phase is important but not the most challenging one. The execution is the real deal.

It’s the ability to push on when things are falling a part. As someone said: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched”. This is why grit is a critical aspect.

We later talked about another passion we shared: long distance running. It wasn’t too hard to see the similarity in characteristics of great entrepreneurs and runners.

From my experience, in both cases, it’s about the people that you meet in this clan and the willingness to help and support each other. In most cases, it’s not a direct competition, but rather a huge challenge to make it to the end. Where each individual define the ‘end’ differently.

Sure enough, someone already did a ted talk on this topic. Continue reading →

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Business

Mentoring Entrepreneurs And Developers

Screen Shot 2016-06-16 at 12.51.01 PMIn the past six years I had the pleasure to mentor hundreds of entrepreneurs and developers. For some, as an investor and for others as an external advisor or a domain expert. These days I’m doing it mostly as my day job which is really fun!

Here are some of the lessons learned over time.

If you are an entrepreneur who is asking:
“Why do I need someone to mentor me?”
Well, there are many good reasons, but check the graph below. Continue reading →

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Business

Innovation From One Startup

These are the slides from my talk today at Google IL Office.
It covers:
1. Google’s past, present and a bit of the future.
2. Google’s 5 principles of innovation.

If you are an entrepreneur, there are some good principle to take to your venture (especially from slide 23).

SFO bride to startups

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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).


Continue reading →

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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?
BecauseCohort 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 app‘ revolution 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. monetization, startups, 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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