Category Archives: Business

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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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

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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

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