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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Chrome

Chrome 45 New Features

google-chrome-logoTime flies!
Since my last update on Chrome 44 we had the chance to see the market crash and quite a lot of new features that were baked into Chrome 45.
The main improvements you should take a closer look at:

  • A set of new ES2015 features including:
  • SMIL is deprecated – to learn more please check out the discussion.
  • This (long time) bug is fixed.
  • Web Bluetooth is now available in Chrome OS 45.
    It’s still in Developer Preview and the team is actively looking for developer     feedback.

Chrome for Android Media controls
On Android, native apps can show media controls in a system notification when playing audio, making it easy for users to control audio while multitasking. Chrome 45 brings this capability to the web by showing a notification with media controls when audio is playing in web content. The controls will automatically show up when <audio> or <video> tags play audio longer than 5 seconds. It will look like this: Continue reading →

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HTML5, JavaScript, php, webdev

Sublime Text 2/3 – Packages And Shortcuts

subl-icon-512

I always start with the one package that allow to stay in sublime and improve it quickly: packagecontrol.io

Next on the line is the option to make our editor a bit more friendly with: SublimeCodeIntel It’s A full-featured code intelligence and smart autocomplete engine for Sublime Text. Few of the technologies that are supported:
JavaScript, SCSS, Python, HTML, Ruby, Python3, XML, HTML5, Perl, CSS, Node.js, Tcl, TemplateToolkit and (of course) PHP.
From here there are many options.
Few the I’ve found useful:

  • Git
  • Emmet
  • Terminal
  • ColorPicker
  • SublimeREPL
  • LiveReload – Make your life easier with this live reload ability. It will save you a lot of clicks on the ‘reload’ button (or cmd+r).
  • MarkdownPreview – I love markdown and this one is making me more productive with it.
  • JSLint – If you are writing some javascript, this one is a must.
  • DocBlockr – Create a new documentation block with a quick click. And yes, it will extract that function’s parameter information and pre-fill it in your documentation block. nice, no?
  • Soda Theme – just to keep up with the cool kids on the block.

Continue reading →

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Chrome, HTML5, JavaScript, mobile, webdev

Make Your Web Forms More Efficient

Ido's payment formForms are the main ‘entry barrier’ to anything meaningful on the web. It might be a registration form, sign-up form or a shopping cart. In all of them, you wish to do the best in order to delight your users and lower the friction.
In the slides below, we will cover the best practices so your forms will rock.

Continue reading →

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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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Chrome, JavaScript

Chrome 44 New Features

google-chrome-logoChrome 44 is now in stable channel and there are many updates and improvements:

And there are a lots of other improvements and security fixes.

What is hot and new on the web?

Continue reading →

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Chrome, webdev

Chrome Adoption In Israel (Summer 2015)

Since the start of the year, the Chrome adoption is moving in one direction. Very impressive considering the mobile trends.

StatCounter-browser-IL-monthly-201407-201506-bar

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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Chrome, JavaScript, mobile, webdev

The Latest From The Web

google-chrome-logoA lot of new interesting APIs that are pushing the web platform forward introduced with Chrome 43 (now in Stable). Let see the ones that are going to impact a lot of users.

  • The Fetch API now allows developers to directly operate on and incrementally release the bytes of streamed network responses, in contrast to the equivalent XMLHttpRequest functionality that requires developers keep the entire in-progress stream response in memory.
  • The Cache Storage API, previously only available in service workers, now provides developers full imperative control over their caching in the page context. This is huge! It will enable users to have better (=faster) experience in places where the connections are not good.
  • Autofill and Autocomplete – People hate filling out web forms, especially on mobile devices, learn how to help them complete it up to 30% faster. (And yes! I wrote it).

Continue reading →

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