Author Archives: affronti

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The SMB market is becoming increasingly fragmented, with businesses realizing the power of the cloud and breaking out of using siloed, one-size-fits-all solutions that are mostly tied to desktop-based software. In doing so, businesses are increasingly mixing and matching a bunch of different vendor platforms to find the right combination of tools.

“ZenPayroll Partners With A Dozen Other SMB Back-Office Tools” via TechCrunch

Another great company opening up their API’s and making the experience for SMB’s more seamless.

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It’s an absolute myth that you can send an algorithm over raw data and have insights pop up. … the predicament of data wrangling [is] big data’s “iceberg” issue, meaning attention is focused on the result that is seen rather than all the unseen toil beneath.

“For Big-Data Scientists, ‘Janitor Work’ Is Key Hurdle to Insights” via NYTimes

A great article that covers the inherent issues of dealing with unstructured data. “Data wrangling” is as important as the actual magic delivered by “data science.”

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Evernote gives employees $1,000 to disconnect from work for a week or more; FullContact offers $7,500 a year.

Good article describes the different personalities that can exist in a company and how they map to the way people take vacation. It’s certainly harder to long vacations here at Contactive because we are trying to grow a brand-new business with minimal resources, which was almost the opposite of my last role, but I still value immensely taking time off. I try to be as disconnected as possible when I’m actually on a vacation; it helps me to decompress and avoids my wife threatening to throw my phone into the water. 🙂

The employees who never take vacation time: How companies are prodding them go

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Within Red Rocket’s “101 Startup Lessons—An Entrepreneur’s Handbook” I have detailed plenty of low-cost marketing lessons, so be sure to read (or re-read) those posts for more details about how best to market your startup. But the goal of this lesson is to try and pull it all together and demystify the concept of growth hacking. The term “growth hacker” was first introduced in a blog post by Sean Ellis in 2010.  He summarized a growth hacker as “a person whose true north is growth” and is disciplined in prioritizing and testing marketing ideas and religiously analyzing such results to…

Growth Hacking: Marketing for Startups

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Andreessen Horowitz has announced a $50 million investment in Buzzfeed.

“Its 100+ person tech team has created world-class systems for analytics, advertising, and content management. Engineers are 1st class citizens. Everything is built for mobile devices from the outset. Internet native formats like lists, tweets, pins, animated GIFs, etc. are treated as equals to older formats like photos, videos, and long form essays. BuzzFeed takes the internet and computer science seriously.”

Andreessen Horowitz Announces $50 Million Investment In BuzzFeed

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By owning engagement on both desktop and mobile, startups capture more attention and become more defensible. It takes more effort to switch someone from Sunrise when they’re using both the mobile app and desktop app. This is especially important for those creating more ‘commoditized’ apps that can be easily replaced.

Awesome quote from producthunt founder rrhoover in “The Return of the Desktop Productivity App” via TechCrunch

We are focused on building exciting, productive, multi-screen experiences with our new sales app, Klink. Early customers love the desktop and tablet notifications that accompany all of their phones calls. We initially thought we would just focus on the mobile apps, but lots of love for the multi-screen experience has us delivering across all of them simultaneously.