In one case, an oblivious Secrets user sent more than 30,000 invites to invalid numbers on their address book over the course of two days…
“Playing Dirty In The Messaging Wars” via Forbes.
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Tag Archives: growth
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The $30 million exit to Zendesk has many positives for Singapore’s ambitious tech startup scene.
Very cool to see Singapore tech making waves.
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Here are some tips and tricks that helped me grow the downloads for our app from 0 to 500,000 organically, spending very little to no money at all.
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To beat a potential customer’s skepticism, it’s important to offer proof of credibility. This can be done using case studies or testimonials from past and current clients, through trial period offers or product guarantees.
“4 Lessons in Scaling Your Startup” via AlleyWatch
Simple but important guidance as you think about how to build for customers.
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In 2013 that sales of fake Twitter followers have the potential to bring in $40 million to $360 million to date and that fake Facebook activities bring in $200 million a year.
“Liar Liar: Faking Social Media Followers Is a Booming Biz, But Watch Out” via AlleyWatch
As a growing startup company looking to energize and grow our social media engagement, we are constantly bombarded with spam from companies trying to sell us ways to buy followers. We always shy away from it because we want our engagement to be viral and hopefully authentic. It’s great to see networks clamping down on fake followers and the emergence of tools that help make it simple to see how “real” someone’s followers are.
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LinkedIn engagement is rising, and its high-income audience is especially desirable for brands.
A good summary of how well LinkedIn is doing, but the article also includes some good tips on “key times to post” on the various networks. We’re working hard on our social media presence for Contactive and are always testing to find the best time to post, blog, tweet, and share.
LinkedIn May Not Be The Coolest Social Network, But It’s Only Becoming More Valuable To Businesses
What’s the most random task you had to do in your last job?
Found this great article today that is perfectly timed given how we’re interviewing right now (and kind-of always are):
“Conduct the Perfect Job Interview in Twelve Simple Steps” via Jeff Haden on LinkedIn.
Contactive is always looking for great people. I find that the way I interview here in our 10-person startup is not too dissimilar from the way I interviewed at Microsoft. I continue to focus on assessing a candidate’s personality, their passion, and their skills (in roughly that order), using mostly experiential questions like “Talk to me about a time on in your old position where you had to talk someone down from a bad decision.”
Given the odd jobs that you sometimes have to do in a smaller company like ours, I’ve added a new one which is “Tell me about the most random task you had to do in your previous job that wasn’t in your actual job description.” I like to see how weird their “odd job” was to get a sense for their tolerances for doing random stuff. It may not be a perfect question, but I’ve heard some pretty interesting responses because of it.
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You have to have innovative ad units … and we’re probably the most innovative in the marketplace.
“10X growth in 18 months: StartApp hits 1.5B downloads, 70K installs, and 200M daily impressions” via VentureBeat
Eighteen months after it reached the 150 million download plateau, mobile ad platform StartApp announced today that it has now hit over 1.5 billion downloads. And while the official release says the company’s ad software is now embedded in 60,000 apps, CEO Gil Dudkiewicz told me the number is actually higher.
Impressive growth and great platform; their ad quality and display flexibility is going make them a strong player on iOS.
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As the high end segment of the smartphone market is becoming increasingly saturated, Apple is starting to feel the pressure from its smaller competitors in the smartphone market. While Apple increased smartphone shipments by 13% in 2013, its competitors managed to realize much higher growth rates.
Good summary of 2013 phone shipments from Statista.
Infographic: Apple Is Lagging Behind in Terms of Smartphone Growth
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Good article on why startups need someone devoted to growth. Especially in the early stages when you’re searching for the features that will help you go from linear to hockey stock user acquisition, dedication to testing and data remains paramount.
#neato 