Want more people to adopt your product? Make sure you know what progress looks like in your user’s life, not just on their screen.
Great story about telling the user a story.
Tag Archives: neato
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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…
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Jack Dorseys dazzling startup promised to transform the credit and finance industry. After losing $100 million, has his company lost its edge?
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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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We spoke to Dima Korolev to gain some insight into what it’s like working at the big companies in tech.
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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.
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“One of the themes we’ve invested heavily behind is this intersection between big data and traditional enterprise application software,” says Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures. Indeed, Bain’s newest partner, Enrique Salem, the former chief executive of Symantec, sees business technologies on the cusp of a still-greater transformation.
Enterprise Investments Surge To Over $5.4 Billion | TechCrunch
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Another challenge with lean dogma is that all that testing and prototyping can feel aimless, even to key members of the team. At Iodine, we spent a lot of time brainstorming and prototyping various features to test, which left some staff members unclear what we were working toward.
“When to Break the Lean Startup Rules” via Inc.com
Thomas makes several great points about adopting the lean startup methodology. As the team at Contactive has grown we always try to make clear to everyone why we’re doing certain in-app experiments or customer-driven development exercises. Sharing with the whole team the reasoning behind the individual experiments and their desired impact has helped significantly with the team’s cohesion around our core mission.
#neato 