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Startup / Entrepreneurship
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4 ways to get automatically rejected by an angel investor
Jason Cohen is founder of Smart Bear Software.
November 4, 2009
I’ve started three companies, and now I’m an angel investor. So I’ve been on both sides of the table.
There are lots of good articles out there about pitching, and surely
everyone who pitches me has read some of them. Still, a few problems
appear over and over again. If you’ve ever had to sort through resumes
and cover letters, you’ve seen this effect: People tend to have the
same misconceptions and therefore make the same mistakes.
What follows are four problems I see all the time, each of which
makes me roll my eyes and sometimes even terminate the conversation
early.
Be dismissive of the competition.
Let me guess what your feature-comparison chart looks like. Probably pretty close to the illustration to the right, huh?
You have all the checkmarks, they have few. Even when your
competitor has a checkmark too, your implementation is still better.
There’s nothing they have that you don’t. Oh, and they’re more
expensive too.
When I see this chart, all I know is: It’s a lie.
The point of “competitive analysis” isn’t to say: “I’m better than
everyone else.” Rather, it’s to define your niche in the market and
explain how you own that niche better than everyone else.
Need to be further humbled? Here are some things not in your little feature-comparison chart:
- Those competitors probably have more customers than you.
- Those competitors probably have more revenue than you.
- Your potential customers have possibly heard of one of these competitors but almost certainly never heard of you.
- Those competitors are already ahead of you in discovering, defining and attacking the market.
- People rarely buy on the basis of “most features.”
So what should you do instead?
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Marketing
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How Moms Use Their iPhones
October 26, 2009
According to a new survey by mobile advertising network Greystripe,
mothers with iPhones regularly let their children use their phones,
download games specifically for their children and often use their
phones at grocery stores to compare prices and check their grocery
lists.
Not too long ago, mothers were still considered to be a hard group
to reach through mobile applications because they tend to be late
adopters. The iPhone's mainstream success has changed this , however, and iPhone moms have now become a desirable target demographic for marketers.
Greystripe is a brand-focused advertising network and obviously has
an interest in making this group attractive for advertisers, but the
statistics in this report seem pretty solid. Greystripe found the 1,294
respondents who filled out this survey through house ads on its own
network.
The iPhone Mom
According to Greystripe, 96% of mothers with iPhones are involved in
their family's purchasing decisions and 40% are the sole decision
makers. Eighty percent have attended at least some college and are
slightly more likely to have received a Graduate degree than the rest
of the iPhone user base. The age of the children in these families
skews slightly older, with 29% of the moms having children between 0
and 4, while 43% have children between 15 and 17.
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Startup Profile
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Five Things That May Shock You about the LOLCats Network
by
Sarah Lacy
on
October 28, 2009
Ben Huh is usually holed up in his Seattle-based company Pet Holdings Inc—better known as the company that brings you I Can Has Cheezburger? , the FAIL Blog and
nearly thirty other sites that aim to make you laugh for five minutes
every day. But he’s down in the Bay Area this week to promote the
launch of three new books “How to Take over the World: A LOLCat Guide 2
Winning,” “Graph out Loud,” based on GraphJam and “FAIL Nation: A Visual Romp through the World of Epic Fails.” A big party is happening tonight.
Annoyingly, Huh is also running around San Francisco this week doing
all kinds of media interviews. But here are some things I pried out of
him yesterday that you may not know.
A word first about Huh: People almost always open an interview by
asking if he has cats or if he’s always been funny, which misses the
point of what he loves about his job. Huh is a businessman. Unlike a
lot of media entrepreneurs, he says his job has become more fun the
larger the staff, the site, and the operational worries have grown.
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Biz Models
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The Rise of the 'Homepreneur'
New research shows the economic importance of home-based businesses:
They account for more than half of all U.S. businesses and employ more
people than venture-backed companies
Stephen Labuda, 35, is planning to hire a fifth employee for the Web
development firm he runs from his home in Cambridge, Mass. CARBONARO PHOTOGRAPHY
By
John Tozzi / BusinessWeek
More than half of all U.S. businesses are based at home. These
companies often are dismissed as quaint hobbyist ventures, but new
research suggests that's a mistake. An estimated 6.6 million home-based
enterprises provide at least half of their owners' household income.
Together these "homepreneurs"
employ one in 10 private-sector workers, and by many measures they're
just as competitive as their counterparts in commercial spaces.
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Revenue Model
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Do-It-Yourself iPhone Apps
Services that do the coding for you make it easy for nontechies to
create iPhone apps. Applications to the Apple App Store are exploding
By Olga Kharif / BusinessWeek
Oct. 2009
Tom Johnson is no engineer. But that didn't stop him from creating
software that helps him market his wedding-video business. Johnson
crafted an application, downloadable to the Apple (AAPL)
iPhone, that plays a sample video, connects users to a blog, and lets
would-be clients call his company, Alliance Video Products, by pushing
a single button. Best of all for a non-engineer like Johnson, he did it
in a single day, without writing a single line of code.
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Startup / Entrepreneurship
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Evan Williams And Biz Stone Admit Twitter Was Stupid At First
by Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch
October 24, 2009
Ev Williams and Biz Stone have just taken the stage at Startup School,
where they’ll be taking many questions form the audience. You can
submit questions by tweeting a question like this “@poll _________”
(where the blank is your question). I’ll be liveblogging the session.
Q: What was the original motivation behind Twitter?
Biz: We
should start with Odeo. We were working at Odeo, we weren’t as
passionate about the podcasting service as we should have been. We
weren’t using it, and that was a problem. Twitter got started because
Ev gave us some freedom to think along different lines.
Biz: We (Jack Dorsey and Stone) did a thing where we had two weeks
to build something and demo. Build it, try it out over the weekend. If
it sticks we may keep working on it. I was ripping out carpeting during
a heat wave and then my phone vibrated in my pocket, and it was Ev. And
it said he was sipping pinot noir. I realized I was totally engaged in
this product. So we decided we should keep working on it. At the
beginning it was “okay this seems compelling”. Early on someone said
“twitter is fun but it isn’t useful”. Ev said “Neither is ice cream”.
So what if it’s just fun? SXSW 2007 was a huge watershed moment for us,
first time we saw real potential in the tool. Saw people tweeting about
a good session to go to.
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Biz Models
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Marketers salivating over smartphone potential
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
Oct. 23, 2009
SAN FRANCISCO — Jeff Smith is a diligent social-networking user, but he doesn't own a PC.
"I prefer a cellphone and a service for a
cellphone," says Smith, 40, a postal worker in Detroit who served as an
Army Ranger in Desert Storm and Somalia.
For about a year, Smith has used MocoSpace (for
"mobile community space") to chat, meet people, search the Web and play
games. "Anything else feels like too much."
The majority of people who participate on social
networks do so from their PCs. Yet a growing number — many of whom
can't afford a PC or would rather not use one — are using mobile
devices to tell their friends where they are and what they're up to and
for sharing pictures.
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