This weekend’s Roundup #17 from Startup Management is a manual selection from the hundreds of weekly articles being curated. Previous issues are available here. There are 15 article links in this edition.
First, I have an announcement. We have revamped the Startup Management website with a new look, and expanded the scope of curation coverage according to 11 categories: Advice, Marketing, Venture Capital, Product, Ecosystem, Growth, Management, Market Data, Technology, Transactions and Think Tank.
To get a feel for it, please visit the new home page, where you’ll see the magazine style, or river of news format. If you are already subscribed to the existing RSS feed, it has converted to the firehose of articles, about 30-40 per day. The feed for my blog posts only will be at http://feeds.feedburner.com/wmougayar. Also, every category or tag page will have its own RSS feed that you can access from the respective pages.
Please send me feedback. We are still working on smoothening the experience, and have additional features coming-up this week. Feel free to also try it on your smartphone.
User Experience
Denis Duvauchelle reminds us of the 500 milliseconds rule, in Don’t lose users for eternity in the first 5 seconds: How to survive the blink test, based on a 2006 study that still holds true. He goes into details, explaining how to quickly retain users attention. My favorite part is about the “halo effect”. “The halo effect refers to how even though something has some minor flaws, the overall effect is positive and reassuring – and most importantly, trustworthy.”
VC-Entrepreneur Relationship
Fred Wilson and Matt Blumberg wrote a pair of related posts depicting each side of the VC/Entrepreneur relationship. In The Role of Personal Chemistry in Investment Selection, Fred explains the 4 stages of the process of getting to know an entrepreneur: first impression, subsequent meetings, reference checking, and negotiation. In Selecting Your Investors, Matt has 7 tips for ensuring you end-up with the best long-term partner as an investor.
Lessons in Conversions
Here are 39 tips from London Conversion Conference. It’s a bulleted list from practioners, on pricing, conversion, copyrighting, mobile, and testing.
Y Combinator Startup School
2 follow-ons are worth a look. YC Startup School Mashup is a collection of speakers quotes. And Gregory Koberger has put together a visually pleasing notebook, Startupnotes, summarizing each presentation with creative graphics.
Content Marketing
David Armano has laid the law on The Five Content Archetypes. They are: Curated, Co-Created, Original, Consumer-Generated, and Sponsored. The drivers of attention are Mobile, Social, and Search. It’s a good framework to think about when looking at your Content Marketing practices. “The first wave of social was dominated by engagement and how to engage at scale. The second is dominated by engaging at scale plus content distribution and integration with marketing programs.”
Alexis Ohanian Interview
If you’re a fan of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian (who isn’t?), here’s an hour long video interview with Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups.
Growth Hacking
VC Chamath Palihapitiya Says He Has Cracked the Code for Making Startups Grow, and has a team of growth experts that he parachutes into portfolio companies to help them grow.
Unicorn Story
Only if you were under a rock during the week-end, you didn’t hear about the Unicorn Club article at TechCrunch that spurred a follow-on post from Fred Wilson on AVC. Here is a link to a tagged list of related posts, and you’ll experience the power of our new semantic tagging on the new Startup Management: http://startupmanagement.org/tag/unicorn-analysis/.
Venture Capital
Boris Wertz picks up on the fact that Funding is now global: location is no longer your financing destiny. This applies equally well to startups that are getting financing from outside of where they are located, and to VC firms who are crossing their traditional geographical boundaries to invest where ever there is a good opportunity. The world is getting smaller for tech investments, and that’s a good thing. Charlie O’Donnell says Don’t Send the Deck, because it’s like allowing someone to play your story on mute. Instead, go for the face-to-face meeting when pitching a VC.
Marketing
Debbie Laskey explains the realities behind The Blurring Lines Between Marketing and Technology. The battleground? Data. “At the core, the tension between the IT and marketing departments has grown because the two own important data.”
The Internet of Things
The Economist Intelligence Unit has a special report, The Internet of Things Business Index, a quiet revolution (pdf). It’s a great read, and includes coverage by industry and geography. And Sarah Guo notes that 2 companies in this segment already have huge valuations: Nest at $800M, and Jawbone at $1.5B, in The Internet of Venture Dollars, Tethering the “Internet of Things”.
That SUMs it up! Don’t forget to share on Twitter, add us to your Feedly, forward to a friend, follow on Twitter, read in Flipboard, or just visit the website often and daily.
William Mougayar
Founder & Chief Curator
Startup Management]]>
