startups
Are we all doing the illustrations for the Twitter pics now or are we back to real headshots?
During a dim sum lunch with staff, someone asked Koum why he wasn’t crowing to the press about it. “Marketing and press kicks up dust,” Koum replied. “It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product.”
Five Hard Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Starting Up
Five Hard Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Starting Up
Ryan Hoover for some pragmatic, necessary questions you need to ask yourself before starting up. The most important one, for me, is passion. Would like to do what you’re doing for the next five years?
Specialization might give you a temporary boost in productivity, but it comes at the expense of overall functional cohesion and shared ownership. If only Jeff can fiddle with the billing system, any change to the billing system is bottlenecked on Jeff, and who’s going to review his work on a big change?
Was Snapchat right in refusing the $3 billion offer from Facebook?
Was Snapchat right in refusing the $3 billion offer from Facebook?
Michael Carney writing for PandoDaily:
The answer boils down to your belief about whether the company can defy the odds and stay hot within the notoriously fickly teen and young adult demographic. Because that’s what this valuation is all about: teens. Facebook is losing its grip on young social users; SnapChat has them in spades.
What will Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy come up with to make teens stick to the service? How will they monetise?
The real problem here is that if teens just change their mind about Snapchat, or suddenly find Facebook attractive again, the trend will fade away. There needs to be constant innovation in terms of stickiness (making people want to use the app and especially come back) and the Snapchat team should not be resting on the sight of exponential user growth.
Amid intensifying interest from deep-pocketed investors, the startup is looking to raise up to $200 million at a valuation of $3 to $4 billion, according to people briefed on the matter.
Two system for successful startups
There seems to be two product systems which are quite popular and successful at the moment, for mobile apps.
1. Simple, mono-action apps
Focus around a unique use case, craft a superb user experience, wait for the market.
Instagram: Take a picture, apply a filter, share it to all social networks.
Vine: Take a 6 second, non-continuous video, share it to all social networks.
2. Kill the middleman
This is Uber, Airbnb, iCracked and Exec.
Find some market which does not need a middleman, as we now have phones with constant Internet connections. Then make connections, and exchanges of goods/services between people super easy, peer-to-peer style.
Airbnb: peer-to-peer house/room rentals
Exec: peer-to-peer house cleaning
In the case of Uber and iCracked it’s business-to-peer via the app.
So you know what you have to do, if you want to build a startup now. (Or you could build a cheap, efficient solar panel (apparently, you can’t).)
Why Square is the next big thing
Farhad Manjoo:
I believe the tech industry’s next great company is Square. If you’ve heard of Jack Dorsey’s three-year-old firm, you likely think of it as a payments startup. Square is famous for its white plastic card reader, a device that lets small businesses use phones and tablets to accept credit cards. But calling Square a mere payments company minimizes its potential, and it misses Dorsey’s world-changing mission.
Square is currently processing 8 billion on a yearly basis. So, they’re already big. But Manjoo sees Square grow even further:
Dorsey is bent on creating frictionless commerce. His long-term goal is to make accepting payments a breeze for businesses, and he wants to make paying for stuff invisible—for everyone, across the entire economy, for all types of goods and services. If Square succeeds in that mission, it will become a persistent, ever-present part of our daily lives. You’ll use it every time you engage with businesses—which might mean you’ll interact with Square more often than Google, Facebook, Amazon, or even Apple.
If someone can make this, it has to be Jack Dorsey.