Archive for ‘Launch Strategies’

Marc Benioff is a classic entrepreneur success story. He didn’t like the way something worked and wanted something better. So, he took the initiative and created Salesforce in a rented apartment at the age of 34, after working at Oracle and…

The term “subscription economy” refers to the business of offering subscriptions to consumers. For some companies, their entire business relies on a subscription business model. Examples of these include Netflix, Spotify, Zipcar, and all SaaS companies. Others companies offer subscriptions in addition…

Margaret Thatcher once said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” Reid Hoffman, social networker and co-founder of LinkedIn, might respectfully disagree. Hoffman believes that society and communities are real and…

I have an immense amount of respect for the team at HubSpot. The work we do here at KISSmetrics is awesome, but if there’s one company that I look up to and try to model, it’s definitely this one. In just a few…

Leadership is a lifelong learning process. Every great leader always looks for ways to improve. No one ever wakes up and says, “I know everything there is to know about leadership. I’m a perfect leader.” Leadership can be especially challenging for entrepreneurs….

Like many entrepreneurs, Richard Branson loves creating things. He sees problems in the world and provides solutions. But unlike others, he has established many different businesses. In fact, in his 40+ years as an entrepreneur, he has developed over 100 brands. Branson…

Some might call them lucky. They launched a photo app, got 100,000 users in their first week, and sold it for $1 billion less than two years later. Instagram co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, will be the first to tell you…

When you think of the people who have made Google a success, Marissa Mayer should be in the top five. As the 20th employee at Google, she rose to become an executive at the company. Then she took a job as…

We all know what burnout looks like. It’s the stressed-out manager who proclaims they’ve “had it” and books the next flight to Cancun. The start-up co-founder working 130 hour weeks who claims he “can’t take all this bullsh*t anymore” and goes…

Shoe selling shouldn’t come to mind when you hear the name Zappos. While the company does sell shoes and other retail goods, it’s not what it sells that makes Zappos successful. It’s how it sells (that is, what it does for…

When Elon Musk was in college, he figured three things would affect the future of humanity: the internet, sustainable energy, and multi-planetary life. He wanted to be a part of each. So how has he done so far? Internet: zip2: Helped bring media companies…

Growing your website is tough. You are continually trying to get more traffic, more leads, and new customers; improve conversion rates; and build a superstar team. But what if there was an easier way? Have you ever considered buying a website to…

“Maintaining an effective culture is so important that it, in fact, trumps even strategy.” - Howard Stevenson Culture. It’s probably a word you hear often if you follow blogs on entrepreneurship or read articles on business and management. But what is it…

When current and aspiring tech entrepreneurs are asked who they look up to the most, they give the usual names: Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and maybe a few will mention Bill Gates. But, unfortunately, there aren’t many who mention…

Netflix co-founder and CEO, Reed Hastings, launched Netflix in 1997 out of a personal frustration with late fees. Now, 16 years later, late fees for movies are obsolete and Netflix’s UVP has changed in accordance with the times. Today, it’s…

Most early stage business to business (B2B) startups think about which market to target. And it usually boils down to these questions: “Do we focus on small and medium sized businesses (SMB) or do we go after the enterprise? Or both?” You…

It’s hard to imagine that a company with lots of resources can fail. With an estimated 172 million uniques every month to their homepage, Google can (and often do) promote their products. To put it into perspective, advertisers paid an estimated…

You’ve hired a ton of talent. You have a great product. You have the best marketers in the business. And as the business owner / CEO, you have a persistent vision of excellence, and you know it’s all there right in…

Wouldn’t it be nice to know the demands of your product before you even launch? It would save you time, money, and a lot of guesswork. The problem is that too many entrepreneurs are stuck with data that supports building a business,…

According to Lean Startup Methodology, the minimum viable product represents the absolute smallest value you can deliver to test assumptions and start to learn about a business idea. This concept and its acronym get thrown around A LOT in the…

For most startups or even businesses that have been up and running for years, it seems like the only focus on anyone’s mind is getting the product up to speed and improving upon it. I mean, if the product is doing well,…

Many of us have experienced feelings of despair when no one would try our brand new product. It takes a lot more than building a product to get someone interested. If we want a chance to build our business, we need to…

Think of the last product you bought. Maybe it was some fancy Bluetooth headphones. Or a spatula. Was it as amazing as you hoped for? I don’t mean kinda-sorta amazing, I mean riding in on a unicorn with rainbows shooting out of…

Starting a business is exhilarating. Unfortunately, the “build it and they will come” theory doesn’t hold much weight and those overnight success stories you hear about are often the result of behind the scenes years of hard work. Simply put, startup…

Being an early Facebook executive must have been quite a job. Working for a fast growing company, changing the world, tackling interesting challenges, making big product decisions, and all the while working with Mark Zuckerberg every day. Not too bad. It’s…

Growing a business is no easy feat. Every dollar counts. But what if we could “hack” our growth? Instead of paying $20 to acquire a new customer, we could focus on projects that continue to bring us new customers long after we’ve…

228% – that’s how much Groupon grew their revenue in one year. As one of the fastest growing companies around, Groupon employed many growth hacks that helped lead to massive growth. In this article we’ll examine some of them and…

Did you know Dropbox has spent very little on advertising, yet it is worth $4 billion? What have they done that’s made their business so successful? They’ve implemented many growth hacks that we’ll discuss in this article. What’s a growth hack?…

You may have heard that Instagram recently sold for $1 billion. How can a photo sharing iPhone app be worth 23x more than Kodak? Instagram is a simple and elegant app, but simple and elegant doesn’t lead to a $1 billion…

On Monday, April 9th, Instagram, the 2-year-old photo-sharing app with no business or revenue model, was bought by Facebook for $1 billion. One. Billion. Dollars. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the great tragedy at sea: the sinking of the RMS…

You likely don’t need to be reminded about Pinterest’s astounding growth. They’re not an overnight success and there doesn’t appear to be any magic to Pinterest. There’s no special technology that gives it an advantage & no new revolutionary marketing…

When setting up a business, most of the important requirements are carefully planned out. It’s seen to it that a proper plan is put into action, the right employees are hired, the required funds are available, etc. But one important ingredient…

One of the most important aspects of marketing your company or product is its position in the market. This is often overlooked because positioning isn’t as sexy as getting Facebook Fans or Twitter Followers. However, it’s the best way to separate yourself…

Are you looking to take the leap into starting your own business in 2012? If you’re just starting to think about it, or if you have been planning it for a while, you still may have lots of unanswered questions….

Here at KISSmetrics, we talk about all forms of online marketing for businesses, including email marketing. While beginner’s guides and email timing are important, there is also one other area that may not have a lot to do…

Over the past 10 years I’ve created many businesses. If you looked at my business life on a timeline you would see that my first few businesses didn’t do too well, however, as the years went on I slowly became more…

Revenue is the most important metric when it comes to starting a business. But it’s not the only metric you should be concerned with. Of course some companies have gotten very creative when it comes to justifying their business model to…

When LivingSocial launched in 2007, the co-founders thought it would be interesting to match a user’s location with their interests. The model has evolved to selling vouchers to users for local experiences, and LivingSocial now serves daily deals to over 30…

Being unique is overrated. Look into the histories of world-famous websites like Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, and PayPal, and you’ll find they ripped off smaller, less well-funded competitors for their ideas, marketing strategies, and even business models. It’s not subtle, either. They took…

Apple product launches have become the stuff of legend. The iPad sold 300,000+ WiFi-only units on launch day. Within three days, the iPhone 4 sold 1.7 million units. The iPhone 3G sold over a million units on its launch weekend. Clearly, Steve Jobs…

Have you found it hard to make your website viral? We have had this pain for years, which is why we decided to create Product Planner. So what’s Product Planner? Product Planner was born out of the need to…