Archive for ‘Launch Strategies’

How to Excel at the Subscription Economy

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…

LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman’s Advice for Entrepreneurs

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…

10 Lessons on Leadership (Poster)

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….

Business Lessons From Mega-Entrepreneur Richard Branson

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…

How to Prevent Employee Burnout

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…

Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Art of Great Company Culture

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…

Inside the Inventive and Entrepreneurial Mind of Elon Musk

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…

How Acquiring a Website Can Be a Faster Path to Profit

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…

The 4 Elements That Make Great Company Culture

“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…

What Startups Can Learn From Netflix

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…

How to Steer Your Company Away From its Own Fiscal Cliff

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…

Make Sure You Do These 4 Things Before You Build A Product

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,…

The ABCs of MVPs: How to Get the RIGHT Product out Faster

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…

How to Recruit a World-Class Marketer for Your Startup

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…

The Ultimate Guide to Startup Marketing

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…

What Startups Can Learn From Quora

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…

The 7 Growth Hacks That Led Groupon to a $12.7 Billion IPO

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…

The 7 Ways Dropbox Hacked Growth to Become a $4 Billion Company

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?…

What Startups Can Learn From Instagram

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…

What Startups Can Learn From Pinterest

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…

Are You Missing The One Really Important Startup Ingredient?

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…

4 Ways To Position Your Company Among Well Entrenched Competitors

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…

How to Get Your Inbox Down to Zero and Keep it There

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…

6 Mistakes That Will Kill Your Product Launch

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…

9 Metrics to Help You Make Wise Decisions About Your Start-Up

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…

If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Stealing

How the Internet has created a culture of plagiarism, why it’s a good thing—and the secret to copying and being copied without going under. In September of 1993, version 1 of the program dubbed “the Internet’s killer app” was released. It…

4 World-Famous Websites Who Ripped off Their Ideas from Someone Else

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…

A Minimalist Guide to SEO: Get It Done in 6 Simple Steps

Everyone’s crazy about search engine optimization. You need to learn it. You have to have it. You have to do it. The problem is that you really aren’t sure where to get started, and you can drive yourself nuts trying to…

What Google’s Nexus One Can Teach Us about E-Commerce

The Nexus One might be Google’s most extraordinary flop yet. The phone itself was great, with excellent hardware and functionality, but the e-commerce strategy Google attempted to employ failed miserably, with their online store closing less than eight months after opening. But as…

Are you viral?

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…