When Technology meets Design meets Business
It’s a short interview with a great entrepreneur. Elon Musk is part of the PayPal Mafia, but that is another story, that will touch on in the future. He started to be famous as the co-founder of PayPal and served as the company’s CEO. After they were sold to eBay, he was a bit busy, starting three amazing companies that are inventing and disrupting their industries – big time. Continue reading
How to pick the right (technology) tool for the job?
There are a lot of options out there. First, you need to decide where your servers will run: Google cloud platform, Amazon web services, and many others platforms that give you the ability to ‘run and scale’. Next, you need to think on the distribution platforms you wish cover and to prioritize them: Web, Android, iOS etc’.
Soon after these stages, you will hit the important questions, on your strategy. Is it going to be ‘mobile first’ or ‘mobile only’? How will you promote the product? Which channels? How to measure and tune them?
In this post, I will try to cover the tip of this iceberg. Specifically, what are some of the consideration you wish to be aware of when making the critical decisions that address your technology stack. Continue reading
Once you have a better picture on the current state. It’s time to try and improve it. A good way to do it is by using the option to serve different pages to unique visitors and measure the differences.
Following our e-Commerce site example, there are few options to test:
Few guidelines to gain more reliable results:
In the last post “How To Use Goals and Conversions In Google Analytics” we saw what are the first steps to define a goal. Let’s go deeper and see how to customize it step by step.
This is the dashboard you will see when you open Google Analytics. It’s giving you the most basic pieces of information. As this is just the starting point, we should customize it and improve it to show us the metrics that we care about. In our case, we will see how to add our ‘Goals’ dashboard. When it comes to monetization, we can translate our goal to monetary value and get in the dashboard the amount of money we were able to generate. In the photo below you can see the default dashboard you are getting in Google Analytics. Continue reading
“In the past, one could get by on intuition and experience. Times have changed. Today the name of the game is data.”- Steven D. Levitt
In todays world, we must measure and analyze our data in order to continue and improve our performances. In this article, we will show how to leverage Google Analytics in order to improve monetization.
TL;DR
Conversion Rate is the percentage of prospective users who took a specific action you want. It might be time spend on a page, registration to an event or completing a transaction. You can also give a Goal a monetary value (e.g. in an e-commerce site), so you can see how much that conversion is worth to your business. Continue reading
What valuable start-up is there that no one is building at the moment?
This question is harder than it looks, because your new company could create a lot of value without capturing some of it. As a founder, you need to have expertise in few areas or find co-founders that will cover them. The tricky part is to find co-founders you really enjoy working with.
Why? Because start-ups are really hard. At the beginning, it seems like a great idea that will be good fun to execute against, but very soon you discover (a lot of) holes that are challenges. If you aren’t enjoying your partners to the road, it’s going to be very hard to work well at those crucial moments. At the beginning, like in relationships, everything is flowing and there are no arguments. But very quickly, in the rapid pace of the start-ups world, you will find conflicts. Make sure you can have a great communication channel with your partners, and you are able to move quickly in those cases that you don’t see eye to eye.
After we have our co-founders and we are set on the idea, we are likely to move forward and to shape it. The first thing is the Minimum Viable Product: It is that product which has just those features and no more that allows you to ship a product that early adopters see and, at least some of whom resonate with, pay you money for, and start to give you feedback on. It should be in the highest quality you can reach. So good, that you will be able to capture your users into it, with the value it’s offering to them. It’s important to put it out there as fast as you can and start collecting feedback from real users.
During my volunteering work at Campus TLV, I work with startups on entrepreneurship skills and technology. One of the popular topics is the subject of this post: “How to raise money”. It’s a challenging topic on many levels. You wish to raise enough money but not too much. Why? because at this point of the startup’s life you are giving a slice of your company (=equity) to the investors and you don’t want to sell too much or too low. Here are few guidelines:
