How To Start? The Execution

This is the last part from four presentations I did to a course for young entrepreneurs. In the last three lessons: Idea, Product and Team I did my best to focus on the things that will move the needle for you at the early stages. This fourth lesson is all about execution and it might be the most critical part.

Web Forms Checklist

In our Udacity course “Building High Conversion Web Forms” we talk a lot on how to think on the friction that forms create and what to do in order to smooth it. One of the outcomes from our source was this checklist that you can use in order to make sure you are on the right path. In this post, I will cover the first 2 topics: form design and inputs types. In the future, I’ll cover validation and touch.

Make Money On The Web (CodeMotion 2015)

Today I had the pleasure to present at  codemotion TLV. It was a great opportunity to meet so many good friends that are pushing the web forward.

TL;DR

• Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic and growing faster. So you better pay extra attention to your mobile website and make sure the friction on your forms is as low as possible.
• On mobile, entertaining apps dominate time but websites capture the bulk of the transactions (=money!)
• Optimize for Autofill! make sure you are using all the right autocomplete types in your form’s field. From Chrome usage data we learned that you will get 30% increase in form fill speed. It’s quite an amazing stats, no?

How to Start? The Team

This is the third part of four presentations I did to a course for young entrepreneurs. The slides are as brief as possible because they meant to give just the framework. The real content is pass verbally.
However, the main points to pay attention are:

• In many aspects, finding a great co-founder is like finding a partner for life. You should do your best to seek for someone you can trust and spend time with during circumstances that will be very challenging. The ‘honeymoon’ will pass quickly, so make sure it’s someone you want to have with you on a deserted island, because this is what ‘startup life’ will look like after few days. It’s important that your skills will complement each other. So if you are the technical person, you should find a partner that is strong in business, marketing, sales etc’.
• You should pick the initial team members by their resourcefulness and passion (or determination) to the mission of what you are trying to accomplish. A good way to look on the ‘founding team’ is for people that could have been co-founders if the timing was right. Another great way to look on these first hires as people that you would have feel comfortable to report to.
• Hire only when you desperate – So do everything first and only hire when there is no other option.
• Hire true experts. The difference between an ‘OK’ developer and a true expert is unbelievable. At the early stages, it’s critical to build an ‘A Team’ because these type of teams create ‘A companies’.

Campus TLV, Google Cloud, IoT And Some Tips

Today I had the pleasure to take part in this conference.
The talk covered three topics:
1. Campus TLV offering for entrepreneurs – Every week, I have the pleasure to spend few hours mentoring startups at the Campus. It’s a great way to help others and to hear about new interesting challenges. I wanted to raise the awareness to the (free) programs that the Campus offer developers and entreparnuers, so this was a classic opportunity.
2. Google Cloud offering for the IoT world and for startups for startups.
3. Tips from my experience on ‘how to start’ your startup and make it a succesful business.

How to Start? The Product

This is the second part of four presentations I did to a course for young entrepreneurs. The slides are as brief as possible because they meant to give just the framework. The real content is pass verbally.
However, the main points to pay attention are:

• Get users manually at the beginning. It won’t ‘scale’ but that is more than fine. You need at the start to get users (in every way possible as long as you aren’t breaking any laws) and not to expect them to come to you. The notion of ‘if we will build it they will come’ is not working in most cases.
• Listen to outside users – This is very important in order for you to build something that users love. A lot of users will give you noise, but your role is to extract the signals and shape the product base on that feedback. You should build an engine: Users -> Feedback -> Product improvement

How To Start? The Idea

This is the first part of four presentations I did to a course for young entrepreneurs. The slides are as brief as possible because they meant to give just the framework. The real content is pass verbally. I hope to have a good recording soon.

Master Google Drive Search

[update: 9/12/2015] – I’ve just saw that the Drive team did this:

These new improvements give you the ability to:

• Narrow your search to a file type from the search box on Android, iOS, and the web.
• Open advanced search instantly from the search box – See in the gif above.
• Access recent files or search Drive from the home screen using 3D Touch on iOS.
• Search Drive using the iOS search bar without opening the Drive app.

When you searching for old documents in your Google Drive, there are a lot of options. The ‘recent’ option or the ‘starred’ one are giving a nice overview, but it’s not enough if you are working on a lot of documents, presentations and spreadsheets. Over the years, I found the most useful ones to be:

• type: spreadsheet
• type: presentation
• from: an email
• to: an email
• after: YYYY-MM-DD

Here is the full list:

Chrome 48 Updates And News

As every six weeks (more or less), we got some cool & new features in Chrome. Here are few that I like for version 48:

Presentation API

This version of Chrome Android allows websites to present to external devices via Cast, increasing the form factors available to sites that want to present content. You can also present from your desktop with this Cast extension.

Custom buttons on notifications

Timely, personalized notifications save users the effort of manually checking for updates throughout the day and have enabled a host of new experiences from real-time communication to live updates on breaking news.

Password Forms That Browsers Love

There are two types of common forms that you see every day on (almost) every website: Sign-up and Sign-in. If you want to improve your users experience and allow them to fill these forms quickly and efficiently, this post is for you.

You can help ensure that browsers’ password management functionality can understand your site’s sign-up, sign-in. All it take is a ‘touch’ of a change for your password forms by enriching your HTML with a bit of metadata.

Here are the rules to follow: