The best list I’ve seen of prepackaged company names with the domain. At $250 the price is also great too.
My biggest takeaway: Get a team of advisors (They had 25 advisors for a 4 person startup) who are people you want to have associated with your product. “Who’s your entourage?”
“What could I build that would be a like a dream come true for independent musicians?”
What an extraordinarily universal way to construct a product, a service or a business. Notice that dreams are rarely “within reason” or “under the circumstances.” No, dreams are dreams. If your business is a dream come true for customers, you win. Game over.
“
| — | Seth Godin quoting Derek Sivers of CD Baby |
Right. Just like Microsoft stopped AOL from winning the early online wars. And AOL stopped Yahoo! from winning the Internet portal wars. And Yahoo! in turn killed Google when it came to search. While Google stopped Facebook in their tracks when they built a social networking company. And Facebook stomped out Twitter from building an open social network. And we know how Facebook stomped out FourSquare.
And on and on. eBay / StubHub. Amazon / Zappos. Twitter / Instagram.
Focus wins.
“
| — | Mark Suster |
My favorites:
2. If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
3. It is better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.
4. Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions.
5. The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind.
6. Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect’s mind.
Learn this concept: Network Effect Startup
Short article outlining some insightful success factors for consumer web startups. Also, if you just read the highlighted portions you’ll get a good sense of what this article is about.
Sometimes just learning a new word can completely change the way you operate your business. Just one little word can have that much power. In this article that word is “Market Launch.”
The next time my investors ask me when we’re going to launch I will have two answers for them. One will be our “product launch” and the next will be our “market launch.”
This clarity is going to make my life so much easier.
First off, did you know Aaron Patzer is from Evansville, Indiana? I had no idea, and considering how often I link to and post his stuff, I should have known that.
Anyway, some of my big takeaways:
“About 8 or 9 months before we launched Mint, we started a personal finance blog. We didn’t really have much money at this time, so we couldn’t hire any writers. We did the blog mostly ourselves. We went around to all the other personal finance blogs, and we said, “Would you like to write a guest post for us?” Half of them said yes, as long as we linked back to them.”
“Then we emailed those guys and said if you put a little badge on your site that says, “I want Mint,” on your blog, or wherever, we will give you priory access. We got 600 people to put a free banner ad for our site on theirs.”
“Then we launched at TechCrunch 40, and about 6 weeks before, I hired a PR firm, which I think is very important.”
“We also hired designers with a very specific skill set. We hired people who had a computer science background, where they could come up with the idea in their head, and render it in Photoshop, program it in HTML and CSS, and do a bit of a usability/user experience product management roll, sort of three roles combined into one.”
