Our top 10 posts of 2009 – Venture Hacks

December 29, 2009 by shkadmin

I really wanted to be a cool cat and make a list of the most popular outgoing links for 2009 —a top 10 list of other people’s posts. But it wasn’t meant to be — we don’t have the Javascript installed to track those clicks.

And so, we present our 10 most popular posts of 2009:

  1. How IMVU learned its way to $10M a year. A talk by Eric Ries.
  2. What is the minimum viable product? An interview with Eric Ries.
  3. The Startup MBA. Links to the best startup blogs.
  4. My visit to American Apparel. How American Apparel gets lean.
  5. How to pick a co-founder. Also see the accompanying interview.
  6. Sell it before you build it. Fliggo’s minimum viable product in action.
  7. We don’t pay you to work here. A review of the book Hidden Value — you can find it in our bookstore.
  8. Customer Development: How to develop your customers like you develop your product. Videos and slides from Steve Blank, king of customer development.
  9. It’s very easy to underprice your product. A short talk by Steve Blank.
  10. How to bring a product to market. A very rare interview with Sean Ellis.

Use this list to catch up on great posts you missed.

When we started Venture Hacks in 2007, we were all about hacking term sheets. In 2008, we continued to write about raising money and expanded to general startup advice — for example, see our posts on job offers. Looking at the top 10 list above, 2009 was clearly the year of customer development. It was also the year of monetization, as we created more free and paid products — here’s a list of them.

What’s coming in 2010? Wait and see…

via venturehacks.com

This is a very good list of posts, mostly linked to Lean Customer Development and similar. My favorite is the Startup MBA link, as that has a list of many good blogs.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: business development, Customer Development, lean, marketing

Is the Tipping Point Toast? — Duncan Watts | Fast Company

December 29, 2009 by shkadmin
Duncan Watts

Malcolm Gladwell

  • Order Versus Chaos
    Duncan Watts’s research tells advertising execs precisely what they don’t want to hear: All their clever (and lucrative!) targeted viral campaigning may ultimately be less effective than good old mass marketing.
  • Infographic: Order Versus Chaos

Related Content

Don’t get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. “Oh, God,” he groans when the subject comes up. “Not them.” The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994–until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types (“Twenty? Fifty? One hundred–at the most?”) began wearing the shoes.

via fastcompany.com

This is an interesting read about demystifying the role of influencers in viral marketing. Granted, the article is almost two years old, but I found some of the concepts that they bring up to make a lot of sense, especially in the current climate of social networking.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Customer Development, marketing, strawman, viral

How to manage a company – Video summary of Awesomely Simply

December 29, 2009 by shkadmin
via holykaw.alltop.com

If you only have 10 minutes to learn about managing a company, inspiring employees, and keeping things rolling, check out this video.

Filed Under: News Tagged With: business development, management
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