There’s been a lot of talk about the New Aesthetic since this year’s SXSW. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s okay! This overview is a good place to start.
via Is This The First Logo Based On Touch-Screen Gestures? | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.
This is really important for selling
Is your sales organization suffering from a lack of velocity? High-speed sales teams tend to outperform industry standards, turning out a large work product on time and with limited resources.
But these high-velocity teams don’t just happen—they are built by experienced executives and supported by smart product management, then bolstered by dedicated, skillful sales reps.
If your sales team could stand to move a little faster, start with these four strategies.
1. Add a Few Quick-Sell Products
Establishing new customer relationships quickly is a persistent challenge for sales reps. One way to speed up the process is to add a few simple, quick-sell products to your product line.
These should be items that are easily and swiftly sold, and that bring real value to the customer, even if they don’t have significant economic value to the company. Appreciative customers will be more likely to accept another appointment after a first positive transaction.
via How to Sell: 4 Strategies for High-Speed Sales | Inc.com.
Content curation continues to go mainstream – phil
It looks like Flipboard; aggregates and posts content like Reddit; and presents news visually, like Newsmap. And its from Intel.
Launching today, Intel iQ is a social-publishing platform and the tech giants latest content-marketing experiment.Intel iQ is a new social-publishing platform and the latest content-marketing experiment from the technology giant.
IQ resembles a digital magazine but is curated by Intel employees. A story gets to the iQ front page when a certain number of people recommend it.
The goal is to “connect with a younger audience and tell them the bigger story of who we are as a brand,” said Editor-in-Chief Bryan Rhoads. “Many of them dont know, so we need to tell them the story of Intel that is beyond PCs and beyond processors.”
via Intel Launches Digital Magazine Curated by Employees | Digital – Advertising Age.
There’s always a goo debate around what’s best Freemium vs Trial vs Paid for a software product. What’s mote never seems to be a right or wrong answer about this. Here’s 3 stories: they share similarities but they all have their unique flavor.
This topic is very current for me since I’m in evaluation mode as to what we should do with Flashissue.com from a pricing POV.
At the end of the day it comes down to what makes more money and this can only be determined by experimentation with different options, so take your pick.
It’s generally accepted that startups should start charging as soon as possible. But for SaaS web apps the question is often whether to use a Freemium or Free Trial business model.
What is ‘Freemium’?
Freemium is a model often used by B2C services such as Twitter, Flickr and Evernote, where the user gets a Free version of the product by default and then is asked to upgrade when they want extra features beyond what the free plan offers. The signup rate is usually very high and the ratio of free users to paying users is usually very high (obviously).
via The Great Freemium vs Free Trial Debate – Stu Green.
After taking 992 days to reach 5 million members, Evernote said today it has now hit 10 million members just 208 days later. It has also eclipsed 400,000 premium members, putting the company well on its way toward its goal of 1 million paid users.
Evernote hit 5 million users on Nov. 10 last year and was up to 6 million users by the first of the year. It’s since grown by 67 percent in a little over five months to 10 million users with the last million signing up in 32 days. It had 3.6 million unique visitors in the last 30 days, up 70 percent since the beginning of the year. And perhaps most impressive is Evernote’s paid conversion growth. Premium users have more than doubled from 201,308 on Jan. 1 to 424,736 now, a 111-percent jump.
“Ten million users seemed like an inconceivable number when we were getting ready to launch the service into open beta less than three years ago. Well, it wasn’t literally inconceivable; we actually put it on business plans and investor pitch decks and everything. Yup. 10,000,000 users in three years. That what we told people. We had really pretty graphs showing the projections. Reality is much more impressive than projections,” wrote CEO Phil Libin in a blog post.
via Evernote hits 10m users as premium membership takes off — Tech News and Analysis.
On September 1st, 2009 we announced that MailChimp was going freemium. On that day, we had 85,000 users. Now, slightly more than a year later, we have more than 450,000 users. We grew our user base five times in one year.
Earlier this month, we actually doubled our freemium plan from 500 subscribers to 1,000 subscribers. So now, even more people can take advantage of MailChimp’s powerful email marketing and social features. We had been averaging around 30,000 new users per month (about 1,000 per day), but since we increased the freemium plan this month, we’re seeing +2,000 new user days.
Another thing that’s increased dramatically since going freemium is the number of lunches I’m invited to; seems entrepreneurs and VCs really want to “pick my brain” about how freemium is doing for us. Usually, it’s because they think freemium might be that silver bullet they’ve been searching for. It can be, but you’ve really gotta be careful not to point that bullet at yourself…
via Going Freemium: One Year Later | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog.
When i watch something like this I think guerrilla marketing. These guys are just having fun but it’s a short step to turning these types of stunts into something you can use for your business.
Given that i had a bizarre past life as an Improv actor myself, I felt very comfortable contacting some old friends at an Improv troupe in Atlanta to see what they could throw together for me. We’re see where it goes…
Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity | Video on TED.com.
Last week i emailed a friend who created a very good marketing automation product (Pardot). He pointed me to the article below by PaulStamatiou.com (ex-Atlanta tech alum).
I have a problem and it’s one that’s plagued me with each of the five tech start-ups i’ve been behind and this ugly beast has reared its head again with my latest venture (FlashIssue).
My problem: I need a messaging service for acquiring, retaining and engaging users of my software service.
A user signs up to try our product on our landing page and the fun begins.
I know what i should be doing but i cant find a way to do it. There are many scenarios to address and i should be hyper focused on messaging each and everyone with a specific message but i cant.
Examples:
The post below is an excellent illustration of what i mean.
Ironically, my new venture, FlashIssue, is itself an email services product.
It addresses another deficiency on the email land scape (the difficultly of getting content into email campaigns faced by DIY marketers and small content producers).
I will be looking at some of the products mentioned in the comments after the article, so we’ll see…
Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service21 Dec 2011It was the middle of our Y Combinator batch this summer.
Akshay and I had a decently functioning version of Picplum that we were continuing to test and polish up. At the end of our office hours that day, Paul Graham said our product was good enough and that we should stop coding and start selling & marketing.
I think about this quite often.Picplum at YC office hours in July. Photo Credit: Garry Tantl;dr Trying to draw attention to the importance of lifecycle marketing. I build up the case, talk about where lifecycle marketing makes sense, show an amateur first attempt at it, then proceed to layout a grand idea for a lifecycle email marketing service I want to see someone build.
Please share this post.I was in that mindset when I decided to sit down a few weeks ago and hammer out some code that would help with that typical engineer approach.. get code to do it for you. One of my perpetual to-do items in the few months following our launch was converting users that signed up but never did anything into users that sent out their first batch of prints.
The latter is more or less our definition of an activated user. You can find more info about Picplum in my lengthy post-launch article, Thoughts on Picplum Automatic Photo Prints.
via Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service — PaulStamatiou.com.
Talk about missing the boat or being the 5th Beatle. It’s amazing how Microsoft pretty much nailed the iPhone 20 years ago.
They’ve got email, wi-fi and even GPS (that’s the amazing one for me). They did miss the Web, Photos, Music and Angry Birds but not bad all the same.
Apple had the balls to develop it when they had their ah-hah moment and Microsoft didn’t. This speaks the to the DNA of each company.
