On Creating a Startup

Repost: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/43774/The-5-Minute-Guide-To-Cheap-Startup-Advertising.aspx

I recently advertised my developer's guide to launching a startup on StumbleUpon. The plus side of StumbleUpon is that all clicks are 5 cents. The downside is the bounce rate is high since people are basically channel surfing. I achieved a 96.88% bounce rate in my experiment, with an average stay of 2 seconds. I wonder if it was something I said? In my test, only 25 visitors stayed longer than 5 seconds. I paid $50 for 1000 clicks, but since only 25 of them stayed long enough to read anything, I effectively paid $2 per click. Your mileage may vary, but through this and other experiments I've gathered the following tips for advertising on StumbleUpon:

• Your #1 goal is to get stumblers to stay longer than 5 seconds. Your #2 goal is to get them to up-vote your page. Paying $50 for 1000 clicks is one thing. Having it go viral and receiving 10,000 clicks for the same price is another.
• Don't send StumbleUpon traffic to a landing page that asks for an email address. StumbleUpon users are notoriously fickle about providing their email.
• People stumble to be entertained, so if your page doesn't have the potential to go viral or turn into linkbait, you will not likely fare well.
• Blog-like content and videos seem to work best. Anything that resembles a traditional landing page will bomb.

http://www.winningtheweb.com/reddit-homepage-advertising-results.php

In 24 hours, my listing was shown 26,050 times (to 3,187 unique visitors). The link in my ad was clicked 419 times, resulting in a unique click through rate of 13.15%. Not bad – that’s about $0.09 per click.

http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/80121/How-To-Get-Media-Coverage-For-Your-Startup-A-Complete-Guide.aspx

Timing of your email and Tweets

Timing is also a very important aspect for getting you covered. The best days for traffic for getting coverage of your story I have learnt are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Monday is way too fast to get you written up, the inboxes of reporters are full it's just not a great day.

At the same time, I learnt that, whilst Fridays aren't as good for traffic, the news is slower. So your chances of getting covered on that day can be higher. With a recent story about Buffer on Mashable, I took advantage of this. I followed up on a story I had pitched earlier in the week. Since it was extremely busy, I wouldn't get a response, yet a quick follow up email on Friday would receive an immediate response.

What is "Big Data"?

I get asked this often, usually by management level types who have heard it as a buzz word and really want to understand how it affects their business. Here's how I broke it down to my 14 year old.

If you look at the press (news, TV, commentators) big press means anything that has to do with the words, pictures and connections that people put on "social sites".

In the business world Big Data means ... well ... a lot of data. And I don't mean a little, I mean a ton. Think on the order of Billions of rows of data. A good rule of thumb would be any data that is over a Tera-byte in size. And that's the minimum.

The third thing "Big Data" could refer to is volume speed. It might not be huge in size, but how fast does the data get generated.

For example, let's say you record the date and time for any phone ring that happens within the United States in the next 30 min. And you had to pinpoint the busiest phone out of all the phones in the US. The data volume size is small. But the volume of data that comes in is crazy, your talking 2 million data points a second. And your "Big Data Solution" has to make some decision on that data within 60 seconds.

This is really the "new" and revolutionary part of Big Data as only recently (in the last 5 years) has the average computing power been strong enough to handle this volume at that speed.

The other reason "Big Data" is considered as new is because businesses have started to take new approaches to it. The goal is to figure out how all this data can be used to "hit" the bottom line.

Personal Opinion: 
The challenge that I see with Big Data is letting your solutions be driven by a measurable ROI or a measurable impact to customer.

The "Big Data" solutions that succeed are those that start with one of those two objectives in mind and move from there.

Nebulously built "repositories"/"reporting ware houses"/"business data troughs" don't really thrive in the long run. (Notice I said thrive, they serve a purpose and can be of value, but they don't generate that spark that makes the C-Level executives go nuts.)


So to put it concisely

1. Big Data is not social data
2. Big Data can refer to physical data size
3. Big Data can refer to the speed of incoming data
4. The goal is to use Big Data to affect the bottom line

Check my Facts:
IBM Article - Analytics-The real-world use of big data

New Website/App Checklist

My personal check list for what should happen with a new website or web app:

1. Choose and Buy Domain
2. Setup Host Package
3. Put up coming soon page
4. Setup Wordpress Blog
5. Setup Favicon
6. Setup 404,405 and 406 pages
7. Setup Email
8. Setup Google Analytics
9. Setup Google Adwords
10. Setup Twitter
11. Setup Heat Click Map
12. Setup A/B Testing
13. Setup a Phone Line
14. Determine Keywords
15. Create robts.txt
16. Setup Bank Account
17. Setup Paypal
18. Alpha Development Complete
19. Create 10 Blog entries
20. Publish Wordpress Blog
21. Create a sitemap
22. Blog - Press Release
23. Blog - Screenshots
24. Blog - How to use
25. Blog - Who we are/what we do
26. Alpha Testing Complete
27. Open Alpha Testing

Additional Check Lists:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/07/15-essential-checks-before-launching-your-website/

Technical Debt

"Myrtle the Turtle told me it would take him 3 months to make my app, but Speedy Slim told me he could do it in 3 weeks? WTF?" my friend complains to me. I wince. This is not going to be easy to explain.

As with most things in life, both Speedy and Turtle are right but for different reasons. At the root of it is the Technical Debt that my friend is about to signup for.

Technical Debt is the "cost" of scaling, debugging and enhancing your application over its lifetime. Minimizing these cost up-front takes time. Sometimes a lot of time. Myrtle the Turtle is all about minimizing these costs.

An analogy that most laymen will understand

Over the entire life of your application there is a cost and the very first item that effects that cost is Speedy and Turtle. You can get this application built on cash, and pay upfront, and pay less. Or you can gt this application on credit and pay less up-front. The choice is really yours to make.

With a cash buy, you are paying every thing upfront. It's going to "hurt" more but once you get over that first build its relatively down hill from there, you will find that scaling, bugs and enhancements have a minimal cost.

With credit, your paying a little up-front but it hurts less...initially. As time passes on you'll be making continue payments to the debt of this purchase. You'll find that scaling, bugs and enhancements will cost you a fair amount of money. Inevidably, you'll pay more this way then you would from a build by Turtle. This is because of the interest on your technical debt.

What's the cost of using Speedy and receiving a "quicker" delivery?

• Speedy is going to deliver exactly what you specify
  
• Enhancements are going to take longer because Speedy will have to "re-work" a lot of code.
• When more users start to use the app or more data gets into the system, the app will start to slow down and eventually will die
• Speedy's going to get tired of working on the bad code in the app.
• When you ask a "new" programmer to pickup the code up, you'll find that they tend to have to re-write the entire thing from scratch.

All of these are reasons that are not apparent in the initiall 3 to 6 months of the applications lifetime. They only become apparent down the road.

I want to point out:

1. Even the most well built and thoughout applicaiton build can fall to the points above.
2. There are developers out there who take 6 months but still deliver the equivalent of Speedy's work.
3. It's not an easy thing to build a scalable, bug free, flexible application.
4. Scaling, Bugs and Enhancements are NEVER free in any app. It's about minimizing the cost on these items.
   

When do I personally take Speedy up on his offer?

I'll take Speedy over Turtle when I know that what I want is a proto-type or proof of concept. I'll take Speedy when I "have" to have something done by a given date, and there is hard dollars tied to that date. I'll take Speedy when I don't know exactly what I want built yet, but I have a vague idea.

Everytime I take Speedy, I'll write down Turtle's name because I'm going to need him to build the real deal when the short need is done.

Are you a Speedy Slim or a Turtle Tim? Can a developer be both "on demand"? Which developer bills higher?

What is a Server?

As a Business Analyst, part of my job is translating technical terms to non-technical folks. The trick is to do it as simply as possible.

So, What is a Server?

A server is a computer that sends and receives data to and from other machines.

A server can send and receive a lot of different types of data. But in some cases the server only handles a certain type of data. Some examples:

• Web Server - Sends web pages
• Media Server - Sends images, videos and mpgs
• Print Server - Sends print jobs
• File Server - Sends any type of file

And the list goes on. Now sometimes one physical computer will have multiple types of servers on it. This is cost effective and a lot of businesses do it. Microsoft even markets a product around it. The"Small Business Server" product does pretty much all of the above.

The most familiar server you will run into is a web server, you will need one of these to have a website. While it's the most familiar, I believe the most popular server is a file server.

What technical topics would you like to see covered next?