By Elizabeth

Making our first full-time hire was really nerve-wracking.  Finding someone really sharp AND would fit in super well was going to be a challenge.  So, for full-time candidates, we've adopted what companies like Pulse and Hubspot do.  We work with potential candidates on a contract basis first before extending a full-time offer.  Having done this a few times now, I *love* their method.  Our process from start to finish is pretty simple.  First, we screen resumes and interview people.  If we find someone we think we'd love to hire, we'll work out a temporary contract to see if there's a good fit on both sides.  Note: we absolutely pay for their work and use a standard contractor agreement to make sure ownership of the work is clear.  We do this with *everyone* who has made it passed the interview stage, including candidates who are currently working full time at another company.  In those cases, a shorter project that can be done on nights/weekends is more apt.  We've found that this process illuminates people's working styles and personalities quite accurately.  Resumes and interviews can be a good way to test for competency, but it's hard to determine culture fit and workflow without actually working with a person.  

Of all the people we've worked with on a contract basis, we've only hired 40%.  This stat is actually disturbing to me, because it means we're not good at knowing whom to hire based on interviews alone.  However, we've also found that we don't actually need a long contract to predict if we'll make an offer.  Usually, after about a calendar-week we'll be able to accurately assess if we'll end up making an offer at the end of the contract.  

So, we don't make contracts any longer than one month in deciding on a full-time position.  It's super important to be clear about the length of the process and what is involved and not string people along.  This means that if we're on the fence about someone at the end of a contract, we'll just not do anything -- a non-decision effectively becomes a decision to not hire.  We figure if we're not super excited about working with a person after a month, then we wouldn't be super excited as time went on.

To be clear, this process is a two way street.  During this short contract, a candidate can very much decide that working at LaunchBit is not for them.  So, when we do decide to make an offer, I'm always nervous, because I'm never sure if the candidate feels the same way about working at LaunchBit.  But, that's the way it should be -- both parties should know what they're getting into before commiting to working together for a longer term.  

How do you hire?

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By Elizabeth

Last night, I was at Google on a panel talking about women in entrepreneurship.  Afterwards, I chatted with an attendee about the very early days of LaunchBit.  I mentioned that one point, I'd lived at my parents' house to save money.  This shocked her and she replied, "Oh...I could never do that."  Reflecting back, that was just the beginning of all the sacrifices that many people have made in order for LaunchBit to work.

There is so much that goes on behind the scenes of a startup -- beyond actually running the core business.  Founders often don't talk about personal hardship, but everyone has a scar, especially in the beginning.  After my failed startup Parrotview, I convinced my best friend Jennifer to start a company with me.  I'd wanted a second chance at doing a startup, and she was finishing up her PhD at MIT and decided that research was not for her.  So, I convinced her to move to Berkeley, where my husband and I had been living so that we could work together in-person.  She packed her bags and embarked on a long distance relationship with her boyfriend, who soon became her husband over the course of the next few months while still doing long distance to Boston.

I picked out Jennifer's apartment in Berkeley that would double up as an office and workspace, and I chipped in for rent.  I felt bad that we could only afford an absolute junkhole.  We nicknamed the place "The Club," because every night, bright blue and red lights would come through the window from the street below, as cops were arresting people.

Meanwhile, on the home front, Curt and I were counting our pennies -- he was a postdoc supporting both of us, and I was pouring money into the business.  Cash was tight.  Everyday, I was thankful that for just one more day, Curt was patient, Tim put up with his long distance marriage, Jennifer would be safe in that rathole, and that somehow everything would work out soon.

After almost a year of this, Curt took a job in Boston, so the three of us left Berkeley and moved to Boston, and Jennifer was reunited with her husband.  Just a few months later, Tim, Jennifer, and I moved back to the Bay Area to enter the 500Startups accelerator program.  To do this, Tim quit his job.  They also had a baby on the way, due just after Demo Day.  They moved in with her parents and had no car.  Jennifer would take public transportation to 500Startups everyday, which was a 2+ hour commute each way.  A few days after Demo Day, Jennifer and I went to a VC to pitch our company, and a few hours later, she went into the hospital to have her baby.  Investors were shocked to see a 9 month pregnant woman in their office, but honestly, it was just business-as-usual for us.  A couple weeks later, Jennifer was back to work.  Jennifer's parents have been absolutely amazing in providing childcare.  I don't know what we would've done without them.  

We've come a long way from our days in Berkeley.  We now make money, we pay ourselves, we've raised money, and we've hired people.  When I reflect back, a lot of what we did to make things work seemed par for the course at the time -- these are the kind of things you do for your company without batting an eye.  But what amazes me the most is how many friends and family have poured their lives into helping us make this work out -- and continue to everyday.  This isn't their dream, so it's not something I take for granted.  On days that are tough, it's this thought that motivates me even more.  

What sacrifices have you made to keep your startup alive?  

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By Elizabeth

I'm going to tell you a secret.  Even though we're based in the Valley, I don't like to hire in the Valley.  Don't get me wrong, we have employees in the Bay Area, but unless I find someone super duper absolutely phenomenal, I like to find talent in other parts of America.  In fact, unless you really want to relocate, I don't want you to -- I want you to continue being happy where you are already living.  

Can't compete on price

Having grown up in the Bay Area, I'd always imagined we would grow our product team here.  But, after seeing my friends do crazy commutes between SF and the South Bay (1-2 hrs each way), all the while flicking people off on 101, I was pretty certain that doesn't make employees happy.  Moreover, in talking with friends running well-funded startups, I learned that salary prices had gone out of control for engineering talent.  I saw the writing on the wall.  If you want to hire solid talent as a startup, you can't compete on price.  

Employee #1

So when we talked to Zach from Startup Frontier about hiring him, he said that he was excited about working with us but would not be able to relocate anywhere.  That's when we started investing time and resources into making a remote workforce possible.   

Why companies really hate to hire remote workers

Admittedly, I was uneasy at first about the idea of building a remote team.  So I made a list of the pros and cons.  There were a lot of pros: little/no commute, working environment of choice, being able to offer a competitive salary for the region, fewer workplace-distractions, and ability to maintain current social/community life.  The cons: harder to build a team and keep morale up, hard to inspire creativity and innovation, and easier for people to slack off when remote.  Having managed a remote team before, I can tell you that companies hate to hire remotely, because they feel like they have no idea if their team is excited, unhappy, or even working -- the crux of the issue is that you feel like you have no control without face-to-face interaction.

It starts with finding the right people regardless of where they are located.  Since we give every employee a project as a contractor before hiring him/her, we have a good sense of fit before we make the hire.  We only hire about 40% of people who go through this process -- this is after they've already passed interviews with us.  But, all the other issues are big -- how do you make everyone feel like they're part of a team?  How do you keep people inspired?  How do you get people talking to spark new ideas?  How do you do all of this without distracting people?  

The magic of Facetime

After lots of experimenting, we use Facetime.  We've given everyone on our team an iPad.  And, we keep Facetime on all day everyday.  I can be on a call with a customer from anywhere in the US, and if they have a question I can't answer, I can verbally ask anyone on my team right then and there.  This works well with multiple iPads and a small team.  You really feel like all your colleagues are in the same room.

We've even worked on optimizing the position of the iPads.  Having them head-on seemed creepy and stalkerish.  Placing them to the side makes it seem like you are working with someone side-by-side. You can see if he/she is heads-down in the middle of something important of if he/she is on a snack break.  A couple of our employees work in co-working spaces, and people in the co-working spaces stop by and say hi to everyone -- they get to know the team.    

Does it scale? 

In a physical workplace, large organizations are broken down into small teams, so why can't you have lots of small Facetime groups?  Our organization isn't at that size yet, but I'm betting that it will work.  Facetime is just the beginning.  Technology -- meetings.io and vsee have interesting technology to make video-based group work even better.  Gone are the days of crazy commutes.  Gone are the days of giving up your friends to move for a job.  This is the future of work.

What do you think?  

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By: Audrey

Photo Credit: Project Perfect

I’ve recently had several requests for suggestions about email newsletter best practices.  How can I increase my open rate? How do I prevent my newsletter from being marked as Spam?  How can I keep my subscribers engaged? Here are some tips that I have.

1) Have a compelling subject line.

Your subject line needs to be short (50 characters or less) and to the point, in order to capture your reader’s attention.  Aside from avoiding the word Free in the subject, MailChimp also recommends not to use Help, Percent Off and Reminder.  Here’s a sampling of subject lines and their corresponding open rates:  Good and Bad Subject Lines.  If your subject line isn’t interesting enough, your reader probably won’t even open the email.

2) Avoiding Spam folders.

Spam filters are highly sophisticated these days, so as a publisher, you need to think about how to outsmart them.

• Make sure that your From and Reply-To domains are the same and valid.  Using a white listed ISP is also helpful.
• Be plain and honest in your emails.  By being creative or cute and using speci@l characters or f-u-n-k-y spacing will make you look like you’re trying to hide things, a typical spam technique.
• Have an Unsubscribe link visible.  You would rather have a reader unsubscribe than for them to mark your email as Spam.
• Image to Text Ratio is also really important.  Spam tends to have more images than text, so even if you are advertising a product or sharing a picture, ensure that you have enough text around it.   It’s suggested that based on Spam Assassin’s criteria, you should only have a max of 40% images and 60% text.
• Avoid common keywords/phrases that send emails to spam.  

3) Keeping Your Readers Engaged.

• Set an expectation for your email frequency.  A welcome email is common, before the first scheduled email is sent to the new subscriber.  Then, you want to send your emails frequently enough that your readers expect it, but not too much that they no longer open it. 
• Brand your campaign, so that your reader knows the email is from you.  Daily Deal sites always have their name at the top of their email and use a template that is similar to the format of their websites.  With maintaining the same theme throughout the website and email, subscribers will recognize your brand.
• How much is too much information?  While you want to keep your email relevant and informative, make sure the content falls within the subject at hand.  If the articles end up being lengthy, include only a summary or teaser with a link to the full text on your website.  This will help keep your email easy to digest and drive traffic to your site.

Of course, depending on your industry, some of these tips may be more or less relevant.  But generally speaking, these are the things that you need to keep in mind.

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By: Ian M

I hate SEO, just for the fact that I hate the sheer amount of garbage out on the web that is published about it. Since it's a buzzword, everyone tries to sell you a manuscript you don't need, new tips to shortcut the system or a SEO crash course. It's hard to get some quality, honest, information that is easy to follow, up to date and actually works. Well here you have it, we compiled some articles, starting with the basics and bringing you up to speed for how SEO is shaping up for 2012, no gimmicks, no sales, just solid information.

The Beginners Guide to SEO

The holy grail of foundational SEO explanation and basics. In this 10 chapter crash course, they take you by the hand explain everything in detail from the most basic to get you started. Also downloadlabe as a PDF so you can print it out and read it – it’s like a good book except better because it’s up to date and built in with a ton of links to services you can use now.

SEO for Non-dicks

if you want to understand a bit about the future of SEO and why, “Good SEO is a by-product of not being a dick on the internet,” this ones for you.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

An SEO goldmine that includes tables, graphs and charts explaining exactly what factors make up your search ranking, and more importantly, which are going to be more significant in 2012 and what will be on the decline. A must read!

A Few Link Building Predictions For 2012

SEO, Link building, Google search algorithms - nothing stays the same. Your strategy in 2008 is certainly not going to work for 2012, so here are some predictions and analysis for what you should be doing this year. According to his past predictions, I would place my money on this guy.

How Social Media Affects Content Relevance in Search

If there’s one thing to take away from these articles and SEO for the future, it’s that social networks, shares, likes, +1’s and recommendations are only going to get more and more important. Search engines such as Bing are already taking into consideration your friends shares, fb likes, and views to sort out search engine results. So read this article, get on those networks and start SEOing for the future!

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by: Ian M

Photo Credit: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Take that elaborate business plan and throw it out the window. Creating a quick prototype and bringing it straight to the market is the best route for success in 2012. Rapid prototyping lets you get immediate information about what people really want, without wasting time planning and designing the product. If you haven't a clue about creating prototypes or are already on the path, here’s the articles you should have read. Everything from the tools you will need, the process, the problems and a dose of inspiration. Get ready to fail better.

1. Why Start-Ups Must Pay Attention To What’s Behind The Curtain

A premium case study of how an early unfinished startup prototype made it possible to gather enough product feedback and raise $7 million in funding to complete it.

2. Building a (Mobile-Web) Start-up: the 2011 way

A step by step guide on the importance of rapid prototyping and why the old school way of creating business plans and elaborate presentations is dead.

3. How To Build Prototypes Without Technical Chops

Ever wished you could learn from the mistakes a young startup has already made? Andrea does just that - documenting her first startup prototype on a yellow piece of construction paper to the web company it is today.

4. Rapid Prototyping with Aza Raskin

A full 30 minute video presentation explaining the principals of prototyping with Aza Raskin, creative lead at Firefox.

5. 15 essential tools every lean startup can't live without

The list of tools you will need to get going on your prototype as quickly and effectively as possible.

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By Elizabeth

I’m grinning ear to ear.  

We’ve spent the last few weeks swinging through the jungle with our friends at MailChimp.  I’m pleased to announce that after all this horsing around...errr monkeying around...we’ve integrated LaunchBit with MailChimp.  This simply means that MailChimp publishers can monetize their newsletters with our high quality text ads.  This is really exciting to me, because this is the beginning of making advertising look really beautiful.  We’ve been working with some of our publisher partners, including folks at The Next Web, Hacker Newsletter, and JavaScript Weekly to get this right.  And, today we’re offering beautiful text ads to all MailChimp publishers currently in our network and to those who apply.  

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By: Ian M

Photo Credit: FullStop.net

If you’re like most online startups out there, you’ve probably been told you need a Twitter account. And as a result, read a million articles explaining how to gain followers, tried a handful of strategies, and gotten lackluster results. You’re retweeting, you’re posting pictures, hashtagging and working your butt off just to get an additional two or three measly followers. There’s no magic pill, but here's 5 reasons why you might not be maximizing on your work and successes.

1) Stop posting during random hours

You might have the most funny, interesting, informative tweet, but if no one sees it when it goes up, you’re not going to get a whole lot of feedback. Start posting at peak Twitter traffic times, and stick to a schedule. Or if you want to go a step further, you can use this tool to check the location of your followers, and find the best tweet time to maximize viewership. It might be tempting to rattle off your “genius” quote or advice at 1am, but do yourself a favor, hold onto it and then fire it off the next day. Because if your writing some great content and nobody sees it, what’s the point?

2) Don’t tweet unless it’s offering value

Far too often, companies or individuals will have a great tweet but then bury it with a bunch of filler, which completely dilutes the quality of your content. Every single one of your tweets should be offering value. What does that mean? It means, post relevant quality content directed at your audience. And if you still aren’t 100% sure who your audience is, get to know them with this tool, which delivers a smorgasbord of information such as your followers age, likes and interests, location, accounts followed.. etc. No one wants to hear about your “worst morning ever” or  how sunny it is outside. So if you aren’t creating tweets that are offering true value, don't tweet. Post content that YOU yourself would feel inclined to retweet.

Every single one of your tweets should be offering value (tweet this)

3) Don’t Abuse Hashtags

All these guides always tell you to get in the conversation by using hashtags. While hashtags are a great way to become part of the universal conversation, especially joining in on newsworthy topics, there is nothing inherently magical about them. So using the tag #mondaymorningchillin has no purpose other than entertainment. If you don’t know what hashtags to use, check out this relevant list and if you want to find out the frequency and history of specific hashtags check this out. 

Stop using hashtags for the sake of using hashtags, there is nothing inherently magical about them (tweet this)

4) Have an informative and interesting bio

No one wants to follow a stranger, in real life or online. So if you don’t already have info about what you do, who you are, what your company is, get that up now. You can have great entertaining tweets, get some retweets and attention, but if you don’t have a bio or compelling tag line explaining who you are, then why would a stranger want to follow you? 

5) Make your tweets shorter for retweets

Everyone says retweets are the key to gain new followers, go viral and gain a million trillion followers over night. But for most people, even to get one retweet can be a daunting task. If you want to get closer to the elusive retweet, remember to keep it shorter than usual. Short enough for people to add the RT symbol and your username (“RT @Launchbit”). Launchbit takes up 13 characters, including the space. That means our tweets can be no longer than 127 characters (140–13=127).

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By Elizabeth

There's all kinds of advice about creating slide decks for investors but very little about how to ace a Demo Day.  With the rise in startup accelerators, this is becoming increasingly important and to a certain extent has even made other pitching materials obsolete.  (e.g. we don't even have a full deck for investors, because of our Demo Day presentation)

3 Tips to rock your Demo Day:

1) Tell a fairy tale

Demo Days have back-to-back pitches for hours on end.  It's hard to be forgotten amidst the myriad of pitches that day, that week, that month.  Yet, not everyone is naturally entertaining.  But, everyone can tell a fairy tale.  When we were kids, a good fairy tale went something like this:

• Jack aspires to marry into a wealthy family
• Problem: he’s poor
• Solution: he exchanges his family’s only cow for magic beans.  Thought it was a great deal
• But, it was unclear what the results of those beans were going to be
• So, the beans grow into a magical beanstalk, allowing Jack to capture all kinds of treasures upon climbing it
• Jack lives happily ever after

Fairy tales have a lot of ups and downs – this is what makes them entertaining.  You can see that this story starts out heading down, but after a bunch of ups and downs, it ends way up.  A demo day pitch should be similar.

• Intro about the narrator (you) or the main character who is affected by your solution
• Problem that you, someone you know, or the main character is facing
• Solution that you believe might work
• But, your audience has at least one fear.  Address the primary fear -- e.g. does your technology work?, will the engagement #s look good? etc...
• So, after working on this for x weeks/months, show great results that appease this fear
• Ask others to join you in living happily ever after with a call-to-action to talk with you 

The purpose of the pitch is to get intros and meetings set up with as many potential investors as possible.  The point is *not* to go into nitty gritty details.  In order to do this, you need people to stay awake enough to remember to get in touch.

2) Show compelling results

Now that you have people on the edge of their seats, you need your results to be compelling for the build-up in the end.  The problem at the seed stage is that few teams actually have phenomenal results.  If you already are making millions of dollars or have millions of users, then that’s great.  But, chances are if you are in this situation, you don’t even need to pitch.  So, how do you show good results when you don’t have them yet?

The key is to show results that show potential.  When Facebook first started and received investment offers, they only had thousands of users.  But, investors loved just how engaged those users were.  Those users came back to Facebook all day everyday.  And, the user growth was phenomenal.  So, while their absolute numbers were pretty terrible, they found compelling unit metrics.  Examples that might be helpful to you include:

• Revenue per paying customer
• Growth of number of users or number of paying customers
• Engagement: ave time spent, clicks, how frequently they come back, etc…
• Testimonials from your customers

3) Work the room

This comes fairly unnaturally to me, but it's a big part of any Demo Day.  Meeting investors in the room in between pitches is key to getting meetings after Demo Day.  The more people you can meet, the better.  A few rules of thumb:

• Find out how you can be helpful -- do intros for your fellow companies, especially to investors who aren't interested in investing in your space.  Saying great things about others is the best way to brag and get bragged for in return.  
• Bring your business cards and make sure to collect email addresses from every person you meet -- even if they forgot their business cards.
• Don't line up to meet with anyone in particular.  Your time is too valuable, and you shouldn't be desperate to meet anyone in particular.  If there is someone you want to meet, make a mental note to yourself to keep an eye on the person.  
• Get in and out of conversations as quickly as possible.  Obviously, you'll want to be polite about it, but you'll want to figure out as quickly as possible if it's worth a follow up meeting with someone and discuss that possibility.  Otherwise, get out of a conversation by extending your hand to say it was "Great meeting them" or doing an introduction to someone else.

With these three tips, you'll set the stage right for your first investor meetings after your accelerator program.  In addition, I highly recommend reading this post on the mechanics of a Demo Day presentation, written by Jason Baptiste, CEO of OnSwipe.  I relied on this post heavily in creating the skeleton for our Demo Day pitch.  

Even though I was absolutely nervous, it tickled me to no end that one of the biggest days of my professional life happened just a few blocks from my elementary school, where I first became an avid computer user.  I'd highly recommend the 500Startups accelerator program, which places a strong emphasis on metrics, design, and user experience.  It takes place 3x a year in my hometown Mountain View, CA, where all the accelerator teams work out of 500's headquarters.

For more tips and resources on starting a web business without coding, visit LaunchBit.

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By Elizabeth

Multi-startup holiday dinner in the Bay Area, Dec 2011.  (Photo credit: Samantha Quist, Check out her startup, TaskHatch.)

Happy New Year!  2011 was quite a ride for us at LaunchBit.  Jennifer and I are so thankful to everyone who's helped us.  

We started LaunchBit in Jan 2011 as a way to help entrepreneurs start and grow their internet businesses.  This is a problem I've become really passionate about, as I've mentioned here.  But, we didn't know exactly how to tackle this problem, because we didn't know *what*, in particular, entrepreneurs were struggling with.  So, we decided to hold a class on customer development and we built a customer development workflow-tool to learn what our customers were struggling with most.  We built the tool and developed an outline for the class within 2 weeks and start doing some marketing simultaneously.  We wanted to know if we could identify specific, large issues entrepreneurs were facing, as we helped people with their startups via the class and tool.

It was rather meta, because in true Lean Startup fashion, we decided that we would only start creating the class videos if more than a minimal threshold of people signed up.  My bar was 5 people.  Jennifer's was 30.  Fortunately, we didn't have to negotiate this, because we exceeded both threshold numbers quickly.  In fact, between the class and the standalone tool, we generated $10k in revenue in the first month by acquiring customers through email advertising (which is now our business) and tweets from people.  

In the public eye, we entered the 500Startups accelerator program a few months later, and by the end of the summer, people learned that we were now an email advertising company.  Whoa.  A number of our LaunchBit classroom customers called or emailed asking me what gives?   

I thought you guys did something really relevant for first time entrepreneurs and I was surprised to learn that you changed direction during 500Startups accelerator program. I was wondering if you could share this experience with me and your reasoning behind this decision?

So in all fairness to our customers, I thought I'd talk about this pivot publicly.  By Feb 2011, we already realized that we were barking down the wrong path for us.  People paid for the course or the tool, but few people were "doing anything."  We certainly had not implemented any hooks in our product to get people to come back, but with time, I think we could've iterated to improve engagement.  But, the main thing that bothered me was that not a lot of people taking our course or using the tool were even working on their businesses.  I knew this, because I reached out to people personally and constantly talked with our customers to get feedback via Skype or phone.  Our audience was primarily folks who were working full time jobs, aspiring to leave to start a company someday.  While I think it's perfectly fine to not actively work on a company or even ever start one, in my mind, helping people grow their companies now/today was what I personally wanted to do.  I wanted ppl to be able to use their knowledge right away.  I wanted to be able to say -- hey, these are the companies/customers I'm helping.  I wanted to have bigger and more immediate impact.  But, because of our price-point for our class, the audience we were attracting was an audience that still held their jobs -- they were not entrepreneurs entrenched in building their businesses.  And that meant doing a major pivot.   

So between Feb and May, we developed content and held two LaunchBit courses, and in our spare time, we'd already started thinking and working on other ways to help entrepreneurs grow their companies.  We entered 500Startups in May and isolated the problem we wanted to solve: customer acquisition.  We spent all our time doing customer development and building prototypes around a variety of different ideas, including an optimization tool for Google AdWords, a 99Designs for Sales, a marketing automation tool, among many others -- about 7 ideas in total.  We gave ourselves until Independence Day to figure out what we were going to commit to, but July 4th came and went, and we still did not have a direction we felt was fleshed out and interesting.  This was largely because we only spent a couple weeks of work-time on each idea and varying amounts of calendar-time to allow people to try our prototypes.  We decided we would miss Demo Day if need be, because it wasn't worth commiting to something unless we both felt very strongly about it, based on customer feedback and our own personal interests.  By late July, we hit upon an interesting experiment.  We helped a couple of companies promote their products via high quality email newsletters and were suprised by the high click-through-rates and conversion rates.  

Startup success involves luck, but the more experimentation you do, the more likely you'll get lucky (tweet this)

From those initial experiments, we decided we had enough to build out a closed beta program to see if we could consistently repeat our results.  In August, we raced to prepare for Demo Day, and our announcement effectively ended all previous explorations and certainly the LaunchBit Classroom and workflow tool.  

The truth is if you're not excited about your company-direction, even if sales are good, it's time to pivot or leave  (tweet this)

But, I don't take pivoting lightly.  In fact, it was extrodinarily hard to pivot, because we built rapport with a group of people who were excited to help us do something that we ended up abandoning, and many of these people became our friends.  So, I'm very grateful to all our initial customers.  We certainly would not have come this far without them.  But, I hope they and everyone can understand that in order to really serve the business community well, we needed to move away from our old model.  I'm very excited where we're taking LaunchBit -- our platform is helping companies reach new customers and grow.  I want LaunchBit to have a big impact in helping our economy.  

So even though we are no longer in the "education business," our door is always open, and you can email us at hello [at] launchbit [dot] com.  Thanks for the incredible support in 2011, and here's to a great 2012 ahead!

Thanks to Rishi Shah and Mario Ricciardelli for reading drafts and providing feedback on this post.

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"Pivot" is probably the most overused word in the startup community.  Everyone is pivoting his/her company from this to that.  So how do you know when you should pivot your company slightly, jump to a completely new business idea altogether, or just shoot for the moon with what you have?

My friend Rishi recently wrote a post about how he thinks many entrepreneurs pivot too early -- they don't give their businesses enough time to prove or disprove its hypotheses.  I think he writes a very fair post -- it does take some time to validate assumptions.  But, I think there's another big reason to jump or pivot that is often overlooked: passion.  Do you have a passion for the business you're in?  Can you be excited about waking up to that same business day in and day out for 3-5 years?  And if the answer is clearly no from the beginning, no matter how good the numbers look, you should not be in the business.

I often hear successful entrepreneurs talk about how you should scratch an itch that you have -- this is apparently an indicator of passion.  But, I would guess that 80% of internet and mobile entrepreneurs haven't got a clue what they're actually passionate about.  

Sometimes you need to experiment with lots of different startup ideas to find your passion.  (tweet this)

 Case in point: I tried to scratch my own itch by developing Shiny Orb with my friend Jennifer.  Shiny Orb is a social shopping site for wedding apparel.  When I was planning my wedding, it was so frustrating to coordinate dresses with my bridesmaids who were scattered all over the globe.  It was a problem that plagued me for months, and Shiny Orb came about as a way to scratch my own itch.  The trouble is -- even just a couple months after starting the site, I realized that I wasn't actually passionate about the wedding industry.  I didn't actually care which one-shoulder dresses were hot and should be on the site.  I didn't enjoy mingling at wedding-related tradeshows and events.  And yet, I could not have known just how tedious the whole business idea would become had I not started pursuing it.  There are so many clever startup ideas we think we want to pursue but are not actually areas we're passionate about.

After spending nearly a year experimenting with different internet business ideas, I finally figured out that I was passionate about solving the problem of customer acquisition.  At LaunchBit, we jumped from idea to idea to try to create an effective platform to help internet and mobile companies grow their customer base.  But, it took me a long time to figure this out -- I had to go through many different business ideas across multiple verticals to learn what I liked and didn't.  So, when I talk with new entrepreneurs who are just starting a business for the first time, I usually suggest looking at the qualitative data more than the hard numbers.  If the qualitative aspects of the business (e.g. tedious nature of the industry, mundane operational activities) are bothersome in the first few weeks, you should not be in the business.  You should jump or pivot.  How will you discover your passion?

Thanks to Rishi Shah for his feedback.  

Want to learn how to avoid common startup mistakes?  Attend FailCon on October 24, 2011 in San Francisco.  Founders from Airbnb, Uber, Udemy, KISSMetrics, yours truly, and more will be sharing war stories and lessons learned.  But only 500 founders and investors can attend, so sign up here to get specially alloted tickets at 20% off.

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By Elizabeth

A lot has happened at LaunchBit.  We've been here in the 500Startups accelerator this summer testing ways to make marketing and customer acquisition easier and more cost effective.  After lots of experimenting, I'm pleased to announce we're building out a network so companies can promote their products in relevant email newsletters.

As such, some of you noticed you can no longer access the LaunchBit Startup Guide or the LaunchBit Classroom on our homepage.  Rest assured both are still available at guide.launchbit.com & classroom.launchbit.com respectively.  Those will operate business as usual -- both are really important to me, as I don't want others to go through the same failure I had with my last startup.

For more tips and resources on starting a web business without coding, visit LaunchBit.

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By Elizabeth Yin

Lean Startup Challenge

These past few days, I've been back in Boston, where there are a number of exciting entrepreneurship programs happening right now. Last Friday, I gave a talk on customer development at the kickoff session for the first ever Lean Startup Challenge. This Challenge is a revolutionary idea to me. It's a six week entrepreneurship competition that is based on learning/iteration/progress in building a company. Unlike traditional business plan competitions, which are all about research, projections, and writing, the Lean Startup Challenge is about doing and learning. Because it's a six week duration, I wouldn't be surprised if we see some momentum of real businesses coming out of the competition. Furthermore, even though the competition is headquartered in Boston, they have participants worldwide participating.

MassChallenge Competition

Then, this past Monday, I gave a presentation on useful third party tools to the MassChallenge Competition, for which I'm a mentor to a few of the teams. It's a year-long entrepreneurship competition that resembles an incubator program in so many respects, because the 125 finalists all work out of the same space in a building with a beautiful harbor-view in South Boston. The finalists come from all over the world to work on their companies in Boston for the summer.  Unlike other incubator programs, MassChallenge takes no equity, and by October, a handful of teams will even win cash prizes.  

On top of these programs, you've got unparalleled startup events to bring the community together.  One of the advantages to having a smaller startup community is that entrepreneurs know each other on a deeper level and feel more committed to giving back to the community by throwing big unusual events.  Where in the Valley or New York can entrepreneurs party with Coolio, help other entrepreneurs on a grassroots level, boogie with fellow entrepreneurs, dine at a DART dinner (which is one of the best startup events ever), and gather on a boat & island?

For more tips and resources on starting a web business without coding, visit LaunchBit.

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By Elizabeth

Photo Credit: LabelMeHappy

First-time web entrepreneurs often tell me "Oh we're moving really quickly...we're launching in just 6 months."  And, then these terrible flashbacks go past my eyes.  A couple years ago, I remember saying the exact same thing to myself.  Just 6 months.  The trouble is that product traction isn't just about getting a product out the door.  

Your biggest competitor isn't any company or individual.  It's time -- the duration you have before you run out of money, morale, and the enthusiasm your significant other/family has for your endeavors.  The trouble with my last company was that our experience in software development came from large companies, where your job is just to ship code.  So we thought that a launch was just about writing the code.  And, we did that in 6 months.  But, what we didn't account for was that in a startup, you don't have a ready large group of users just waiting to use your product. So, your launch time must also include a cycle of user experience and marketing.

Since my failed company, I've learned there's actually two kinds of time.  There's work time, and there's calendar time.  The former is in your control.  That's the actual time it takes you to do work: code, write blog posts, write emails, etc.  But calendar time is much trickier to control. Calendar time is the total time it takes to get something done, inclusive of your work time but also inclusive of time it takes for other people to do things like use your application, give you feedback, take the time to talk with you, and respond to your emails.  So, if you need to build user experience and marketing into your launch time, calendar time can be really long and unpredictable.  You have no idea how long it will take for people to respond to your Craigslist post or get back to your emails.  You have no idea how long it will take for SEO to kick in.  Or, how long it will take before word of mouth will take hold.  And, worst of all, you have no idea if any of these things will even happen at all.  

So, if you do everything in series in a drawn out way like we did: build, market, measure, it's a cycle that can turn months into years.  Eric Ries suggests that shortening an iterative loop and going through such a loop multiple times quickly is the key to success.  I would take that a step further and suggest not only cutting activities to shorten that loop, but to do as much of this loop in parallel.  Our workflow looks like this: get your Unbounce or LaunchRock page up from Day 1 and start marketing before you have a product.  You can gauge interest and get signups from the very beginning until you're done with the first iteration of the product.  Start getting the Craigslist posts out there on Day 1 to get feedback and potential customers immediately.  Once you have enough of an idea of what to build, start mocking up your idea.  Get those mocks back out to potential customers to make sure you're on the right track.  Iterate as much as possible on paper before building, because it's much faster to re-draw than to re-code.  "Delete features" on your paper prototypes as well, reducing what you need to actually build in code.  Try to code as little as possible to shrink that build time to about 1-2 weeks.  By the time you're done building your first prototype, you've already acquired users from doing marketing in parallel.  This puts you in a position to start measuring usage and gauging interest immediately before iterating through that loop again.  

Build, market, measure should happen as much as possible in parallel to reduce your launch time and keep your money, morale, and support up.

For more tips and resources on starting a web business without coding, visit LaunchBit.

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By Elizabeth

Yesterday, we celebrated America's birthday, which is always one of my favorite holidays -- sunshine, bbqs, friends, and family.  But, perhaps more than most holidays, it means a lot more to me.  My parents were immigrants to this country.  I know just how many hoops both of my parents had to go through to get here and struggle here so that I could have the freedom to pursue my dreams.  

Some of my dreams include building a sustainable, growing internet company.  And, I feel lucky to have grown up here in the Silicon Valley where I was inspired by great entrepreneurs before me who built their dreams with the help of American capitalists, business-friendly infrastructure and laws, and encouragement for entrepreneurship.  Only in America.  Only in the Silicon Valley.  This was in the 90s.  

Today, the world is a different place.  Internet entrepreneurs come from everywhere, not just the Valley, not just the US.  LaunchBit has customers from everywhere -- not just here, and I'm pleased that we have presence in almost every continent -- to date, everywhere except Africa and Antarctica.  In fact, it surprised me -- I do approx half of our customer feedback calls over Skype so that I can speak with our customers from other countries.  It makes me happy that both technological and business infrastructure has permeated worldwide to enable more people to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams.  In the 90s, you needed a lot of capital to operate your own servers and write your own tools only to get started with your web business idea.  We now have 3rd party tools so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel, saving us time, resources, and money.  

But, we're only just beginning.  We'll see the rise of more 3rd party tools to make it easier to start a web business.  We'll see more sharing of tips and tricks in Google Groups such as the Lean Startup Circle and through interviews such as on Mixergy and the Startup Foundry.  And, it will continue to be global.  But, every 4th of July, I'm always reminded of where all of this started for me.  And, for that, I'm thankful.

For more tips and resources on starting a web business without coding, visit LaunchBit.

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By Elizabeth

Once you have your prototype (minimum viable product) up and running, the most important thing you'll want to do is measure its success.  We measure our sites using both quantitative and qualitative tools.  Quantitative tools allow us to measure our conversion funnel, while qualitative tools allow us to see what people are actually doing.

Qualitative Tools

In many ways, qualitative tools are more important to us at such an early stage for two reasons.  1) We'll have very little traffic coming to our prototype at first, and so the numerical data is often not statistically significant or accurate.  2) A prototype is just the beginning -- we'll need to learn how to evolve.  In order to do that we'll need to get a better sense of how to improve the user experience to meet our customers' needs, and qualitative feedback will tell us how we can improve.  These are some great qualitative tools:

*Sponsored links

For more tips and resources on starting a web business without coding, visit LaunchBit.

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By Elizabeth

We're pleased to announce we've been accepted into the summer startup accelerator program at 500Startups.  500Startups is a relatively new fund led by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai, two people I've worked with through a prior employer and have known for years.  So, when I learned they were starting a new accelerator program, we just had to throw our name in the hat.  These are some of the most honest and helpful investors I've ever met.  We're 1 of about 20 companies from all over the world in the accelerator, and we all work side-by-side the summer at 500HQ in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

In so many ways, Dave has shaped my own thinking about how to start a company.  When my last startup failed (because we had no users), I started to really understand the power of doing quick market tests to get validation before waiting months or years to launch a web application.  And, I also started to value his obsession with metrics as an indicator of progress.  So as you can imagine, the startup accelerator places serious emphasis on getting solid market validation and improvement of key metrics by mid-August, which is when the program culminates in a demo day in front of other investors.  In just the three weeks we've been here, we've gone through intense UX reviews and design bootcamp to help us prototype ideas quicker than ever.  

All of this is great for LaunchBit users.  We're rolling out new design improvements this summer as well as some new services like this, this, and this that we are currently beta testing.  By the end of the summer, LaunchBit will look very different from today.  Thanks so much to all of you for your constant support -- we could not have made it to this stage without you.

For more tips and resources on starting a web business without coding, visit LaunchBit.

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By Elizabeth

I had the pleasure of speaking at RamenCamp in Boston this past weekend.  Ramen Camp was a one day conference about how to bootstrap your internet company.  It's a topic that I don't think is covered nearly enough.

At RamenCamp, there were a lot of very successful bootstrappers, whom I enjoyed listening to at Ramen Camp.  What is amazing to me is that some of the most understated, unknown entrepreneurs are the best people to learn bootstrapping skills from.  So, I'm glad we had the chance to hear from people like Chris Savage (CEO of Wistia), who spoke on how he got his first sales at his startup, Wistia and Wayne Chang (probably most known for this but really should be better known for things like this) on how he thinks about his side projects.  Here's what Dan Pickett said about RamenCamp.

Bootstrapping is an immensely important skill, because in this early stage, your runway is so short.  That timespan is however long you have savings for, which could be on the order of months.  And, if you believe that you may need to go through several business ideas before you find one that has a true market or group of passionate users, then it means you need to be able to figure out within a matter of weeks whether a particular idea is going to work.  Your biggest competitor as a bootstrapper is time.

I gave a presentation on 10 online free/freemium 3rd party tools that can help bootstrappers make efficient use of the runway they have.  One tool that I came up with as a side project is something I call Fake Buttons, an easy way to add fake buttons to your website to test what people want by way of clicks.  We used fake buttons over and over again with our niche websites to decide whether or not to build out a particular feature.  So I thought, why not roll it out to other entrepreneurs?  Check it out at fakebuttons.com, and let me know what you think.

Here's our presentation:

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Last week, I had a great time giving a webinar with the Get Sharp program, offered by Sharp Skirts, a network for professional women who are building companies.  One of the easiest ways to do market testing on a business idea without even having a product is to do landing page tests.  So, I gave my talk on Landing Page Testing: getting online customers without coding.  

Though I'm thrilled that more web startups are using landing page tests to validate their business ideas, the tactical details of how to build a landing page, market it, and then analyze how it went are often mysterious to new entrepreneurs.  So I dove into some the best practices we've learned along the way in running these kinds of tests.  Feel free to check out my slides below:

For more tips and resources on starting a web business without coding, visit LaunchBit.

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By Elizabeth

Lots of people ask us how expensive it is to launch a web business idea.  That's obviously an impossible question to answer.  But, getting your first customers to get some validation for your business idea -- now, that's not as far off as you may think.  Getting there would probably cost you less than an iPad.  So, skip the frenzied line at the Apple Store and buy yourself a web business instead. 

This is how I would invest my saved $499 in a web business idea:  

Talking with potential customers in-person/via Skype or phone

• FREE: Recruit potential interviewees using Craigslist, Google/Yahoo Groups, Ning, Meetup.com, vertical-specific forums, alumni lists, malls/cafes where applicable
• FREE: Decide on 3-5 different personas to interview and find and filter those people using Google Forms
• ~$120: Pay interviewees $10-$20 for each completed interview (15-30 min per interview)
• FREE: Use Google Docs to type notes and analyze each interview to find patterns

Finding first customers through a landing page:

• $15: Buy a domain name for extra credibility
• ~FREE - $25: Use Unbounce, Weebly, or Yola to build a landing page without coding
• FREE: Check landing page copy for clarity using FiveSecondTest
• $200: Run Google Ads to the landing page.  Aim to drive 200+ visitors to your site.  (We like to bid < $1 per CPC)  You can find cheap keywords if you look hard enough...
• $100: Run Facebook or relevant blog ads to the landing page.  Aim to drive 100+ visitors to your site.  Facebook ads tend to be more expensive and vary a lot more than Google Ads.  Blog ads will range in price.  
• FREE: Drive more online traffic through relevant forums, Q & A sites, etc... Aim to drive 50+ visitors to your site from a combination of these channels.
• FREE: Analyze your marketing channels and landing page tests using Google Analytics

For more details and best practices on how to do all of these activities, check out LaunchBit.

With 350+ people now coming to your site, you should now have a good handful of people who are eager to be your first customers/users.  Combine that with people you spoke with in-person/via Skype, hopefully you now have a good group of users/customers to work with as you start to think about your exact product/service. 

Total cost: ~$460 with money to spare.  Go buy yourself a cheaper Apple product to celebrate.  

For more tips and resources on starting a web business without coding, visit LaunchBit.

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