November 26, 2008
John Biggs over at CrunchGear today neatly skewers music startup Grüvme.com and in the process talks about exactly why early-stage tech startups need the help of people like me.
GruvMe must fail. In a world of good ideas, it is a me-too media service that can’t even get its core business model – selling the songs people want to listen to – right. These clowns can’t even...
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Grüv me and the importance of a clear consumer benefit
November 12, 2008
You have to go a long way and add a lot of value if you want to get consumers to change an established pattern of behaviour. Sometimes you may find you have to massively subsidise their use of your product for a long time before you’re able to directly charge them anything at all. But it’s worth doing, since you’re paying for your site visitors.
Assume every visitor costs you...
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Casual visitors need low, low barriers before they’ll stick
September 9, 2008
TechCrunch50 live on the web
You could fly to San Francisco, be horrified at the cost of even a cheap hotel room, then spend USD500 just to be there, or you can watch the TechCrunch50 conference live on USTREAM and just pay the streaming bandwidth cost. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a USTREAM live video stream acceptably from Australia, so if that’s been the experience for you too, give this one a try – it... read more
September 4, 2008
Thirty minutes after installing 2.01 on my iPhone 2G I had purchased and downloaded 21 new iPhone apps. The whole experience – from finding to buying to downloading and installing – was so quick and easy that my credit card barely warmed up as the money drained away. I had to force myself to stop before I blew it. It was clear there was going to be quite a market for iPhone apps.
Later, I was...
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iPhone App-onomics and prospecting for gold
May 2, 2008
As some of you may know, Elliot and I are toiling away building TrippyThing, a website that turns unfriendly, jargon-heavy confirmation emails from travel booking services into understandable, friendly, shareable trip itineraries.
We hope to tell you more about our launch timeframe for TrippyThing soon.
Right now, we need your help to add to our collection of travel booking confirmation emails.
These are...
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Will you help Trippything?
April 8, 2008
Brian Burns and I have recently discovered each other and are both excited to learn there’s someone out there doing the same kind of thing: helping startups build not just better products, but better stories about who they are and why their product matters. I may rave about his insights more than once in the next few weeks, and I apologise for that, but wherever possible I’ll try to extend on...
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You don’t need SEO from the get-go
