Uncommon thoughts on creativity, ideas, innovation, and marketing
It’s been a week and amid all the tweets, articles and blog posts, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Steve and the dent he’s had on our universe.
image credit: http://sacc-usa.org/
My thoughts haven’t changed since the tweet I posted when I first found out.
More than our tweets and our tears, I think Steve would want our ideas and actions and initiative.
Thank you, Steve. For everything.
My friend Andy Traub is a man who ships things. He regularly ships the Linchpin Podcast, one channel of his Take Permission Media Network.
In June, Andy was nice enough to interview me for his Linchpin Podcast. The episode is pretty long at almost 90 minutes but we had a great conversation on the following topics:
Click here to head over to Andy’s blog to listen or click here to listen directly.
I hope you enjoy the show and look forward to your thoughts.
I’m covering some Internet Week New York sessions for Yahoo! Scene.
On Wednesday, Vinicius Vacanti, founder and CEO of Yipit, the most popular daily deal aggregator on the web, delivered an excellent session for startup founders titled, “From Idea to Product to Traction.” The session was jam-packed with actionable nuggets. Some highlights and a link to the full post below.
Identify a real problem. The biggest mistake most entrepreneurs make at this stage is getting excited about an idea that isn’t solving a real problem that people have.
Make sure it’s a very big problem. Vacanti used a personal example of replacing a broken remote control for one of his televisions. Problem? Yes. Big problem (market)? No. Vacanti explained that when pitching entrepreneurs need to convince VC’s they’re building a billion dollar company.
Come up with a name and setup a landing page. Collect emails while you’re working away getting a product up to speed. To do this quickly and easily, Vacanti recommended one of my favorite new startups, Launchrock.com. He explained a few simple ways to promote the landing page, such as including the problem you’re solving and the landing page URL in your email signature.
Come up with a less than 7 word description that succinctly explains the problem you’re solving. Tumblr’s is simple, “The easiest way to blog.” Yipit’s is “All the best daily deals in your city.” The original Apple iPod was, “A thousand songs in your pocket.” The shorter the better.
Don’t add features, throw them out. Vacanti explained that by trimming features and functionality, Yipit reduced it’s production time from a year and a half for v1.0 to four months for v2.0 and then down to three days for the current iteration of the product.
You can read the rest of the post over on Yahoo! Scene here.
On Tuesday, February 8, 2011, I was lucky enough to help facilitate the Health | Tech | Food event that Luminary Labs put on for Social Media Week. 125 people gathered to openly innovate around the core health issues of New York through the lens of social technology.
There were amazing presentations and brilliant ideas that came out of the workshop sessions and the unique “open innovation” model means that Luminary Labs has published all input and output under a creative commons attribution 3.0 unported license. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as they credit the event for the original creation.
See the original post on Luminary Labs’ blog. You can view all the published content at www.healthtechfood.com and the summary SlideShare presentation below.
