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I've communicated with hundreds of startup founders over the past three years, and I've begun to notice a pattern. There are three points during the creating of a startup where the founders are most likely to close up shop. I call these the "danger points" and this post looks at how to avoid them Read More

One piece of your marketing that you need to nail down is your "hook." This is not your Unique Selling Proposition, and it's not your elevator pitch. It's the headline of your home page. That single sentence that grabs the reader in and makes her know she's in the right place.

Once you find your hook, post it in the comments with a link to your site. Consider this permission to do a little marketing for your startup or product Read More

StartupLens.com performs 7-minute screencast reviews of startup websites, publishing new reviews twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday. Watch past reviews or submit your site. Reviews performed by serial web entrepreneur Rob Walling (SoftwareByRob.com). Read More

More than two years ago my business partner and I discussed launching a hosted version of our invoicing software. We developed a task list and estimated the effort at around 160 hours. But given the heavy competition in the hosted invoicing software market and the level of effort of the task, it was continually placed on the back burner. Until we figured out how to get to the same endpoint with 1 Read More

TechCrunch traffic is not profitable for startups. It's completely un-targeted (unless your niche market is other startups) and you have no relationship with that audience. On the flip side, the highest quality traffic is typically from an email list that you've been communicating with for some length of time. Your conversion rate for these leads will be astronomically higher than your standard w Read More

Every customer who cancels due to a lack of features (or any other fixable reason) translates to time and effort you spent sending them to your website and converting them into a customer. Think about it this way: if your conversion rate is 1%, losing a single customer is like 100 people never coming to your website. Strike that traffic from your logs. I'm a bit weepy just thinking about it. Read More

Find a startup or microISV founder and ask the following: what are the top 3 approaches you use to find customers? You'll get some pretty good answers. Then ask about the next step in the process: once you have traffic coming to your site, how will you turn prospects into customers? Most startup founders think about driving traffic to their website. Almost no one thinks about improving conversion Read More

Most startups would rather live in a world where they don't have to talk to actual people, definitely not customers, than to find out early on that their idea isn't going to fly (or that they will have to make drastic changes to make it fly). That dream-world is called 'pre-launch' and it's fun to visit, but if you become a permanent resident Read More

Product naming is hard. This is the kind of thing that keeps you up at night, even after you've made the decision. And asking opinions is fine, but more often than not the people you ask are not in your demographic: "Hi Mom. Things are good, thanks. Hey while I have you on the phone, what do you think I should call my enterprise level encryption Read More

Twitter and Facebook are the darlings of the media for the time being, and it seems no one gives a rip about blogs anymore. That hot topic of yesteryear is now a fad of the past, much like Chia pets and Snuggies. Wait, you haven't heard of a Snuggie? Be really disappointed you missed out on that one. Where was I? Oh yes, blogs. They're over. Done. Read More