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Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen
andrewchenblog.com
5
Analysis on viral marketing, user experience, game design, and online ads
#232509 in All

Stop asking “But how will they make money?”

Business models are important, but today they’re commoditized Let me first state: Business models are important. Of course businesses have to make money, that’s a given. But that’s ...

4 days ago

Know the difference between data-informed and versus data-driven

Metrics are merely a reflection of the product strategy that you have in place Data is powerful because it is concrete. For many entrepreneurs, particularly with technical backgrounds, empirical data...

5 days ago 1 person likes this

What makes Sequoia Capital successful? “Target big markets”

Don Valentine, who founded Sequoia Capital, talks about what makes Sequoia Capital effective. It’s one of my favorite talks, and I find myself watching and re-watching it from time to time, and...

24 may 12

How to use Twitter to predict popular blog posts you should write

Using retweets to assess content virality Recently I’ve been running an experiment: Tweet an insight, idea, or quote See how many people retweet it If it catches, then write a blog post elabora...

16 may 12

Quora: Has Facebook’s DAU/MAU always been ~50%?

I recently asked, and then answered my own question on Quora and wanted to share here as well. Has Facebook’s DAU/MAU always been ~50%? According to public info, Facebook’s DAU/MAU is 58%...

16 may 12

How do I learn to be a growth hacker? Work for one of these guys :)

After writing my recent article on Growth Hackers, I’ve been asked by quite a few folks on how to learn the discipline. The best answer is, learn from someone who’s already good at it ...

11 may 12

Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing

YouTube didn’t need ads to spread itself – instead it used embeds. Ad via Laughing Squid The rise of the Growth Hacker The new job title of “Growth Hacker” is integrating itse...

27 apr 12

Google+ and the curse of instant distribution

I was reading today’s NYT article on Google+’s new redesign and found myself continually puzzled by the key metric Google continues to report as the success of their new social product: R...

11 apr 12

The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs

The first banner ad ever, on HotWired in 1994, debuted with a clickthrough rate of 78% (thanks @ottotimmons) First it works, and then it doesn’t After months of iterating on different marketing...

05 apr 12

Visual Basic, PHP, Rails. Is Node.js next?

I had a nerdy conversation on what might be the next mainstream framework for building web products, and in particular whether the node.js community would ultimately create this framework, or if node...

01 apr 12

Quora: Will CPE (Cost Per Engagement) advertising ever take off?

Will CPE (Cost Per Engagement) advertising ever take off? I doubt it – the reason is that it’s targeting metrics at the kind of marketers that don’t care too much about metrics. Bro...

22 mar 12

Why I doubted Facebook could build a billion dollar business, and what I learned from being horribl...

Facebook, early 2006 Sometimes, you need to be horribly, embarrassingly wrong to remind yourself to keep an open mind. This is my story of my failure to understand Facebook’s potential. In 2006...

14 mar 12

How sheep-like behavior breeds innovation in Silicon Valley

Once you’ve been working in Silicon Valley for a bit, you’re often offered advice such as: Are you launching at X conference? … where X is whatever hot conference is coming up, lik...

08 mar 12

Top tweets recently on startups, tech, and more

I recently dug through Favstar.fm and found a bunch of the tweets over the last few months that were saved/retweeted the most. Wanted to save them here for posterity: Teardowns Facebook, Google, Twit...

06 mar 12

Ask me anything!

Here’s the form as a link if you can’t see it – questions, thoughts, etc appreciated.

04 mar 12

Why you’ll always think your product is shit

Lobby of the Pixar offices in Emeryville, CA “My product isn’t quite there yet.” You’ve said this before. We all have. Anyone working on getting their first product out to mar...

03 mar 12

Linkedin acquires Connected – congrats to my sister Ada!

Quick blog post to congratulate my sister Ada Chen and her husband Sachin Rekhi, who have just announced the acquisition of their startup Connected to LinkedIn. The company was backed by a seed inves...

05 oct 11

20+ pitches from the new 500Startups cos

Yesterday I attended the 500Startups demo day – it was a fun event and will be interesting to compare to the YC demo day coming up later this month as well. For everyone who didn’t make i...

18 aug 11

Thanks Spotify! 40 invites for startups (UPDATE: All out! Next time, guys)

A product I use every day This morning I got a very nice email from the Spotify folks- it’s a product that I’ve become a big fan of- I’ve used it for over a year. One of their early...

14 jul 11

Don’t compete on features

The “Ultimate Driving Machine” is a classic slogan that makes BMW compete based on position, not features. It’s hard to keep things simple, especially when adding so many new featur...

11 jul 11

Quora: What UX considerations were built into Google+?

This is reposted from my answer on Quora here. Question: What UX considerations were built into Google+? The most interesting design choice I’ve seen for G+ has been deploying it across all the...

09 jul 11

Simple is Marketable

Simple products aren’t only better designed, they’re easier to market too. Marketing and product UX are seen as conflicting with one another, but there are, in fact, many opportunities fo...

08 jul 11

How to use A/B testing for better product design

There’s more than one way to use this tool A/B testing is a very useful tool that can be used to develop better product designs, rather than just evaluating landing pages. In a classic A/B test...

06 jul 11

VIDEO: The Anatomy of a Fundable Startup by Naval of AngelList

Do you live outside of Silicon Valley? Watch this video For all the startups and entrepreneurs outside of Silicon Valley, I want to direct you to this incredible summary by Naval Ravikant of AngelLis...

21 jun 11

Does anyone care about your new product? (Doing market research with Google’s Keyword Tool)

Does anyone care about your new product? A question every entrepreneur asks is, if I build it will they come? You can have a cool idea for a new product, but how do you know if anyone cares about it?...

14 jun 11

“Anyone can start a Groupon!” and other startup myths

There’s been some excellent Groupon analysis Since the S-1 has come out, there’s been some incredible analysis done – two of my favorites are Rakesh Agrawal’s Quora answer on ...

03 jun 11

When Does Paid Acquisition Work for SaaS Startups?

Today we have a guest post from my sister Ada Chen Rekhi about user acquisition based on experiences at her new startup Connected. Connected is a new contact management product they’re working ...

01 jun 11

Why it’s smart for consumer startups to grow first and make money later

I’ve had two recent conversations in which people have mentioned the “grow first, monetize later” philosophy as one of the signs of the coming bubble apocalypse, and this post is to...

29 may 11

When has a consumer startup hit product/market fit?

This post is part of my recent 2011 blogging roadmap post, where I created an outline of going from zero to product/market fit. Getting to this endpoint is obviously a good goal in theory, but questi...

29 may 11

Designing for distribution with Eric+Eric (YC 2011, Mochi Media)

One important question that comes up all the time is, what makes a product easy to market? I had a fun chat about the topic with Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire who worked together at Mochi Media w...

23 may 11

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