Category: Funded

profitability growth

Why your startup shouldn’t focus on growth OR profitability.

Within the world of startups today, there are two distinct opinions on the importance of growth and profitability in a business: those who believe that profitability should always be secondary to rapidly expanding the user base of the product (Facebook-style, if you will), and the alternate view that founders should focus on turning a profit before gaining millions of users. In reality, neither is perfect.

mail

An email client that achieved 20,000 downloads in a day: The Sparrow story

Sparrow is a new email client for OSX that has taken the Mac world by storm: it was downloaded over 20,000 times on launch day, and has been downloaded 100,000 times since the Mac App Store launched in January. To hear the background story on Sparrow, we invited it’s co-founder, Dominique Leca to have a chat.

Tool

Your product should always fix a problem, even if your users don’t realize it.

The best way to ensure your startup has a place in the market, and to ensure that it has long-term potential, is to figure out what ‘problem’ you’re fixing in the life of your users. If your product isn’t fixing a problem, no matter how generalized that problem may be, its chances of being successful are severely limited.

Card

Monetization is the best way to validate the worth of your product.

When launching any new startup, or any new personal project, it’s often very difficult to validate the worth of your product: Is it good enough to gain serious traction? Do people really want to use it? The best way to find those answers is often through monetization.

Star

A practice run that made it big – the Wunderlist story

We recently checked out Wunderlist, a fantastic new to-do application for a range of platforms which has quite literally risen to the top in the industry. To tell us the background story on Wunderlist, we invited the founder of 6Wunderkinder, Christian Reber, to have a chat.

Wipro

Why Color will fail (and how your social startup can succeed)

Color, the latest golden child of Silicon Valley, has recently received $41 million in venture capital. Pre-launch. Despite this gargantuan show of monetary support from some of the Valley’s biggest names, there are a number of inherent faults with the service which will make it very difficult, if not impossible, for this fledgling startup to succeed.

Apple

The success of the Apple logo, and why your startup needs to copy it.

The icon or the logo of any startup define the business and define it’s products to a much greater extent than many founders realize. The logo of any company characterizes the visual presence of the business throughout it’s lifespan, and the Apple logo is a great example of this done very well.