Are you suggesting that he has something to gain financially by tweeting about PH a lot? This comment makes no sense to me.
I know Jeff and can confirm that he was a huge fan of Ryan and Product Hunt before ever meeting him. Jeff is the epitome of a super fan. He networked hard and moved to a new city (SF) to make the connections he has and to get his job at Meerkat, as well.
He also doesn't angel invest, so he doesn't have anything to gain by posting the products he posts or tweets.
Here's the other thing, there are a ton of other people around the world just like him. They're a big part of the reason why PH has been successful and has struck a cord with product fans and makers all over.
There's a large difference between "big fan" as he said and "super fan."
I could have also pointed out a) he contributed to the source Medium article and b) he had openly criticized OpenHunt in the PH thread for "it's not Product Hunt."
The point is that super fans are good for Product Hunt, but not good for people trying to get into the ecosystem based on merit instead of pandering to a brand.
This reminded me of Hipchat's 30-day free trial that I recently discovered. I was mistakenly under the impression that they limited the trial to 5 users. I reached out to them on Twitter, since I couldn't find an email address for them anywhere, and they told me the trial can be for an unlimited amount of users. I think this is genius. With a product like Hipchat, 30 days provides a decent enough amount of time that companies will feel locked-in as long as they use it a fair amount. Great strategy.
>An investor or friend shouldn't be the first one to tell an entrepreneur about someone new in their space.
This line resonated with me. I know the stomach-dropping feeling of someone mentioning a potential competitor that I've never heard of. I usually play it off and say, "Thanks, I'll definitely check it out" and then immediately Google it on my iPhone as soon as possible. Luckily, in my research I haven't found anything all that similar to what I'm working on.
This brings up a corollary question: Assuming I have a pretty well-informed view of the competitive landscape and I can't seem to find anything that solves the problem in a similar fashion, how do I sufficiently answer the inevitable question from investors about my competition? I've often heard people write and say that business ideas ALWAYS have competition, the tricky thing is that the competition isn't always immediately obvious. Answering that a startup doesn't have direct competition leads to skepticism, therefore creating distrust right off the bat when it may not be warranted.
That's a great question. I think the only thing you can do is address who your competition is, even if they're only tangentially related. I usually follow a pattern of "X competitor is doing Y, which helps our target customer solve A and B need but not C and D".
I think it's worth finding the closest competitor no matter how far away they are, even just to signal that you've done the research.
I think it's better to mention the tangential ones than to omit them because it shows that you've really thought through the competitive landscape.
Competition is also not a bad thing. If there are a few startups vying for attention in a certain space, it means there's obviously value there. You have to prove to investors and customers that you're going to do it better and ultimately win the lion share of the space.
If you did your research seriously, i believe sharing the results(indirect competitors) and maybe the process(keywords searched, etc) could help build trust .
I had a similar idea I called Readminder. It would be a mobile app with push notifications setup for the time you want to read that particular article, similar to the way Mailbox does it for email.
Very cool idea. I would change the functionality of the commenting system. I'd like to see the comments on the same page as all the videos, rather than clicking through to a new page. I think it would have the nice side-effect of more engagement with the comments. They're also not super obvious at first as I found myself looking around for a comment button of some sort.
Their main pricing page, http://mailchimp.com/pricing/, is much better from a marketing and sales standpoint. I'm surprised they even provide a link to the "all" page since it probably doesn't apply to 99% of their potential customers.
>The truth is most CRM systems available today are more useful to the sales managers and executives because they use the CRM systems to gain insight on overall and individual sales performance. The CRM systems doesn't necessarily help sales professional to increase sales, though.
This part is flat-out wrong. Modern CRM systems are very useful for sales professionals. They provide analytics, pipeline analysis, and other powerful features.
I think wearable tech will eventually end up playing a minor role in an outside sales professional's daily routine. I could definitely see some of my reps using it for accessing their calendar and locating information on the client for their next meeting when they're out and about. However, it will never completely replace the computer and mobile versions.
Very good insight and I agreed with you with modern day CRM. But analytic, pipeline analysis will only be accurate when the sales rep did spent the time updating all the data in CRM.
On a related note: Raising money at insanely large valuations sounds sexy and exciting, but can lead to serious problems down the road. The expectation with any VC-backed startup is for the proverbial valuation pie to expand after each round of funding. If the pie is already spilling over the sides of the pan after the A round, then the company is almost certainly destined for a down B round unless they can grow massively. That typically smells of desperation and failure, or a rotten pie, to continue the analogy. Damn, pie sounds really good now at 1:15am.
I think it was a year well spent! Nicely done. This is an important step in the right direction for independent musicians that don't have the benefit of large distribution.
Quick question: How do the various services handle categorizing the uploaded music? My concern as a musician is my music might not be as easily discovered via Spotify Radio or on related artists pages.
I know Jeff and can confirm that he was a huge fan of Ryan and Product Hunt before ever meeting him. Jeff is the epitome of a super fan. He networked hard and moved to a new city (SF) to make the connections he has and to get his job at Meerkat, as well.
He also doesn't angel invest, so he doesn't have anything to gain by posting the products he posts or tweets.
Here's the other thing, there are a ton of other people around the world just like him. They're a big part of the reason why PH has been successful and has struck a cord with product fans and makers all over.