Yesterday, I meet the aunt of the founder of Yelp. Naturally, I looked at the Yelp website and had a few thoughts related to yesterday’s post.
Looking at the About Yelp page, I can say that Yelp is most probably funded by Venture Capital / Private Equity. Here’s why:
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Financing for a startup is not very easy to acquire. But it is not impossible either. Some financing methods are fairly easy, while others are extremely difficult to obtain. First, I will define some methods of obtaining financing and rank them as Hard, Medium and Easy:
One of the subjects I have not talked about so far is our products. After all, this is our company blog, which should be used for marketing purposes! As of now, our products are anyInput and the upcoming anyAssets. The core features of the two products will be the same but will diverge with time as customer feedback is collected. The core features that users may find useful are the following:
I was about to engage in e-mail marketing. There are two methods to go about mass e-mailing people:
Just recovering from an illness and now am well enough to recommence posting! Sorry to all my millions of readers. I am kidding, very few people read this blog as of now.
When I was developing anyInput, I thought marketing would be a simple. I would just tell friends and family about anyInput and that would be it! (more…)
I’ll get off the marketing topic for today’s post and talk about “options.” So when you were a kid, the sky was the limit in terms of your future. You could be an astronaut, engineer, scientist, president, writer, artist, rock musician and etc. As you grew up, you started to see some doors close. In college, you decided to be an engineer and not a music major. When you got out of college you decided to be a software engineer for a defense company. You worked at this company for 6 years. Doors were closing left and right since you were choosing to be a particular type of engineer.
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Federated Media Review – TechCrunch Advertising Review: Yesterday, I talked about Google PPC advertising as one of the anyInput marketing strategies I attempted. Today, I will talk about CPM advertising. CPM means that you pay for the number of times that your ad is served (viewed) on somebody else’s page. This is best illustrated by an anyInput CPM trail:
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Review of adWords: Google is an awesome money sucking machine. They make billions of dollars per year mostly by serving ads through Google.com or adSense. Google uses the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising model. So when a person clicks on your ad, Google bills you for that click. The average cost per click nowadays is around $0.50. If that person looks at your ad but does not click on it (impressions), you are not billed. Keep in mind that if a user does not click on your ad, he probably does not see it.
The cost per click is determined by Google’s secret formula which is based on advertiser competition for keywords. You must choose keywords so that Google knows when to display you ad. You could choose “database,” “online database” and “web enabled online database” as keywords. “database” will probably have more advertiser competition. Therefore “database” will have a high cost per click of greater than $0.50. I would not be surprised if the cost per click for “database” (more…)
As a boy, my best friend’s father was an engineer that invented cool gadgets in his spare time with his basement machine shop. Some of his inventions in the late 80s were programmable LED signs and a bike storage product. I don’t remember the specifics of his marketing efforts, but I know he never hit it big with any of his inventions. Why was this? Maybe he did not have the marketing background since he was an engineer. Or maybe he was not persistent enough when doors were slammed in his face.
I am not a marketing person; I am an engineer. Doing engineering work is what I am good at by experience and education. So while developing anyInput, I made the conscious decision to focus on developing it and not on the business aspect such as marketing. Was this the right decision? Ultimately, I believe it was a good decision since if one focuses on all aspects at once, the probability of getting things done will decrease. However, I should have thought about marketing more.