Thoughts on Building Technology Products and Businesses
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How do you find and hire a CTO for your business? As a business owner you might be looking to find a CTO for a number of reasons: You have an established business and are looking for someone with the…
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How Hired.com Started a Fast-Growing Careers Marketplace
If you’re interested in how to start a successful marketplace, Matt Mickiewicz is a man to study. Matt has previously started two successful marketplaces: Flippa and 99designs. His latest business, Hired.com, is a job marketplace which — after just three years — is doing tens…
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7 Frameworks For Predicting Online Marketplace Success
What makes some online marketplaces billion dollar successes and others costly failures? Uber and Airbnb are forging ahead relentlessly. Yet Homejoy, having raised $40 million in funding, ended up shutting down. Why? How much is down to execution and luck, and how much to fundamental…
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How Thumbtack Built a Huge Local Services Marketplace
How do you build an online marketplace from scratch? Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, yesterday announced a $100M funding round led by Google Ventures. Building a local services marketplace is a notoriously difficult problem that has beaten many entrepreneurs.…
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What is the Average Churn Rate for a Subscription Box Business?
What churn rate can you expect for your subscription box business? What’s a good churn rate? What’s a bad churn rate? If you haven’t yet launched, what number should you put in your business plan? I wrote in a previous post about…
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How to Find a Good WordPress Developer on oDesk
You have a WordPress blog or website. You want some changes made to it, so you need to find someone who can help. But who? One effective way to find a WordPress developer is through a freelancing website like oDesk…
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Skillshare: How to Build a Marketplace for Online Education
I always like hearing how entrepreneurs have managed to launch marketplace businesses. TechCrunch recently posted this interview with Michael Karnjanaprakorn of Skillshare, a platform for online education, about how they seeded and grew their marketplace. He described two main phases…
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What Makes a Good Ecommerce 2.0 Startup?
PandoDaily have been running a series of articles lately on ‘ecommerce 2.0’, featuring video clips from a dinner with the CEOs of some of the top ecommerce startups: Birchbox, Warby Parker, One Kings Lane and Jack Threads. I’ve rounded up…
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Our Share of Visits from iPads is up 23% Since Christmas
iPad Share of Visits Up 23% In the month before Christmas, 13.2% of our unique visits came from iPads. In the seven days since Christmas, that has leapt to 16.2%. That’s a whopping 23% increase in a matter of weeks.…
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Magento E-Commerce Checkout Conversion Rates
Screen Pages, a UK ecommerce agency, publish some great data on their blog. Their latest post is about Magento e-commerce checkout conversion rates. It’s interesting for a couple of reasons: It gives some useful benchmark conversion rate numbers. It shows…