Recently in Startups Category
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Michael Bodekaer was a founder and CTO of Smartlaunch, which makes software for Internet cafes worldwide and IPO'ed in 2005. Michael explains how they initially got traction by, among other things, giving away their product for free to leading cafes when entering new regional markets. He also talks about his Top 7 Beliefs and his new passion, Project Getaway.
We start talking about Smartlaunch in min 13. Also note that I didn't plan shamelessly plugging my startup with my shirt.
This interview is ~45min. For just audio, there is an mp3. You can also get it on your iPod via iTunes.
For more, check out the Traction Book site.
ad.ly is a relatively new, well-funded startup that puts ads "in-stream" on twitter, and is supposedly expanding to Facebook, MySpace, etc. Such expansion may be wise in the wake of Twitter's TOS changes, but that's another story.
This story is about what happened when I tried to spend money on ad.ly. In a nutshell:



- Downloading the full list of top influential twitter users from trst.me (~22K users).
- Hacking ad.ly's URLs and then downloading a big list of people you can advertise with.
- Cross checking with the trst.me list to only keep top influencers.
- Cross checking that output with the twitter API to only keep people recently retweeted.
- Taking that subset and downloading ad.ly info including price, followers, & avg tweets.
- Filter out people > 10 tweets/day and then sort by price/follower count.
- Fun: try this new search engine for a week http://duckduckgo.com/ PLZ RT! (Ad)
- New search engine http://duckduckgo.com/ PLZ RT! (Ad)
- Check out Duck Duck Go, a cool new search engine http://duckduckgo.com/ PLZ RT (Ad).
- Duck Duck Go is the new Google http://duckduckgo.com/ (Ad)
- Duck Duck Go is a new search engine http://duckduckgo.com/ (Ad)
- New search engine Duck Duck Go http://duckduckgo.com/ (Ad)
Recently I spoke at Dreamit Ventures on SEO. I used Manu Kumar's #20tweets presentation format where I opened twenty tweets in twenty tabs and clicked them off as I went. The talk was recorded by Vijay Kailas from Numote.
The point of the talk was two-fold. First, I wanted to convince the Dreamit startups (and you!) that SEO is not only worthwhile, but is a traction vertical that all startups should consider seriously in the pursuit of traction. Second, I wanted to lay out a an actionable startup SEO strategy that all startups can follow.
- Startups should have an SEO strategy and spend significant time tracking, evaluating & tweaking it. 5 reasons to follow.
- Reason #1 to do SEO: HQ traffic. 88% of Google clicks are organic search (via @randfish). They're looking for stuff!
- Reason #2 to do SEO: edge. 2009 US spend on search ads, $18B; on SEO, $1.5B (via @randfish).
- Reason #3 to do SEO: precedent. It's worked for @yelp@aboutdotcom @scribd @slideshare @docstoc @nytimes@linkedin
- Reason #4 to do SEO: intl users. Just 22% of search traffic is US (via @comscore). Intl can make you an acquisition target.
- Reason #5 to do SEO: you can do it. It's not black magic. It's really just generating content and building links.
- SEO fact #1: ranking/click % drop-off is huge, ~40% for #1, 12% #2, 8% #3, >=10 (second page) just 10% (via @aol).
- SEO fact #2: top 10K keywords get ~18% (via @experian). top 1M ~(very rough)~50% (via @duckduckgo). 50% "long-tail"
- SEO fact #3: "20 to 25% of the queries we see today, we have never seen before" (via @google)
- SEO fact #4: conversion rates are much higher in the long-tail bc intent is less ambiguous (via @oneupweb).
- SEO how-to #1: you really need two SEO strategies, one for the fat-head and one for the long-tail.
- SEO how-to #2: what unique data can your business generate? That's the content basis for your long-tail SEO strategy.
- SEO how-to #3: make pages people want to link to naturally, e.g. for reputation, posts, resources, answers, stats.
- SEO how-to #4: help/nudge people link to you, e.g. URL shorteners, widgets, copy/paste, JS, customer emails, etc.
- SEO how-to #5: continually triple check your site for basic issues, e.g. robots.txt, URLs, redirects, duplicate content.
- SEO tip #1: anchor text still matters a lot, which can work wonders within your fat-head strategy.
- SEO tip #2: for your long-tail strategy, you want as flat a hierarchy as possible, and/or deep links.
- SEO tip #3: focus on pages that convert for your business. Traffic is a means to an end.
- SEO tip #4: avoid anything black hat, e.g. buying links. It's not worth the risk of getting blacklisted.
- SEO resources: @seomoz @seobook @adwords @compete Google Trends/Insights/SEO Starter Guide
The other day I had the pleasure of being on Mixergy with Andrew Warner, which is a popular video interview series about startups and business tips. There is also an audio version.
The interview is mainly about my last (second) company, Opobox, but it also includes (in the latter half) some q/a about DuckDuckGo and my blog.
It's about an hour, and yet I just really scratched the surface of a number of topics, and realize I left a number of other topics not completely explained. So if you have any follow-up or other questions, feel free to ask them on HN, in the comments below, by email or on formspring.