Brand is a hot topic for tech companies lately. It’s unsurprising, because tech companies are currently dominating the top brand charts. In the 2016 Interbrand survey, technology companies occupy fully half of the top 24 global brands with Apple and Google 1st and 2nd, and Facebook and Amazon the top growing brands in their report.Read More »Three keys to building a strong technology brand
Product and marketing are key players in ensuring the success of a product. However, often these two functions struggle to work effectively together.Read More »Building Effective Marketing + Product Partnership
The role of product marketing in technology companies is a fascinating topic in part because it is so poorly defined and inconsistent. I’ve managed product marketing now at LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey and various early-stage startups and in each case the expectations for the role were different from team to team and company to company. It’s a chameleon role that is often defined by circumstance, such as the first hire of a marketer to support the product development teams. Often, this first hire creates a precedent on product marketing’s role and contribution within the organization which results in wildly different roles from company to company. What then do product marketers do?
Last Friday I attended the unSEXY conference, a one-day conference hosted by 500 Startups focused on the unsexy topics of distribution and money makin’ for startups. You can see the conference slides here.
A quick repost of my guest post for Andrew Chen’s blog yesterday.
After recently moving on from adventures building a consumer gaming portal at Mochi Media (acquired last year for $80 MM), I’m now working on a new startup called Connected, which is a SaaS contact management solution for professionals. I decided to blog some of my thoughts based on my experience thus far with deciding on the right user acquisition channels to focus on.
Read More »When Does Paid Acquisition Work for SaaS Startups?
A new project I’ve been so heads down working at my new startup that I’ve neglected to update my blog. Sorry guys! A few months ago, I left Mochi Media and the world of games to start a new adventure with Connected, which provides contact management without the work. It automatically pulls in contact information from across your email, calendar and social networks and gives you the tools to proactively manage your network. Why Connected? Because relationships are important One of the key reasons for my original decision to join Mochi Media was because I just liked the founder and team,… Read More »My new startup Connected is contact management without the work
One of the challenges of early product design is creating the initial product hypothesis on what the product actually is. Internally, products tend to be more easily described as a bundle of features, but it’s difficult to convert that into an actual description. Marketing and initial product design is often the realm in which everyone has an opinion, and it’s hard to judge which one is more valid. Should this button be red or blue? Is this the right message for the user, or should we phrase it another way? The answers to the questions, however, can be very important… Read More »Breaking Stalemates on Product Design Questions
Last weekend, Sachin Rekhi and I did connectme.cc as a little hackathon project for the Cloudstock Hackathon. I’m proud to report that we were a finalist for the event and even made it onto Techcrunch! If you’re not familiar with it, Cloudstock is a small event offshoot off of the larger Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference designed to bring developers and cloud technologies together. Meet our project: connectme.cc The premise behind connectme.cc is simple. Send your business card with one text. Even though we’re living in this world with social networks and online profiles, many of the existing applications are dependent on both… Read More »Lessons from designing a product in less than 24 hours
One of the key early decisions to game design or creating a virtual currency platform is designing the price and exchange rate of virtual currency. Unfortunately after it’s been released, it’s also one of the most difficult to change, because the change impacts the userbase and economy of the system as a whole. So if you’re starting out, how do you decide how to price your virtual currency? Three Types of Virtual Currency To answer this question, I started by looking across a broad swath of popular social games, social networks, and some MMOs and virtual worlds. Currency is typically used… Read More »How to Price Your Virtual Currency (Dataset Across 57 Social Games, SNS and MMO/Virtual Worlds)
Gamification as a buzz word seems to be picking up steam and there’s a lot of conversations going on about the topic these days. After my recent post defining gamification and giving examples of it, I’ve pulled together a roundup and quick summary of the topics. To start off, the web can’t seem to decide whether or not gamification is a real word. Wikipedia deleted the word from its index and since then it’s reappeared again. There also seems to be a disagreement about whether it’s spelled gamification vs. gameification, and it looks like a pretty even heat. Trying to… Read More »Roundup: Ongoing Gamification Debate