2,014 karma · joined September 29, 2008
Interested in Strategizing, Marketing, Psychology, Cognitive and Neuro Science, History, Trending and Patterning. Totally intrigued by the question: what makes us humans tick.
Email: ankeshk AT ankeshkothari.com
But if he adds a forum - he can create a good membership site out of mixergy. And $25 per month for it is doable.
(I personally think its just an experiment to control high bandwidth costs...)
Sporting events have just one broadcaster. One person who controls what you see. Online, everyone is a broadcaster. That changes the game. Not everyone will agree to such a policy. And you just need one player to disagree to make it impractical.
Case in point: 9/11 attacks were shown on TV repeatedly - because there was more than 1 player who could do the broadcasting.
Shouldn't confuse usage with fixing.
Thats funny (and inaccurate). Because a lot of Indian border clashes are against the Chinese. India and China have a long standing border dispute.
Also - I've never been to China so can't comment. But news sources say that India has a better human rights record than China. So the probability of throwing tire around the neck and petrol dousing is higher in China than in India. That stuff doesn't happen in India without consequences.
(Disclosure: I'm an Indian.)
So had checked X.com - but discarded them. Because they don't work with credit card transactions yet - only PayPal. Which would mean at least half the transactions being lost...
Ideally: it would be awesome if we could hide the entries we've already read from the front page. And these entries are replaced by "new" entries. This would give the new entries a fair chance - and people wouldn't resort to gaming the system.
Also - giving points to people to visit the new page is a good idea.
As a service provider - you will always get paid a bit less though - because of the real time competitive bids. When 15 coders bid for the same project, no matter how skilled you are - you will have to make competitively priced bids to win the projects.
Doesn't matter if people have organized desks or chaotic desks. Doesn't matter if they have a minimalistic desk or a cluttered one. Just follow one rule: shut down everything before you leave for the day.
At the end of the day, everything should be in its proper place. You can't have 3 folders open on your desk - they have to be closed and put in its place on the shelf.
That one rule gave a tremendous boost to employee productivity.
There is trending. And then there is individual timing.
Bill Gates pointed out a trend. Before most others. Finding trends and patterns before others = you will usually not lose money.
But not being right on time = you may not make a lot of money either.
To do awesome in the stock market, a finger on both the pulses is necessary: trending as well as timing.
But it starts with the trends.
(Imho - candlestick is a good method for finding the right time - but only after you've analyzed the trends.)
Most consumers don't even get to choose anything over 1mbps in India. 512kbps speeds is the norm (which is also like $22 per month in Mumbai - where I'm based. $22 for 512kbps!)
On top of that, bandwidth capping and other such practices is still the norm in India! A lot of ISPs don't allow you anything over 4gb or 6gb of bandwidth per month!
Oh what I would give to see a chart by an Indian ISP that starts with minimum speeds of 1.5mbps!
Venmo $10 to Jenny 1990
Where the last 4 digits of the message - 1990 in this case - is the security pin code.
1.
Find a list of bloggers in your niche.
2.
Find their contact details. (Either their contact page, or their whois.)
3.
Send them a snail mail letter explaining your offer.
This seriously gets more high profile bloggers to review your products - because it cuts through the clutter. Its more work, but a lot more effective than email.
* I kept it as a first-come-first-serve thing. I didn't want to become the judge out there.
* But I kept a rule from the beginning: people had to move once they became ramen profitable.
* There was no other rule except the obvious: don't abuse the resource. It worked well.
* The only problem I faced is: quite a lot of people who took me up on the free hosting offer didn't do anything with it for months. Didn't put up a single web page online. And only used email. It was free. So they procrastinated. And weren't as aggressive as they would be if they had to pay for hosting.
* So if I were to repeat my offer, I would add Rule # 2: their website or beta has to be up within 2 weeks.
(Also to weed out people who wouldn't use the free hosting after getting it - I started relying on how good they were with follow up. I usually asked a question on their first request. Once they answered that, I asked another question. And only then did I gave the hosting. Its amazing how many non-serious people drop out by that stage. These questions were basic ones: who is going to be your target audience? How many people in your team? Anything to just see their response reaction.)
People who write sales letters that are mailed a few million times, or who write copy for the 30 minute infomercials - use MBTI constantly. Before writing down a single word, they do research:
Step 1: Which MBTI profile dominates this particular products usage? (For HN - it would be NT)
Step 2: What do these people look for - to make a decision?
Step 3: How do we give this information to them?
When millions of dollars are spent on persuasion, people bet on writing for specific MBTI profiles - and not for the general audience. They realize that MBTI is not perfect. But it is a good framework none the less.
Its like being left handed or right handed. Being left handed doesn't mean you won't use your right hand at all. It just means that you prefer using your left hand for most tasks. And so it is with MBTI. Finding your specific type doesn't mean you don't have other types in you. It just means that you prefer one type over 15 others for most things. And it would be smart of me to focus on that one type to persuade you.
Indian startup scene is pretty much like the Chinese startup scene. American success stories are ripped off and given a local twist. Because this ripping off is lucrative - but comes without a lot of startup risks.
All the big R&D hubs in India are run by Non-Indian companies (IBM, Intel, Microsoft)... thats not a coincidence. Indian companies are yet not at the stage of spending a lot on R&D (medicine and defense are 2 exceptions.)
Yes VC funding is increasing in India. But really - the biggest news I heard in the last year was a VC investing in a Netflix copycat. And Vinod Khosla investing in a micro-financing fund in India (copy cat of Grameen Bank etc...)
Use your current job to build a 6 month nest egg (calculate what you need to live on if you won't earn a penny for 6 whole months). Then parlay that 6 month safety net to start your own venture, or become part of another startup as a founder with more equity options.
And in the mean time, learn all you can from your current job. Not just about your work - but about how the company is creating its strategy, how its hiring people, how it manages folks, how it handles finances and gets external funding, how it gets clients - try to pick up a bit about everything.
And if you follow the latest online copywriting best practices, you'll know that creating 3-5 persona types for your website navigation is all that is required. Almost every one will follow one of those 3-5 pathways.
Sidenote about the test the article runs - re: adding text to a graphic tab...
In 1985, after finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple Computer Human Interface Group adopted the motto, "A word is worth a thousand pictures," And a descriptive word or phrase was added beneath all Macintosh icons.
When Michael Dell was young and selling newspaper subscription, he found that only 2 kinds of people bought newspaper subscriptions. Those who just got married. Or those who just shifted homes. Out of the total population, maybe 5% fit this criteria. But the people who form this 5% change constantly. (I don't know if its 5% or 7% or 10% - pulled it out of thin air to make a point.)
So if the % of clickers fluctuates or even goes down, but the people who form the clickers group keep on changing, then online advertising makes a lot of sense.
Laptops are not like stocks or other exchange commodities. As in, their prices won't fluctuate like crazy (unless of course you manage to get pre-order commitments to like 10,000 laptops.) At the scale we are talking about, we have a pretty good idea of what price discounts we'll get. And more importantly - who will be able to deliver them well.
Its important to keep scale in mind.
1. Source products from an auction company on consignment basis.
2. Find an event happening in town and pickyback to it - hold your auction at that event (with permission) or outside but very near the event (with no permission).
3. Auction the stuff. Anything over the reserve price = profit. Anything under the reserve price = sale canceled.
Sourcing products within 2 hours from an auction house is hard though - unless you already have a relationship with them before. But given a bit more time - and this is a good idea.
Trick 1: Forget about the $5.
2.
Trick 2: Forget about providing the actual service within those 2 hours. Use the 2 hours just for doing the actual trade.
3.
Then sell something before you buy it. If I was given just 2 hours, I would do quick brokerage.
Hour 1: Find a group of people who wants to buy laptops* at a decent price. Get their configs down and get a commitment.
Hour 2: Find a seller who will give the best price on bulk laptop purchases.
*Laptops because I think it has high profit margins. But if finding a group or a business that is willing to buy laptops is hard - I would switch to some easy product - like movie tickets.
1.
You have to put one person in charge of an app or project so that she takes care of maintenance. But putting one person in charge - as the article says - "gives executives no incentive to say their product line is on the decline and the technology used by a rival group will be the next big trend."
2.
But if you don't put one person in charge, the problem of getting good ideas improve. But it raises another problem: maintenance suffers. No one takes the responsibility of maintenance.
Its a catch-22. I think there has to be a mix of both the models: 1. Hierarchy for accountability. 2. Councils for idea generation. 3. And a mechanism that both models work well together.
2. Accessibility of information (no one wants to click 8 times to find what they're looking for)
3. The mood the design creates (colour / spacing / layout / font)
4. Uniqueness
1.
Round up the competition sites. At least 3-5.
2.
Go to: http://tools.seobook.com/link-tools/backlinks/backlinks.php and type in each of the competition sites one by one.
3.
See who linked to the competition and try to get a link back from there.
Whatever you do - don't go for a cookie cutter plan where all they do is write a press release and submit it out and then offer tracking services. Make the publicist sit down with you and create a customized plan.
It goes back to playing according to the medium rules.
Note: don't only do directory submissions. If all search engines can see is you're getting link backs from not so good pages, they won't rank you well.
And don't only rely on getting authority linkbacks. Because if search engines see that you have very few linkbacks, they won't rank you well.
So use them both: create good content and focus on getting authority linkbacks. And at the same time, submit your site to various directory submission services. Quality + quantity linkbacks = search engines ranking you well.
SEO is not fraud. But a lot of people who do search engine optimization sure don't know what they're doing.
2. Why isn't SEO fraud?
As a business, you create your promotional message. And then you decide where to run that promotional message. You determine where your right people hang out.
Say you determine that newspapers and radio ads are 2 good mediums for your message. But if you run the same message without any tweaks for the specific mediums, you won't do very well.
Your message has to be relevant for the medium.
If you determine that your business requires a website (or that your business is a website) - and that a lot of your right people will be using the search engines, you need to focus on SEO. You need to learn the tricks of SEO trade. And make your message fit the medium.
3. 5 Minute SEO
Two parts of SEO:
i. Onpage SEO: Search engines look at your web page to determine what it should rank for
- The URL of the page has to be keyword rich
- The title of the page has to be keyword rich
- Use H1 and H2 tags well
- Make sure the entire website is w3c validated
- Use meta description for key pages (especially product pages)
- Create an xml sitemap
ii. Offpage SEO: Search engines look at who is linking to you to determine how highly it should rank you
- Get links from authority websites
- Create good linkworthy content - linkbaiting is actually good
- Get thousands of links from directories (blog / article / rss directories)