Email Deliverability Hack: Adding mark as spam in your own email

September 11th, 2008 4 Comments Noah

With our new startup one of our BIGGEST challenges is getting email into inboxes, and we just started sending them:O If you’ve ever ran a website with more than 20 users, I am guessing you know my pain. I know Ted has written up some great tips on making your email work. So has Auren. [...]

Should you give discounts?

August 14th, 2008 17 Comments Noah

Fortunately, my car and motorcycle have both broken within the week. Yay! Now, my mom is driving me to meetings;) Anyways, I was at JP Automotive (car mechanics) and trying to get a deal. Our conversation went like this:
link to photo
Noah: “JP, I am broke, poor and hungry. Please can I get a discount.”
JP: “No.”
Noah: [...]

Startup Tips: Health Insurance

July 22nd, 2008 10 Comments Noah

This is not a sexy post about marketing or product but something I was hoping to share with anyone starting or looking to start a start-up. We are a small team of 3 working on our new project and my mom kept bugging me to get health insurance for riding my motorcycle. I frankly never [...]

Learning Viral: What to do when you are NOT Viral

June 17th, 2008 7 Comments Noah

I was thinking about this during a drive about many sites and services that just don’t have a natural or artificial viral component. Some great sites come to mind:
Kayak.com, like.com, scribd.com (questionable).
link to photo
Your Marketing person is thinking: “Shit, I wrote that I do viral marketing on my resume and our site is not viral [...]

Startup Tips: Getting to that first 10,000

June 12th, 2008 No Comments Vinnie

This post was written by the great Vincent Lauria on how they grew Lefora.com so fast.

So how did Lefora get to 10,000 communities in just 3.5 months? I think it can be broken down into just 3 steps:

Solve a Problem
Develop alongside a real audience
Support the early community

.
1. Solve a Problem
Research - Not just web [...]

Obama uses viral marketing to raise money and love

May 27th, 2008 3 Comments Andrew

My friend Christel Hyden told me how the Obama campaign got her to donate twice as much money–and made her heart Obama more. Here it is in her words:
I decided last night to finally give to Obama because they sent me an email saying that my donation would be matched by someone else, and [...]