How NOT to do Marketing…Microsoft Style

June 18th, 2008 8 Comments Noah

Welcome to Noah Kagan’s Okdork! I am really glad you found me. Don’t go just yet. If you’re killing time at work, enjoy marketing, online communities and other business things; then you are at the right place.

You should check out my Okdork Virgin Guide to get started.

If you like what you read why don’t [...]

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

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

Startup Tips: How I grew a waiting list of 20,000+ at Mint.com Part I

June 3rd, 2008 25 Comments Noah

Recently I got a question asking
“i was curious what methods you used to build a 20k pre-beta email list, and what were the conversion rates for those emails?”`

I love Mint.com and if you are not using them for your personal finance then bleh. Anyways, I think for many new startups the largest challenge is distribution [...]

Learning Viral: What my Brita taught me about Commitment

May 30th, 2008 6 Comments Noah

I just moved into my own place in Pacifica,CA. Feel free to come work over here with me if you are interested. Can you believe I have my own place? Anyways, I bought a Brita water filter to have some delicious filtered water.

After I took out the pitcher it made me tear apart some [...]

How the Top Social Networks got started

May 21st, 2008 10 Comments Noah

It might be unknown to many but the majority of all social networks were started by a spamming of some sorts.
link to photo

MySpace used their ResponseBase email marketing list of 100 million+ people to send for first users.

Facebook spammed all the Harvard email lists to get the first 2,000 users in a day.

Hi5 used their [...]

Be Careful what you Advertise

May 15th, 2008 16 Comments Noah

Yes, Google Adsense can make you a lot of money but at the same time it can hurt you. Notice anything wrong with this photo?

Solution: Go to Google and filter out your competitor list…
The person with the funniest comment wins the book Difficult Conversations.