Lean Startup para pymes

Mejora tus productos con el método Lean Startup

Rodolfo de Juana - Muy Pymes

“No hay nada tan inútil en el mundo como hacer con gran eficiencia lo que no debería hacerse en absoluto”. No lo decimos nosotros. El autor de esta cita es Eric Ries, autor de uno de los libros de gestión empresarial más importantes de los últimos años:  ”The Lean Startup”.

¿Y por qué decimos que es el libro de gestión empresarial más importante de los últimos años? Porque cada vez más start-ups (especialmente tenológicas) han abrazado con fuerza uno de los conceptos centrales del libro: MVP (Minimum Viable Product), es decir el producto viable mínimo o lo mínimo que tenemos que “entregar” al mercado para que sea viable y podamos comprobar la validez de nuestro producto o desarrollo.

La idea de la que parte es sencilla. ¿Por qué vamos a invertir una enorme cantidad de esfuerzo y dinero en el desarrollo de un producto, si puede que después no interese a nuestros clientes? ¿Por qué crear si no vamos a poder vender? Y si lo queremos decir en palabras del autor: “Tenemos la capacidad de construir prácticamente cualquier cosa que nos imaginemos. La pregunta clave no es ¿puede construirse? sino ¿Debe construirse?”

Y sin embargo es una idea que pone en cuestión el modelo clásico de empresa, esto es: desarrollo una idea de negocio, creo un producto perfecto, lo lanzo al mercado, recojo los beneficios. Lo cual dice Ries, siempre ha sido problemático porque no sólo es un problema que no haya beneficios sino pensar en todo lo que se ha invertido y tras es lanzamiento, comprobar que tampoco va a haberlos en el futuro. 

Minimum Viable Product

Eric Ries defiende que no tienen por qué llegar al mercado los mejores productos, sino sobre todo los que los consumidores están dispuestos a comprar. Y ahí está el quid de la cuestión: ¿Cómo sabemos qué productos están dispuestos a comprar?

Apostando por el minimum viable product o lo que es lo mismo, la versión básica del producto que tenemos pensado lanzar y que en el caso de por ejemplo en el caso de las start-ups tecnológicas ya se conocen como versiones alpha, beta privada, beta pública y lanzamiento del producto final.

¿Qué se consigue con el MVP? En primer lugar saber si el producto puede resultar atractivo para los clientes. Aunque sea en una fase embrionaria o inicial, podemos determinar si existe interés real en lo que estamos pensando en lanzar más adelante. En este sentido si pronto detectamos que nuestros clientes potenciales no sienten ningún interés real por nuestro producto o idea de producto entonces puedes ser un buen momento de plantearnos cosas: ¿Merece la pena seguir desarrollándolo? y si aún pensamos que sí lo es… ¿Tenemos que adoptar un ángulo radicalmente diferente?

La segunda ventaja es que obtenemos un feedback del mercado desde el primer momento. De esta forma tenemos un contacto directo con lo que pide el mercado, lo que les gustaría a nuestros clientes, lo que debemos mejorar, etc. Por supuesto este es un enfoque muy interesante en muchos casos, aunque también es cierto que no siempre el mercado sabe lo que quiere hasta que lo tiene.

Desde el Minimum Viable Product se pone en macha un ciclo de desarrollo del producto final, que se basa en tres fases:

• Construir: desarrollamos nuestro MVP centrado en las hipótesis que queremos comprobar.
• Medir: establecemos una serie de métricas con las que valorar nuestro experimento.
• Aprender: gracias a las métricas obtenemos información con la que aprenderemos nuevos detalles de nuestro negocio para seguir mejorando.

Este proceso lo repetimos una y otra vez hasta que acabamos por lanzar el producto final, de modo que cada vez que ponemos en marcha estas tres fases tomamos una decisión: perseverar en nuestra idea inicial o cambiar y enfocar el producto de otra forma.

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Tips para escribir un plan de negocios concreto

The Business Plan that Always Works

A business plan that attempts to account for all the possible changes that will happen in the future is obsolete before the ink is dry on the page.

Why is it that business plans never come to life? Why do almost all of them, once written, sit on a shelf and gather dust, while the futures they describe never see the light of day, and the businesses they lay out wobble their way into uncertain futures?

A traditional business plan is head-centered; it's an exercise in what business owners think they should do. Writing a traditional business plan is usually precipitated by one of two thoughts:

1. We'd better write a business plan because "that's what most successful businesses do"

2. We need to write a business plan if we want to go out and borrow money.

Traditional business plans are quite intentional. They are thoughtful, analytical, complete, decisive--all of the hallmarks of a supposedly "smart" business.

Traditional, head-centered, static business plans don't work. A plan that starts in the head, with logic and reason and thoughts, lacks passion and excitement and purpose. And a plan that starts with the assumption that it's been able to capture and account for all the relevant changes that will happen in the future is obsolete before the ink is dry on the page.

The business plan that will always work starts from a different place with a different set of operating assumptions. It starts from a heart-centered approach, which means it starts with experiencing the feelings you have. Not only does this plan tolerate change, but it relies on your building in change as a key factor that will keep you on the best course.

When I work with Entrepreneurs, I lead them through something I call 'The Dreaming Room.' This is the step before the business plan. In the Dreaming Room, we set out to imagine our businesses-but not from a logistics standpoint. Rather, we dream about the vision for the business. Why do you want to build it? Who will benefit? What will it mean to the world? Only after you understand those things, can you write any kind of tactical plan that will truly get you there.

The real difference between the business plan that always works and the traditional business plan is in how you think and feel about the plan--it's your attitude and your relationship to the plan that will make all the difference.

Inc.

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Las ferias como eventos de marketing

Why events are the final frontier in data-driven marketing

Lawrence Coburn is CEO and co-founder of DoubleDutch.

A few weeks ago, VentureBeat ran an article discussing how to get the best Return-on-Investment (ROI) when attending a tradeshow. It was a great piece, but the reverse question — how an organizer can measure ROI from an event — is an even trickier proposition.

It actually seems a bit odd that this question hasn’t been answered already. As technology budgets shift from the CIO to the CMO, Silicon Valley (and elsewhere) is rapidly becoming awash in data-driven marketing tools designed to help CMOs optimize that spend.

Yet event marketing continues to coast blissfully along, untroubled by nagging data insights. While an organizer will call an event a success, once you scratch the surface you find most of this “success” has been measured via anecdotal information and qualitative data as opposed to empirical evidence.

The optimists among us would say that this ability to survive – and even thrive – while running nearly blind (in a data sense) is a testament to just how valuable events are to marketers.  By doing the bare minimum of scanning some badges and retrieving a .csv file of leads three days after an event, CMOs are still seeing enough ROI to continue to spend – and spend big – on events.

But the pessimists among us are starting to get antsy.  Take, for example, the CMO Council, who in a recent study pronounced that trades shows and other events are falling woefully behind other marketing techniques in terms of measurable ROI. In an interview with CMO.com by Liz Miller, vice president of marketing programs and thought leadership for the CMO Council, said, “Marketers are looking for new, improved measurement and how to extract value from [events].”

Just how big is the event marketing budget?  PriceWaterhouseCooper estimates that $108 billion is spent per year in just the production of events in the US, which makes events a bigger industry overall than even the US automotive industry.  That same report puts event marketing at #2 in the overall marketing spend, just behind advertising.

Personally, I think spending such a huge amount of money without a clear understanding of ROI is reckless. In its current state, if I were in charge of the Event Marketing Industry I would likely be retargeting my spending to areas where I at least know what I’m getting.

The good news, however, is that there are seismic shifts happening around evaluating event ROI: specifically, companies are helping event organizers access data that was previously in the dark.

Probably the biggest difference between live events today and in 1992 is that most, if not all, attendees are carrying a smartphone with them. While paper business cards, booth babes, and hardware scanners remain pretty much unchanged, many people are leaving digital trails of their interests and interactions at events by using their smart devices

This data – captured by smartphones and pushed to the cloud – will eventually power a modern, data-driven approach to event marketing.

Much like how website analytics packages can be used to optimize websites for conversions, so too can live event data be used to optimize events.  Event organizers no longer have to rely on surveys to understand which elements of their event worked, and which ones did not.  They just need to look at the data from their event app (and perhaps take a quick look at tweetstream).

One of the areas crying out for optimization is in maximizing leads for exhibitors, who fund much of the industry. By using data logged by smartphones, event organizers can begin to map – and even proactively initiate – connections between attendees and exhibitors, thus helping exhibitors find the leads they desperately crave. The holy grail will be if event organizers can deliver more leads to exhibitors than the ones who physically walk up to a booth to get their badges scanned.

I suspect they can.

Event marketing has survived for many years as a giant, idyllic, data free island in the rapidly quantifying sea of marketing.

But that will not remain the case for much longer.

Lawrence Coburn is CEO and co-founder of DoubleDutch, a mobile technology provider for corporations, associations, and trade shows worldwide. 

Read more at http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/28/why-events-are-the-final-frontier-in-data-driven-marketing/#ERZgl8J5c7pKCv7l.99 

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Retorno a la inversión de asistir a una feria comercial

Mastering trade show ROI (or, How to get sent to your favorite shows every time)

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem

When was the last time you went to a tradeshow?

How did you measure the impact that the event had on your business or personal goals?  Attending tradeshows is more than just cruising the aisles and looking and exhibitor booths. Understanding the inherent mechanics of trade shows, executing a well-defined game plan, and measuring the results in your professional life can make the difference between a useless visit and a game changing trip.

And, of course, going to interesting shows and great places more and more often.

Attending a trade show is an investment

We exhibited at AWS re:Invent in November 2012, making a major investment to meet Amazon Web Services (AWS) users in order to help them improve and optimize their cloud infrastructure.

For an attendee the ticket price cost $1,000 just to set foot in the door. Put airfare, hotel room, and a decent expense budget into the picture and an attendee could easily spend $4,000 – $5,000.  For a show attendee justifying an investment like this, both in terms of hard cash and time, is hard if not impossible to achieve.  Especially when managers and other staff see an empty desk for a few days.

Or is it?

Break down the expectations from the event and consider an active game plan (both during and after the event) to measure the time and money ROI the event cloud potentially deliver. Let’s take a closer look.

There are two main areas that a trade show can show a valuable impact on the company: knowledge and deals.

Gaining knowledge

Many tradeshows offer breakout sessions to learn from experts in a specific field of work, industry or vertical.  Think of an accelerated course to capture knowledge that could improve your ability to solve specific issues, learn best practices, and improve workflow analysis and overcoming issues as they come along.

But breakouts are not limited to your direct line of work.

For example if you’re on the sales and marketing side, attending breakout sessions of an IT, cloud, or IT operations event can help improve your knowledge of the everyday flow your customers and prospect are experience. Leveraging this knowledge cloud have a direct impact on your day to day operations (e.g., improving cloud availability for DevOps) or give you added insights on how to engage your customer base (e.g., understanding what factors are important for DevOps to address when improving availability).

Deals, deals, deals

The objective here is to show measurable value in starting new deal flow, accelerating conversions in the pipe, and improving value from existing business. There are a few methodologies to include in your in-event game plan to ensure you allocate the optimal amount of focused time:

• Reach out to everyone related in your industry and start booking meetings
• Take an assertive approach and book 15-30 min time slots based on the objective you want to achieve.  Don’t stop until you get an answer.Total time investment: 50%
• Book sessions with exhibitors in advance
  This is important. Randomly cruising show floor booths is not a preferred strategy unless you’re open to discuss partnerships. Consider that each booth potentially represents months of planning and budget negotiation, meaning that each staff member at the booth is focused on building new business themselves.   Booking time in advance will ensure a decent amount time to carry out your main objective rather than randomly pulling someone out of their booth.Total time investment: 40%
• Cruise the show to understand the landscape.
  Some of your time must be invested in cruising the show to better understand the landscape, identifying potential partners, keeping tabs on competitors (both future and current), and staying in touch with associates.Total time investment: 10%

Understanding the underlying mechanics of a trade show and putting the right game plan to harvest the value at the show — and execute when you return to the office — can help you win budget each and every time you hit a new show.

Cameron Peron is VP Marketing at Newvem, a cloud operations optimization service designed for Windows  Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud users. Offering a business view into a company’s public cloud operations, Newvem actively tracks cloud health in order to help reveal and solve cloud irregularities related to cost, security, utilization and availability.  Follow Cameron at @cameronperon.

Venture Beat 

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Video: Lean Canvas

Lean Canvas

Una una serie de vídeos de una adaptación específica del Canvas Model de A. Osterwalder que ha realizado Ash Maurya y que denomina Lean Canvas. Personalmente lo he estado utilizando y creo que es una buena herramienta para guiar a las startups en sus procesos lean startup. Complementaria al Canvas Model y más específica en algunos de sus bloques como son el de Métricas Clave.

En este vídeo descubrimos las similitudes y diferencias entre ambos lienzos como introducción a los siguientes vídeos en los que vamos a poner en práctica a través de un caso su uso.

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Todo lo que tiene que saber sobre el emprendedorismo tecnológico en Silicon Valley

Everything You Need To Know About Breaking Into The Tech Startup Industry

SAN FRANCISCO, CA - JANUARY 31: Ben Horowitz accepts an award onstage at the 5th Annual Crunchies Awards at Davies Symphony Hall on January 31, 2012 in San Francisco, California. (Image credit: via @daylife)

Every week I receive dozens of emails, from old friends to blind reach outs, asking how they can break into the tech industry. As the tech industry continues to heat up, that number continues to climb. While there is no exact science to landing your big break, there are a few ways to increase your chances.

Those looking to break in generally fall into one of the following three groups:

“Noobs”

Noobs are looking for exploratory information about the tech space. They aren’t sure where to start, nor do they know the first thing about the tech space. Whether it’s by word of mouth or sheer curiosity, noobs are primarily concerned with understanding high level concepts such as the nature of the work, company culture, or the differences between corporate and startup life.

“Languishers”

The languishers know about the tech space but don’t have a specific passion. They want to be in the industry, but don’t know where. This middle ground is not a dead-end, but in order to get a job in tech (just as in any field), you eventually need to narrow your focus. Criteria to consider are the company’s development stage (seed funding? Series A? Series B?), industry (education, social media, etc) and even the size of the company. Saying you just want a job in tech is simply not enough.

“Know-it-alls”

The last category consists of the people who know exactly what they want. They typically have an idea of specific companies they want to work for, primary because of an industry passion or a particular relationship with (or admiration for) someone in the industry. They are keenly aware of what they’d like to pursue within the company, whether that be business development or software engineering.

If you are willing to honestly evaluate yourself, you will know where you fall among the three types. If you are a noob and/or languisher, there are things you can do to become a know-it-all. The most critical step is doing the proper research. Educate yourself on what is out there, who the players are, and where you fit in. From there, try to formulate opinions about the companies/industries you’ve researched so you can become a know-it-all.

Read constantly.

Educate yourself on what is out there, who the players are, and where you fit in. Knowing about the space is crucial and there is a constant flow of news in the startup world. This ranges from product announcements, funding news, and trend stories, to acquisitions, partnerships, and public blunders.  If you are a noob, some of my favorite recommended reading sites include TechCrunch, Pandodaily, The Verge, GigaOM, Mashable, Lifehacker, TheNext Web, All Things D, BetaBeat, Venturebeat, Wired, Fastcompany, ReadWriteWeb, Business Insider, and The NY Times Bits Blog. You can find some other great sites here: Techmeme.com/lb. Once you have familiarized yourself with the space, turn to more specific industry leaders for thought-provoking insights.

Some of my favorite thought leader blogs include Venture Capitalists like Fred Wilson, Mark Suster, Bryce Roberts, Bijan Sabet, Paul Graham, Roger Ehrenberg, David Lerner, Matt Harris, Dave McClure, Brad Feld, Ben Horowitz, and Steve Blank.

Some of my favorite blogs from Entrepreneurs include Chris Dixon, Eric Ries,Jordan Cooper, Josh Weinstein, Vin Vacanti, Brad Hargreaves, Micah Baldwin, and Mark Davis.

Network, network, network.

There is a saying in BD that a person is only as good as their network. Once you have put in time researching the industry of your choice, and are up to date with recent news and the current ideas circulating within the space,, then it is time to get out and meet people in the space. This means going to events and meeting people in your chosen industry, attending classes at Skillshare, General Assembly, and the like, or even asking friends to make introductions on your behalf.

To find out which events to go to you should sign up for all of these mailing lists (these are for NYC specific): Gary’s Guide, Skillshare, Curated List Of NYC Innovation Community Events from Charlie O’Donnell, Startup Digest, General Assembly mailing list, Meetup, Lanyrd, and oHours.

Sign up for these listings and try to attend at least two events per week. Another trick to figuring out which events to go to is to go on your social media of choice and follow people you want to meet. When they tweet or message out events they are attending (which happens often) you should jump at the opportunity to sign up.

There is no exact science to breaking into the tech space. But if you follow this formula of doing research, reading everything you can, and attending events, you will put yourself in an optimal position to break in. Take action and get started now.

Forbes

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Tamaño de mercado

Market Size

Frost & Sullivan

Market size is a measurement of the total volume of a given market. When determining market size, it is very important to define the measurement as precisely as possible.

A statement like, "The market for recorders is over $100 million per year," leaves a lot to be desired. What is wrong with that statement? Just like engineering, when monitoring or measuring a dynamic variable, the measurement must be well defined and all external variables considered. For example, if you were testing a jet engine for its vibrational characteristics, you would not just document the vibration level of the engine during operation. In a test of this nature you might also like to note the status of other parameters such as:

• Engine speed
• Fuel mixture
• Wind speed
• Wind temperature
• Time
• Oil temperature
• Weather conditions
• Altitude

It is obvious that fluctuations in these measurement variables could influence the engine's vibrational dynamics. For the same reason, when a market manager confidently states that the market for recording equipment is $100 million, we should request documentation on how this measurement was taken and determine the status of all other relevant parameters to gauge their impact on the forecast. For example:

What is the time period?

• One year (usually assumed)
• Six months
• One month

What was the date?

• 1986?
• 1989?
• 1991?

What geographic regions does the market cover?

• U.S.
• World
• Europe/Japan
• Nepal

What is the size based on?

• Production
• Consumption

How was the market estimate generated?

• Secondary data sources
• Competitor interviews
• End-user surveys
• Experience

What is the unit of measurement?

• Currency
• Units
• Volume

What groups are included in your product definition?

• Video recorders
• X/Y chart recorders
• Floppy disks
• Hard disks
• Film recorders
• Tape recorders
• Cassette tape recorders

Methods of Measurement

We cannot exaggerate the importance of making accurate measurements of market size. Virtually all companies make a rough estimate of that parameter and let it go at that. Some of the larger companies in broader product segments have a dedicated market engineering staff that accurately tracks the size of various market segments within market segments of the particular industry. Consider them lucky. However, less-significant product segments that the research community tends to ignore must rely on experienced "old boy" guesswork or (worse yet) on government statistics.

There are many methods by which you can calculate market size. These methods can be categorized into two subgroups - the wrong methods and the right methods.

How Not to Determine Market Size

• Based on customer demands extrapolated from a small sample size
• Based on potential
• Based on current rates of production or production capacity
• Based on government statistics
• Based on a competitor's guess or your boss's guess

Each of these five methodologies will most likely give you an incorrect measurement. Market size measurements based on customer demand and market potential tend to be on the high side because both methods extrapolate for all customers from a small sample what an ideal customer should buy.

Production is also a poor indication of customer demand because production and actual sales are rarely perfectly coordinated. Government statistics are calculated with very poor methodology and little regard for accuracy; be careful if you base anything on those numbers.

Typically, market size estimates are based on rumor and expert opinion. For example, we were talking to the chief executive officer (CEO) of a large manufacturer of industrial equipment. He asked us to tell him the market size for his product line. We told him we did not know, but he insisted that he had read an article of ours that discussed the numbers. We finally gave him an estimate, which he later used in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. For the next two years, that was the market size the entire industry used as a benchmark.

How to Measure Market Size

There are three ways to measure market size, two of which are based on competition and one of which is based on customers.

• Competitive sales (bottom-up approach)
• Competitive sales (top-down approach)
• End-user purchases

Of the top-down and bottom-up methods, the bottom-up approach is far more time-consuming but is more accurate. In essence, it uses a series of interviews with all suppliers to determine quantities sold by each company in the period. These are added together to give the total market size.

The top-down approach, which is used most often by research firms, is based on a series of competitive interviews where each competitor is asked for an estimate of the market size. These estimates are sometimes weighted and then averaged for the market size calculation.

The last way of calculating market size is based on end-user purchases during the period. If there are few end-users, this is an accurate measurement. However, as the end-user base increases, the cost rises and the accuracy of the measurement falls. A smaller sample will have to be taken and extrapolated to approximate the entire user population.

What Does Market Size Really Tell You?

Market size is one of the fundamental measurements that must be taken on the market. It is the standard measurement ruler against which all of a company's activities should be measured.

For example, expenses for an R&D project should be related to market size. The same is true for sales force and marketing expenses. On one hand, you do not want to over-invest based on market size. On the other hand, you do not want to under-invest in large, fast-moving markets.

Case Study: Measurement Instrumentation

This client was a 25-year-old manufacturing company founded by three engineers who were then fresh out of engineering school. Over the years, the firm evolved into a three-division company, as shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1 - Market Size: Case Study Company Structure

Division	Sales (%)	Salespeople (#)	R&D Expense ($ Million)
Pressure Sensors	34	24	12
Humidity Inst.	36	25	15
Navigational Inst.	30	20	14

Note: All figures are rounded. Source: Frost & Sullivan

The owners came to us frustrated with the low growth of their company. New products were not selling fast enough, and the only way they could see to encourage growth of the company was through acquisition. This represented a problem, however, as one of the three partners was 100 percent opposed to acquisition, another wanted the firm to "stick to its knitting," and the third wanted to start development projects into newer and exciting markets such as office automation and telecommunications.

The fundamental problem they had was that none of them really knew where their relative strengths and weaknesses lay. They had no marketing department per se, although they did have sales managers and a literature development group. Each division had its own sales support structure, and was of roughly equal size based on contribution to total sales.

We started on a quick market engineering overview of the company to determine where it was positioned in the market. As each division was in a radically different product area, we had to develop three distinct overviews.

The first and perhaps the most important parameter that we determined was the firm's size in each of the markets in which its divisions competed. Of course, knowing the market size and volume of sales of each of the divisions, we could immediately calculate market share, as shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2 - Market Size: Market Share Calculations

Division	Sales ($ Million)	Market Size ($ Million)	Market Share (%)
Pressure Sensors	40	600	6.6
Humidity Inst.	43	50	86.0
Navigational Inst.	36	110	32.7

Note: All figures are rounded. Source: Frost & Sullivan

This certainly was an eye-opener. It immediately showed us that the firm was looking for greener pastures while completely overlooking the green grass in its own backyard. It was quite obvious that the growth we were looking for would most likely be found in the pressure sensor market.

As we previously indicated, each of the company's three divisions was run by one of three partners. Unfortunately, the non-aggressive partner was responsible for the pressure sensor market.

A few simple calculations illustrated the immense potential that lay in the pressure sensor market, as shown in Chart 1 and Chart 2.

This analysis brought us to the conclusion that if the company had as many salespeople per market size in the pressure sensor market as it did in the humidity market, there would be 12 times as many salespeople to address that market. Moreover, R&D spending would be increased by $200 million as well, if it were in proportion to the humidity market.

The Response

• The company stopped its investigations into acquisitions and product development outside its areas of expertise.
• The company formed a management committee to oversee all product lines rather than segmenting the firm into three discrete divisions. The division strategy made no sense based on market size.
• The company began increasing the number of salespeople in the pressure sensor market. The company decided to increase the sales force by 10 percent per year for three years and to observe the level of sales per salesperson to determine if they remained stable.
• The firm allocated additional funds for product development to grow the pressure sensor market in line with the two other segments the company addressed.

The Result

• The company grew by an average of 11 percent per year over the next three years, approximately 6 percent higher than over the previous three-year period.
• Sales from the pressure instrument division now account for 51 percent of company sales, and this figure is projected to increase to 75 percent over the next seven years.
• Management harmony has increased considerably as management now chooses to base its decisions on market figures instead of personalities.

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Un pibe de 15 años que se volvió multimillonario

Meet Raphie: The 15 Year-Old Developer Who Built ShareBrowse

Forbes

There are moments in your life when you meet someone half your age who who has accomplished twice as much. I had that experience when I metRaphie Palefsky-Smith at theAngelHACK finals in San Francisco a few weeks ago.

Raphie is a 15 year old high school student attending Georgiana Bruce Kirby High School in Santa Cruz. At AngelHACK, Raphie won third place and a huge trophy for building a project called ShareBrowse (which is currently down).

Have you ever had to explain to your grandparents how to use gmail over the phone? How about Facebook? Twitter? Youtube? If so, ShareBrowse would have been an enormous asset. The concept behind ShareBrowse is simple: a zero-install Internet helper in your browser; all you need to do is share a link from one party to the other and both sides are able to see the same site and the other user’s mouse. While the concept is already embedded in other products, ShareBrowse spans individual applications and has a very clean interface.

After Raphie blew away the crowd and judges (one of them offered him an internship at Facebook, another at Google), I had the opportunity to connect with him and chat about his project, how he learned to hack at the tender age of 15, and which companies excite him right now.

Alex Taub (AT): When did you start hacking?
Raphie Palefsky-Smith (RPS): At the beginning of last school year. I’ve always been interested in tech — my dad’s in IT, and the computer gene kinda rubbed off on me. However, I wasn’t actually technical; I spent a lot of time online and worked with my school’s IT team, but I didn’t code. Last summer my friend showed me a blog post about theTeens in Tech Incubator program, and I thought it’d be a great experience — tech and business together! That was my first foray into the startup world. I started reading TechCrunch and going to meetups.

A lot of tension great between my two co-founders (of Codulous) and me. Looking back, I had unreasonable expectations for them — after all, I didn’t know anything at all about programming. So when school resumed I decided I’d learn to code myself and take matters into my own hands. I did an Independent Study in JavaScript, and to my surprise, I really enjoyed programming. From then on I’ve become progressively more technical.

AT: What have you built before?
RPS: I’m very much the tons-of-little projects type. It usually goes something like this: I find a cool API/library/technique and quickly hack something together. In the process of researching for that project, I find something new and embark on a new project. So none of these are at all complete, but a pretty broad list would be: a web interface for Spotify (nodejs), Solitaire Encryption (java), various Titanium apps, Arduino projects like game controllers, command-line Blackjack, a game/signboard app for a Launchpad MIDI controller, an Epsilon-greedy AB-testing framework, a little bit of Flash Augmented Reality stuff, and a couple quizzing apps for AP Chem. This summer I’ve been interning at a company called Offerslot, and I’ve been working a lot with geodata and Google Maps. They had me learn Ruby and it’s my favorite language yet.

AT: What made you build Sharebrowse?
RPS: I was planning to go to AngelHACK weeks in advance, but I’m a terrible procrastinator and delayed buying my ticket. When I finally got around to it, they were sold out! I resigned myself to going to the Reddit meetup in Golden Gate Park. However, on Friday I dropped by Firebase for their office hours (they do that every Friday). I’m a big fan of Firebase; I got my account the day they launched and immediately used it in several projects. Anyway, I had the pleasure of meeting James Tamplin, and we talked for a while before he asked if I enjoyed hackathons. I said I did, and as chance would have it, he had an extra ticket to AngelHACK! This was the day before the event, so I got on the Caltrain and began wracking my brain for ideas. I specifically wanted to do something with Firebase. It’s not that I felt obligated to make something with their API, I just thought it’d be nice to have their support (plus, I was already a big big fan of the service. After they add more security features, I’m using it for *everything*).

Since their speciality is syncing data, I tried to come up with ideas that might really benefit from that. Eventually I settled upon syncing two browsers. The tech support angle didn’t immediately jump out at me, initially I thought it’d just be really cool. The best practical application I could think of was demoing a website or avoiding the need to send a bunch of links. It wasn’t until about 30 minutes before the first demo round (with the help of Andrew from Firebase) that I settled on helping granny as the main use case — it was by far the easiest one to pitch, as almost everyone’s had that problem. Ironically, I really haven’t — my parents are all pretty good at tech — but I knew it resonated with quite a few people.

AT: Where do you want to go to college? Or do you want to go at all?
RPS: I absolutely positively want to go to college. I’m gunning for Stanford, but I’d also love to go to CMU, MIT, or Cal. Maybe even an Ivy. I know a lot of startup people don’t really fit into the educational system (which I totally resonate with – it’s broken in a lot of ways), but for me it works pretty well.

AT: What do you want to do when you get older?
RPS: I definitely want to code for a living after college. Hopefully as a technical cofounder of some exciting startup.

AT: Which companies are you excited about?
RPS: Oh god, I’m excited about a bunch. Pretty much anything I read about on Hacker News piques my interest. The companies I’m most into *at this very moment* are Code School (awesome platform for learning), and a couple of online design sites — Easel.io, Accelsor, and Divshot. That’s a huge pain point for me. I love the html and js side of the web, but when it comes to CSS, I can design as well as John McCain can pick a running-mate. I’ve never been a visual person. At all. So the prospect of drag ‘n’ drop mercifully quick design is very welcome. BTW, ShareBrowse was designed by two lovely gents — Ben Reyes contributed to the first version, and Marc Laugharn did the final version.

On that note, there are some other people I definitely need to thank. Here’s the whole list (in no particular order; everyone was amazing): Daniel Brusilovsky, Andrew Amis, Ben Reyes, Marc Laugharn, the whole teams at AngelHACK, Firebase, Tokbox, Nodejitsu, and Offerslot, my parents, the webetalk IRC gents, and Carter Hinsley. ShareBrowse would never have been finished without people to bug about iframe permissions and socket.io.

AT: What are all your friends playing in school?
RPS: Not many coders at my school, but a ton of gamers. Starcraft, TF2, and League of Legends mainly. I host a Minecraft / Ventrilo server in my living room (some other members of the gaming league do the vast majority of the admin work, I just have fast internet).

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5 cosas para mejorar su identidad digital

5 Key Things Needed To Improve Your Digital Identity

Having a solid digital identity is more important now than ever. The first thing anyone will do when they hear your name is Google search you. Would you like to rely entirely upon an algorithm? I didn’t think so. This is twenty-first century due diligence. Your online presence requires cultivation and work: make sure it is not only up-to-date, but also accurate and tasteful.

Here are five tips to improve whatever you are currently doing:

1. Get a Twitter account and make it legitimate.

• Switch your Twitter account to @firstname+lastname or @initials — none of this number garbage.
• Add a short bio to your profile: a brief, high level overview. Long bios are tough on the eyes and people may think you don’t really do anything). See mine here:@ajt.
• Start following people and subjects that are relevant to your industry (or in the industry you want to be in). Remember, Twitter is an interest network, not a social network.
• Be active! Tweet daily news articles that you find interesting. Reply to people who share interesting things. Be part of the conversation!

2. Create an About Me page.

• Go to about.me and set up a page; the ideal formula is about.me/(your first name)+(your last name). So, for instance, about.me/alexander+taub.
• Link up all your social media accounts and add a short bio about yourself.
• Add a photo of yourself and a background.
• Add the link to your signature on every email you send (you can access this in your email settings; for instance, Gmail users can change their signature here.)

3. Acquire domain names.

• Pick up or buy the following websites: YourFullName.tumblr.com (get it on tumblr.com), FullName.com, AlternativeFullName.com
• Buy them for two or five years: you will get a better deal.
• This will help control what people see when they search your name.

4. Work on your blog.

• Start thinking about blog post ideas. You have a perspective that is unique; what have you seen or experienced that is worth sharing, and might be valuable to others?
• Make a draft every time you have an idea but also spend time thinking of a theme. Examples of themes include lessons learned, tips on x, y, and z, how you are unique/different, etc.
• Decide how frequently you want to blog: once a day, week, month. Stick to it.
• Consistency is absolutely important, but some people only want to write when there’s something to write about. That’s fine, but the option exists to use substantive “filler content” (i.e. share quotes, links, etc.) so there aren’t huge gaps in content on your blog.

5. Go to events (not really digital, but very important as physical and digital overlap)

• For New Yorkers: Sign up for Charlie O’Donnell’smailing list, General Assembly, Startup Digest NYC, andGary’s Guide to know what events are coming up.
• Share the events with your friends/followers — be someone “in the know.”

These tips should help you become visible and take control of your online identity. I’ve been working on this for a few years now and try to follow my own advice. If you Google search “Alex Taub,” “Alex Taub Dwolla,” “Alex Taub Aviary,” “Alex TaubTech,” or some other variation, my information covers the first page. Not some other Alex Taub. If I’m not logged into Google my LinkedIn comes up first, then my blog, then my Twitter handle, then a celebrity producer named Alex Taub (Producer of Television shows like Early Edition, Drop Dead Diva), then my About.Me.

Owning my digital identity didn’t happen overnight. If you look at all my social media, I have a consistent brand across the sites (same bio of “Biz Dev, Entrepreneur, and Dwolla. Previously at Aviary. Forbes Contributor”). This matters because I want people to be able to connect with me if they need to get in touch; I want people to know who I am and what I do. By having a consistent, visible digital identity, I’m putting myself in a position for good things to happen. I recommend you do so as well.

Forbes

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Cómo estimar tamaño de mercado

How to estimate market size

As an entrepreneur, your time is a very valuable asset. It takes as much time and effort to build a business whether you’re attacking a small market or a big one. But the rewards for success in a big market are much greater, so it makes sense to attack big markets.

For the same reason,VCs are often very focused on market size. But there is is a lot of confusion about how to estimate market size. While you might play in a big industry, it is the Total Addressable Market size (TAM) that is really important.

TAM is really a pretty simple concept – it is what your revenue would be if you had 100% market share in your business. This is often radically different from what an analyst report estimates as market size as their view of the “market” can be quite different from what your product can address. Here is an excellent analysis from VigLink of their TAM:

Viglink allows publishers to put commerce links into their content with a universal affiliate code, and then tracks sales that originate from those links and pays out the affiliate fee. As you can see above, they have done a really nice job of starting with an enormous “market size” ($600bn+ ecommerce market) and broken it down into what is addressable by them, the network payout piece of commissions coming from affiliate orginated ecommerce transactions, which is still a $1b+ opportunity.

I’d urge other entrepreneurs to conduct similarly realistic analysis when they present market size estimates.

LSVP

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