On Victory

I’d rather Lose the Right Battle, than Win the Wrong Victory.

  • Florin Muresan

Deep, deep thought

I was intrigued to find out that what sets us Humans apart from Beasts and mere animals is our inability to want what we need.

  • Florin Muresan

What a Startup Really Is

I’m getting sick of hearing people saying that a startup needs to be a young company (<2 years) that’s growing “hockey-stick”-style.

I’ll give you the real definition of what a start-up company is:

Startup = an organization which is still searching for its business model.

It gets money to continue experiments and testing for the business model. When the biz model is clear and has all of the processes 100% established, then it is no longer a startup.

Paul Graham’s ideas about high growth and bla bla are besides the point. I believe Steve Blank has a better view on this.

[Product Design] The Hierarchy of Engagement

[Article from:: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hierarchy-engagement-sarah-tavel]

Building an enduring, multi-billion dollar consumer technology company is hard. As an investor, knowing which startups have the potential to be massive and long-lasting is also hard. From both perspectives, identifying companies with this potential is a combination of “art” and “science” — the art is understanding how products work, and the science is knowing how to measure it. At the earliest stages of a company, it comes down to understanding how a product is built to maximize and leverage user engagement.

I think of user engagement as the fuel powering products. The best products take that fuel and propel the product (and with it, the company) forward. Just how products do that is something I’ve been thinking about for most of my career.

At the Habit Summit this week, I presented a framework for how I evaluate non-transactional consumer companies I’m looking to invest in that synthesizes some of this thinking — I call it the Hierarchy of Engagement. The hierarchy has three levels: 1) Growing engaged users, 2) Retaining users, and 3) Self-perpetuating.

As companies move up the hierarchy, their products become better, harder to leave, and ultimately create virtuous loops that make the product self-perpetuating. Companies that scale the hierarchy are incredibly well positioned to demonstrate growth and retention that investors are looking to see.

I encourage you to use the Hierarchy of Engagement framework when thinking about your own product, and building out your product roadmap. But, like most frameworks, I am continuously improving the hierarchy and would love to hear your thoughts.

Let me know what you think.

And here’s the presentation on SlideShare:

 

Squirrly SEO vs Yoast – a complete argument for SEO WordPress Plugins

You can use them both, that’s for sure. Squirrly has been built to work with Yoast and All In One SEO.

Yoast and AIO SEO are good for the basic SEO on your site: the things that are about the SEO structure of the site. We offer those functions for free as well, but if you already have them setup in these plugins, just use them.

Squirrly is a paid plugin, and there’s a good reason for it. Here’s a break-down of the main elements of the software and it would cost if you had them from other providers.

The power of Squirrly comes from:

1) Keyword Research (which impresses Neil Patel 10 Time-Saving Blogging Tools You Need To Use) (worth $68 / month :: keywordtool . io). In our tool, you can search for specific markets, not just by using data from google.com, you can do Google .com . br or any other

2) SEO Audit, which is one of the most craved for element of our All-Inclusive solution. It gets data about your site, shows you what you need to fix and how to improve your visibility score. (worth $49 / month :: woorank . com)

3) WooCommerce SEO , which is amazingly useful for ecommerce WordPress sites. (worth $79 at Yoast Woocomerce)

4) Instapage SEO , which is the only such thing on the market. Instapage is the best landing page creation software we’ve ever used, but they lack SEO on their WordPress deployments. Thus, we’ve taken care of it. It’s the ONLY SEO plugin that works with Instapage.

5) Google GEO Rank tracking for all your pages. What? This is a crazy and really solid benefit you get from using the Squirrly plugin. (worth $99 / month over at GeoRanker) You can use it to track pages for your very own specific country: Spain, Russia, you name it. It will show you the exact position in google of the page for your search engine location. You can set any location you need to track.

6) On-Page Optimization for Search Bots and Human beings on all Your Pages, Articles, Landing Pages, Products. You get feedback from our tool as you’re typing your content. You will always know when it’s 100% human and SEO friendly, so you can publish with peace of mind. (Worth over $200 / month at Inbound Writer).

7) Social Media Metrics for each page, product, article. Reddit, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter (YES, Twitter! The same api and great stuff that Mashable uses these days, after Twitter removed counts from their own API), Google Plus, LinkedIN. You will get to see your top performing channel for each Article. Amazing value! (worth $99/month at BuzzSumo if you tried using their tool for these details).

8) Inbound Metrics straight from MOZ. We pay a lot of money to bring you these. Just check their API pricing. To get this sort of details in your wordpress it would cost you $99 / month.

9) Content Marketing Lessons (worth $197 over at Udemy.com)

See? The value of using Squirrly SEO Plugin for WordPress comes from these 9 strong points that ONLY we offer to the WordPress community.

The Squirrly All-Inclusive SEO way is $20 / month for the PRO package, as opposed to $700 / month if you purchased all these tiny bits from the other providers.

Upgrades and Power-Ups for myself

  1. I recently became a member of OMFG from Chris Brogan (I’ve always liked that guy!)

It’s all about Ownership and Being an Owner, which is cool. It shows you how to own your decisions and actions.

2) I can add Makers and New Products to ProductHunt. Well, I’ve been doing this since December 2015, but I wanted to brag about it.

3) I have access to ES Summit and there’s tons of great stuff I can learn from there.

4) I might finally take Ovi’s advice and start a podcast tour. I have so many experiences to share.

5) I began using EmpireAvenue again. It still has active bloggers. #socool

EmpireAvenue is something I’ve used when we launched Squirrly. I had to get in touch with many bloggers and it seemed like the best way to do this.