Hot answers tagged growth
12
Newcomers are able to surpass established companies by picking the right established company to surpass, let me explain -
Usually, once a company get to a certain size it gets filled with politics, bureaucracy and incompetent middle management - at that point most of the work in the company is directed by political in-fighting between divisions and the ...
11
To me, the obvious starting point is your 600 customers. Do you even know why they are your customers? It seems to me you do not know what they really like about your product, and what they think could be added or improved. Do you know anything about those that did not choose your offering? It would be useful to know why they did not go with you.
I ...
8
Some ideas:
Have a group of "followers" who will join your forum. (Stackoverflow was started by two co-founders who had blog readerships in the tens of thousands).
Make sure the subject of your forum has a potential market big enough to have an active site. If it's too small the forum will feel empty, and new people will leave.
Work on the SEO, and be ...
7
I cleaned house. I had a bunch of people on board who were nice guys, pleasant to have around, but were complacent, unproductive, incompetent, and did not strive to become better. We went from 3 partners plus 10 employees down to 2 partners plus 3 employees. I now own 64% of the business instead of 50%. I now have the power to do things without needing a ...
7
You might be asking the wrong question because:
Notice that a lot of the answers here involve leveraging existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and I would add LinkedIn and mailbox integration with GMail, Yahoo Mail, and HotMail.
Of course when Facebook was growing, these didn't exist (in the massive, ubiquitous form they're currently in) and ...
7
I think you're definition of "growing fast enough" is a bit subjective. Here are some things you need to remember:
Creating an online community is extremely hard because you have a chicken + egg problem. You need active users to get new users.
Anyway can come up with an idea, a lot of people can build the site, but few people can focus and persevere long ...
6
One of the problems with trying to use other company/people success is that there is a bias towards "survivors" and there may not be any usefulness in copying them.
Essentially you can look at the outcome of facebook and other popular sites as the one lucky survivor out of thousands of initial participants. Eventually you will have a company that has "made ...
6
GET A SALESPERSON. I can't believe you don't have one. Bring someone in who will sit there all week long and call up every single condo and try to get them to buy. Pick a wealthy neighborhood and work down the streets, one at a time, cold calling. Call every single happy customer and ask them to refer two others.
If the salesperson doesn't pay for ...
5
One answer is this: without employees, you probably don't really have a company, you just have a job. That's not ALWAYS true, but it's often true.
After that, it all depends upon what you means by "profitable". For example:
Company A has 150 employees and earns $1M net profit per year.
Company B has 30 employees, and earns $1M net profit per year.
...
5
You could use Alexa statistics to estimate your growth rate. But you shouldn't do it for long-time established companies like Yahoo. Do it for relatively new sites of a similar nature.
For example, here is onstartups.com:
That looks pretty linear to me.
If you think you've got the end-all to be-all, then you can use stackoverflow.com:
Still pretty ...
5
Hiring is tricky, most standard recruitment agents are nothing more than order takers ... They just tick off skills which isn't helpful, I have found 2 Recruiters that understand our company and our culture and have the ability to find suitable fits.
That said it took working with 15-20 different agenecies in 14 years to get these 2.
One bit of advice ...
5
They grow by getting connecting people that share the same interests.
If they are included on a strong company/organization that alreay have lots of hits, so a forum is just one more contact channel, and grow is easier.
If they don't have that advantage, they usually grow the usual way, by mouth-to-mouth/friend recommendation/ads and a lot of patience. I'm a ...
5
A few tips:
Give people something they can't get anywhere else.
Carefully structure your site architecture and HTML to optimize SEO for your target segment.
Use social media like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, etc to aggressively share good content and make it easy for your users to share content.
Get guest bloggers from your target segment to post on ...
5
Well I think this is a range of issues not just facebook, more the social engineering problem.
I wouldn't want the bulk of my friends knowing I was on a dating site.
I might want to let a subset / group know.
I would instantly opt out of a dating site that forced me to do anything. There are lots of them and I would just jump to the next
If your using ...
5
Metaphor: Have you ever played the game snake? Big companies having long tails, changing direction takes a lot of fore-thought and requires substantial momentum.
Startups have no tail, your ability to adopt and change direction gives you the potential to strike markets faster than your bigger competitors.
5
raj, take a break!
Hand over power for a few days to a trusted employee and go do something completely else than what you do now. Drive go-cart, play bowling, go top the mountains, fish, watch your favorite movies, what ever that can entertain you and keep your mind off business for a few days. Remember, we are not robots.
After that you will be able to ...
4
Put together a project plan with estimates for development, along with how that relates to your company getting paid. Show how, by adding more developers, you can make money faster. Also, this will give everyone a timeline for when the first project will be done, and when you will need a second project to start working on.
It is all about money to some ...
4
The most powerful element in growing a social network is referrals via your new user's contact list.
The ability to import address books automatically to send out invitations is key to viral growth.
This tactic is so crucial that Facebook acquired a company for such talents recently.
Imagine if there is an average of 100 addresses in each new user sign up ...
4
With a very broad stroke, larger firms have more revenue per employee than small ones. Last time I looked, the smaller companies in the Software 500 was around $100K and the larger ones was more like $250-300K. To benchmark your industry, go to hoovers.com (or like) and sample a sizable number of companies then do your your own simple math averages.
...
4
Congrats - admitting you have a problem is the first step.
Don't "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs." Regardless of your informal process, someone has managed to make sales. Now you want to tell them to spend more time entering data, so you can feel more comfortable with the process. They will see is as micro-management. Good sales people have an ...
4
I'm not a huge twitter user personally, but I've seen it best used for doing four things.
1) Use it for short info blurbs that aren't worth the company blog. Ex: server downtime, 1000th user announcement, single feature tweaks
2) Use it to get immediate feedback or informal polls from users. Ex: We just released this new feature, what do you think about ...
4
My feeling is that Quora is not very helpful. It is more useful for general high-level overviews on topics.
I am also myself wondering whether there are any real notable differences in this site and Quora. I kind of prefer the format of the stack-overflow sites so I use this site.
So far this site has not been helpful for me, but I try to answer ...
3
This situational is typical in most tech start ups where the core team is divided in terms of skill. The only option is to to be blunt and let your partner know that x number of people can only to y things at a time and y may not necessarily meet the deadline for your product(s). If your planned market is small you do not need a huge marketing/advertising ...
3
You might want to take a serious look at your business model before you begin to 'scale'. And define what 'scale' means to you. Most entrepreneurs think 'more customers' is the only way, but in fact this is often the most undesirable form of scaling a business. More customers equals more stress and more time and more pressure on staff.
A much more ...
3
Growth eats cash. There are lots of stories about profitable businesses that went under due to lack of cash.
As one of my business coaches says, "You can't spend profits, you can only spend cash." What he means by this is that when using accrual-based accounting, you typically recognize revenue before you receive the payment. At Blue Fish, we recognize ...
3
Pretty much the same thing happened to me (the technology guy in the company). We ended up closing the company and released the source code to the customers. I ended up continuing to do for the existing customers for changes / enhancements / support, but it only requires a fraction of the time than before than when my effort was on cranking out new features ...
3
I'll answer the question title rather than the one asked in the body!
Perceived wisdom is that a recession is a good time to start a small business:
Companies begin to work with smaller firms and freelancers on an ad-hoc basis.
More scope to keep your own costs down.
Less opportunity cost for you.
Good people are looking for work and partnerships.
...
3
There's not much point - in my opinion at least - prioritising low-value possibilities over high-value ones, if the effort's similar. It costs more to market test commodity services.
There is a genuine choice, though, in the matter of whether you start free, to try and build scale and experience; or whether you start by charging, to test whether your value ...
3
Probably the biggest problem most startups have is getting exposure for their product. Often times they think they just need to put something on the internet and the buyers/users will come and nothing could be further from the truth.
It is sometimes better to do a partial development and get some initial feedback from the market and see if there truly is ...
3
I don't know about the rest of the people here, but I think you are looking at the trees and not the forest.
How is your dating website different from match.com, chemistry.com, eharmony.com,...? Exactly.
The question here is not how to attract users using the Like button or facebook or OpenId. The question is how to attract users. Period.
"I want that ...
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