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CHAPTER SIX: Make Your Calendar Thoughtful

In This Chapter:

–How to hack your calendar to be more thoughtful
–How to never forget your moms birthday

Your calendar can keep you smart about meetings—But, what if we told you it can also make you a bit more thoughtful?

You may have a handful of important dates like your spouse or kids’ birthdays or perhaps some holidays sprinkled in your calendar. But what about all the other “mini anniversaries” and holidays that may be important to others that may not be easy to remember?

A great way to keep you looking 10x more thoughtful than you could ever be is to populate your calendar with a cross section of “events” that you’d love to respond to when they come up. Can’t think of any? Well, friend, th...

I read a popular article recently arguing why anti-lean startups are back because lean isn’t a…viable…way for ambitious startups tackling new domains, like artificial intelligence, to take moonshots.

Hmmmm…

As a practitioner of lean startup achieving high growth in Fin-Tech, I’m intrigued with counter-arguments to the methodology.

The article states getting paying customers is an anti-lean advantage:

“Anti-lean ventures, which have what lean startups sometimes lack, customers willing to pay for them. This fact alone upends the usual freemium model!”

Actually, points can be made that lean startups are particularly good with validating market (willingness to pay) risk.

Many lean startup experiment designs like ‘Wizard of Oz’ or ‘Concierge...

When you’re at a startup and don’t have a budget for marketing, PR is a great way to get your market’s attention and foster growth. The right PR strategies will create awareness for your startup company and product and expand your reach.

There are so many articles on building long-term PR campaigns just to get one journalist’s attention, that it can be overwhelming when you’re looking for effective tactics that work right away. Luckily, you don’t have to wait months for one press hit.

Doing PR for startups can lead to massive growth

Here are five simple PR strategies that will drive instant results for your startup.

1. Find co-marketing partners

Co-marketing is a very effective way to broaden your reach by collaborating with another compan...

Startups.co, the world’s largest startup launch platform, announced Tuesday, August 11th that they have signed an agreement to purchase Zirtual, the leading platform for connecting fast-growing startup companies with virtual assistants.

This agreement comes on the heels of an announcement by Zirtual on Monday, August 10th that the company would pause operations while it made a transition. The brief outage was due to a capital infusion that the company was counting on for expansion. Startups.co has notified all Zirtual employees, clients and associates that the service will resume normal operations as of Monday, August 17th.

The Zirtual service has grown at a rapid pace, expanding to over 400 Zirtual Assistants (ZAs) in just a few years, ser...

Remember when clouds were just for sifting snow, and “the Cloud” was just for storage?

A lot has happened since those days. A lot. But the Cloud’s out-of-sight and out-of-mind nature makes it easy to miss the benefits of the latest developments.

Why Cloud computing matters

Recently I sat down with my colleague Eric Schmidt, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) certified Cloud Systems Architect, to talk about his perspective on the future of Cloud computing. Our aim was to exchange ideas as we create products and services our customers value.

Cloud computing is a key strategic compon...

Don’t miss out! Check out the previous chapters here:

–Chapter One
–Chapter Two
–Chapter Three
–Chapter Four

CHAPTER FIVE: Build Priority Folders

In This Chapter:

• Easily access the most important emails first with priority folders
• Build a response system based off importance—not time.

So, one of our biggest goals is to get rid of all of the time sucking aspects of email. Email drains our time because we don’t process it properly.

For example—take a quick peek at your inbox.

Are you back? Cool.

Well, you’ll note that there is typically only one factor that sorts all of those wonderful and random messages—and that is Time.

While this will help you figure out who’s emailing you at 3am, and who emailed you a few seconds ago—it really doesn...

We’ve all been there: You’re searching the web for some new shoes but then get distracted by a TV show or an incoming text message. Upon opening up your laptop again, you notice that there’s magically an ad for the running shoes you were looking at before.

Coincidence? Not in the slightest.

Smart marketers understand that there is no magic wand needed for this trick. Instead, they strategically utilize retargeting to reengage missed consumer opportunities.

This powerful strategy — when implemented properly — can inspire casual browsers to convert into customers. And many companies are willing to pay more for retargeted ads because they appear for consumers whose intent to purchase is typically higher, such as shoppers who have abandoned an ...

Wil Schroter: Baremetrics did the unthinkable – it showed the rest of the world what other companies were doing in revenues – publicly. It pulled back the most sacred curtain. Why in the hell would you have ever thought that would be a good idea when so much common business practice does the opposite?

Josh Pigford: Our transparency is rooted in laziness! Back when I first launched Baremetrics I felt strongly about having a live demo instead of some screenshots. I could have generated an infinite amount of fake data, but that’d have taken a lot of time and I don’t think it’d have felt as authentic.

On top of that, my friends at Buffer and Groove and clearly had some success in being transparent, so figured what the heck!

At that point Barem...

Today I’m ridiculously excited to tell you about a product I’ve been personally waiting on for a very, very long time – Startups Live!

Startups Live is a moderated, members-only Slack community where we’re pulling together the smartest Founders (and their teams) into a single discussion for one hour every day.

Real Time, Moderated, Focused

None of us have time for another forum or Slack community of random chatter. We’re not interested in sifting through trolls or hoping someone comes up with a topic that might be interesting in a chat room somewhere.

That’s why we’re keeping it short – 1 hour, every day – at 11a EST / 8a PST.

Each day we’ll be moderating the discussion to keep it fresh with new topics and adding in special guests and exp...

When people talk about the transformative innovations shaping business in the 21st century, you may hear them talk about the influence of automation or the impact of increasing globalization. But one of the most revolutionary aspects of the digital revolution often goes unmentioned: social media.

Because so many of us tweet and post and share day in and day out on our personal accounts, it’s easy to think that social media is… well… easy.

But social media has completely transformed the way businesses connect with their audiences. And as any Founder who has struggled and failed to drum up an online audience for their brand can tell you, effective social media strategy is deceptively hard to get right. It takes a delicate balance of strategy ...