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Wed, 08 May 2013 11:17:54 +0200

How to Create Winning Headlines in 9 Simple Steps

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:17:00 +0200

Getting heard, as in making your “news” interesting to others that your cofounders and your mum is a super important skill for any entrepreneur or leader

Whether your story is about you, your product or your startup it’s imperative that you can tell a story that others are interested in hearing. That’s what will make the product spread.

About a year ago I decided to learn the craft of writing press releases and stories. It’s a long on-going process in which I’ve found the hardest part to be the headline. Thus I was stoked when I found this blog post with detailed tips on how to create winning headlines. I wanted to share the best bits.

You can read the whole detailed post by Scott Martin, a direct marketing copy writer here

Types of headlines

• Lists

• How to

• News

It’s great if they are:

• Drawing a picture.

• Stating a fact.

• Asking a question.

Classic template formulas you can use

Are you ____________ ?

“Are You Ready for the Most Beautiful Lawn in Your Neighborhood?”

A word of warning about question headlines: I only use them when the answer is obvious to the reader. I never use open-ended question headlines.

“How I _______________”

“How I Overcame Joint Pain, Got Off the Sidelines, and Back in the Game.”

“How to ______________”

“How to Add at Least 20 Yards to Your Drives and Hit the Ball in the Fairway More Often than a PGA Tour Pro.”

“Secrets of ____________”

“Secrets of Wall Street’s Elite Investors Revealed…”

“Thousands (hundreds, millions, etc.) now ______________, even though they ________________.”

“Millions of ambitious investors are beating the ‘down market blues’ by listening to this woman’s advice…even though they know little or nothing about stocks and bonds.”

“Warning: ___________________.”

Perhaps my favorite headline but difficult to use well.

“Warning: a little-known change in the law will make it harder to manufacture chocolate. Here’s what you can do right now to keep making chocolate…”

“Give me _____________ and I’ll _________________.”

“Give me 10 minutes right now and I’ll show you how to sell your home for full value in any market.”

“__________ Ways to ______________”

“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.”

With apologies to Paul Simon.

Newsletters: Religion works the best, deals the worst. See what response percentage is a good result

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:34:23 +0200

Ever wondered if your newsletter is working?

Well, here’s some help for marketeers to judge themselves by from the nice guys at MailChimp. They have shared the average response rate. Very useful indeed!

All industries: http://mailchimp.com/resources/research/email-marketing-benchmarks-by-industry/

We use MailChimp in Everplaces. It’s very good but also very expensive. But these nice stats are for free!

Hard facts. Price per user in famous acquisitions

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 12:58:49 +0100

A startup is acquired for any combination of the technology, talent, or the user base. Here are some hard cold figures:

More info in this wonderfully informative blog post by Wired, including a spreadsheet with all this valuable information.

How much revenue do the big boys make? Stats on Facebook, Yelp and the rest of them

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:35:00 +0100

Cutting through the hype, smoke and mirrors these numbers of revenue show what’s really happening at Twitter, Groupon and their big cousins.

2012 Revenue Per Employee
Here’s a data table comparing the 2012 reported revenue over employee headcount, found from online public data.

Comment: Foursquare is officially “not to be focussing on revenue, but on growth”, in contrast to the others, so enjoys a little unfair comparison here.

Facebook shows highest revenue per employee
As reported by public available data, Automattic, Zynga, Twitter, and Facebook are all making over $300k per employee despite tech salaries often ranging in 100k range, with additional costs.

300k is benchmark
300k per employee can therefore be used as a benchmark for good revenue per employee. For comparison, Facebook is pushing over $1m per employee, and Google (50b revenue for 53k reported employees) is about the same, at $946k per employee. And while WordPress team has a modest $45m their revenue per employee stands toe to toe with the big dogs.

True success is in the ratios
People have a tendencies to compare apples with pears, such as Groupon’s revenues with Yelp’s, despite the massive difference in size and expenses occurred making same revenue. Unless you’re looking at the opportunity costs of one sector vs another, a much more nuanced picture is from ratios. It gives you a much better understanding of how you’re company is really performing.

Example, the startup scene is famously hyped, and early stage success tends to be measured in headcount. This is not a great measure since headcount is an expense and therefore hardly a great measure of success in itself (any idiot can hire lots of people). The best measure of success (or productivity) early stage is employees per user.

Best pre revenue performance

Among the most famous ratios, Instagram comes out on top, with one employee for every 2.07 million users.

The second highest user-to-employee ratio is OMGPOP (Draw Something) with only one employee for every 875,000 users (fastest growing mobile product in history, scaled to 50 million users within 50 days so probably never even got the change to hire).

On the other end of the scale are Aardvark, with one employee for every 1,800 users, and Zappos with one employee for every 3,400 users.

More information

This came from two super informative blogs:

Revenue per employee, by Web-strategist: Full article here
users per employee, by Wired. Full article here

Travel - what Google, Facebook and Kayak are betting on

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:59:01 +0100

Normally it’s hard to get anyone from the big three in tech travel to reveal anything about priorities or strategy. But having three of the head honchos on stage together at IBT, made them reveal a bit more.

Here’s key priorities of

Bernd Fauser, Global Accounts Director, Travel. Google
Lee McCabe. Head of Travel. Facebook
Jan Frederik Valentin Vicepresident Package Travel. Kayak

Facebook revealed they are working on becoming really good at sorting friends recommendations based on shared interest and level of trust, a mix between the social graph and interest graph.

“People are looking for filters, there is simply too much choice” . Facebook

Facebook expanded that their early venturing into graph search supports this observation, as the 2nd most frequent type of graph search is for places. So hotels, bars, and places you’re friends have visited and liked.

Google revealed the are working on making the whole process from discovery to booking more streamlined. Right now people check 12 sites before they book, therefore the overall process (the five steps of travel) is the big ambitious goal for Google.

On a question on on site operators such as tour operators Google was positive because these expend a service that can’t be done online.

“If you’re a tour operator that owns the whole value chain, and then extends that to include mobile, then you’re in a winning position”. Google

On whether search remains a key factor Google replied that “Our core business is answering questions. It’s not about links”. Which i why we should expect a lot more than traditional search results, depending if you’re looking for a recommendation, wants to know the weather or find a flight to book. Another example why owning the whole process becomes increasingly important to them.

Kayak said, their key focus remains price comparison. The are looking into discovery social recommendations, but consider it less important. However they did reveal to be working on an algorithmic that predicts what will be relevant to you based on your past behavior (by the sounds of it similar to a cookie with semantic analytic capabilities)

All agreed mobile is the future

“Going forward the land grab is getting your app on someone’s mobile phone. Then to get it onto the first two pages.” Facebook

The other key topic was meta data. Facebook went as far as to say that meta apps are one of the key opportunities. “Meta is a smart play”

This is all good news for Everplaces. I better get back to work;-)

"When going through hell, keep going"

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 07:29:58 +0100

“When going through hell, keep going”

- Winston Churchill may have been talking about politics, but hits it spot on for entrepreneurship too

How a VC fund works. Important knowledge for entrepreneurs

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:23:51 +0100

I wanted to share an excellent ressource. This article is a great explanation of how a VC fund work:

http://360cp.posterous.com/greed-and-vc-math-by-fausto-boni-0

In any negotiation and sales understanding that the person opposite you wants and needs to get out of the situation is important. I’d almost say its paramount to success. Despite this, many entrepreneurs don’t understand the maths and rationale that rules a VC fund. If you learn you’ll have a much better chance of picking the right fund based on the size of investment you require, and return you expect to be able to deliver.

Two key things a lot of people forget:

- Big funds require a potential for truly massive returns, so they wont invest in anything that doesn’t offer a chance of that.

- If you need too little money, you might not be worth their time. A investment manager normally manages around 8 investments, and it takes the same time to manage a tiny seed investment as a big one.

Enjoy the article

Here's how to get a neat and structured sales pipeline

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 14:05:33 +0100

Business development is a long and arduous process with a million little details you need to remember, and at the right time. So you need a system.

If your team has several people working on outside relations you definitely need a CRM system to keep track of what’s been said to whom. And we’re not just talking sales here, but also partnerships and key contacts.

This is not just to make you and your sales people’s job easier. It’s also because those relations are of critical value to the company and need to be sustained even if a key person leaves (the “if someone gets hit by a bus” rule).

I’ve tried so many of these systems that just didn’t cut it. Like SalesForce and Highrise that are both too inflexible and old fashioned. But now I’ve just started using a new CRM system called Pipeline, and it’s amazing!

Over all theme is a cool visual overview. Where you can see how far each “lead” has come in the process.

You just drag and drop them as the move on. And of course you can click further into each deal/ organisation/ person to record full history.

Top features:

Customize to suit your needs
Visual
Good modern software thats intuitive and simple to use
Statistics
Import data

It can be both stressful and a headache keeping track of these million little things, all happening at once. I hope this can make your life easier.

So often true…

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:44:31 +0100

So often true…

How people really use mobile

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:51:24 +0100

Harvard Business Review just released this study of mobile usage. It provides interesting insights to mobile companies and marketeers.

SOURCES ”Seven Shades of Mobile” study, conducted by InsightsNow for AOL and BBDO, 2012. In the first phase, 24 users completed a seven-day diary and in-depth interviews. In the second, 1,051 U.S. users ages 13 to 54 were surveyed, data on 3,010 mobile interactions were collected, and the mobile activities of two-thirds of those users were tracked for 30 days.

TheNextWeb’s Startup Awards come to Denmark! The company behind one of the world’s...

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:54:06 +0100

TheNextWeb’s Startup Awards come to Denmark!

The company behind one of the world’s most famous tech blogs are now turning their eyes to Denmark. In the next weeks they want to find the best startup people and companies, and are running a competition to do so.

Nominate for the competition now

The awards are awarded to several roles in the startup ecosystem:

Startup of the year
Best Co-founder
Best web app
Best mobile app
Best design
Best e-commerce
Best investor

While startup awards seems to be a dime a dozen these days TNW have a refreshingly relaxed approach. There is no award ceremony, just a meetup on February the 28th which is organized in collaboration with Founders House and Connect Denmark.

“The Danish Startup Awards are a public choice award, where the people decide on who will win the awards. It starts with nominating your favorite startups through our platform. Later, the TNW jury select max. 5 companies or people per category who will be going to the voting round. During the voting round anybody can vote for their favorites via the social voting platform or e-mail.The companies who get the most votes in their category will receive a ticket to TNW Conference Europe and of course, eternal fame”

You can nominate people and companies here

Inspiring quotes

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:21:43 +0100

”My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people:
Those who do the work and those who take the credit.

He told me to try to be in the first group. There is much less competition”

Indira Gandhi

60% of Apps have never been used. Stats for app producers

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:49:00 +0100

New analysis from Surikate shows some scary facts.

In my daily life as the CEO of a mobile company (that produce apps) the stats seem bleaker that what I hear, see and experience. We often hear of apps not getting a lot of downloads, but I’ve never heard of any getting zero. Scary, and it probably says something about that its harder to produce good apps than most people immidiately think. There’s both art and science to it. But there numbers are interesting so I wanted to share

There are 775,000 apps in the App Store but many are never used:

Various studiessuggest more than 60%, have never been downloaded
and about a quarter of those that make it past download are never used.

Most visitors never look past top 50 apps:

81% of visitors to the UK App Store don’t find their way past the top 50 apps.
It also shows that 82% find new apps by browsing the app store, predominantly the top 25.
Two-thirds of users say they also find apps through friends and family.

Willingness to download unknown apps

75% of iPhone users will download an app from the charts without having any prior awareness of it
85% say they need to see strong reviews, screenshots or price to be convinced.

Other findings:

there are more than 52m visitors to the UK App Store every week
Fridays from 6-8pm is one of the best times to be visible in the App Store with access to 2.61m users
average user accesses the App Store six times a week
11.5 minutes is the average length of visit
the average number of apps on a phone is 30 or less
86% browse the store from home, 23% on the go

What you need to know before you raising money

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:46:01 +0100

A lot of the advice that’s swung around regarding raising money when you’re a startup is actually irrelevant. Not because it’s not true, but because

your fund raising strategy totally depends on whether your startup is hot or not.

So how do you know that? Nic Brisbourne, London VC explained it brilliantly on his blog:

“You get out and talk with potential investors a long time before you need the money. This is good practice anyway (remember VCs invest in lines not dots) but determining your fundraising strategy is another good reason to invest time in networking with VCs.

The trick is to figure out their level of interest before you are actually asking for money but without pitching too hard and ruining your emerging relationship. It’s a delicate balance, and in my experience many entrepreneurs don’t get it quite right – some almost never talk about their companies and therefore don’t have any idea whether I might be interested or not, whilst others overdo it by pitching for too much of the time that we are speaking. If you’re not sure I would err on the side of pitching too much but keep your senses tuned for signs that you should tone it down a little.

If you get out and meet lots of investors and make sure they know what your company does then you should pretty quickly get an idea of whether a short and tight process will work for you. The only way to go wrong now is to read the signs badly. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself. Everybody will say they want to consider your round when it happens, so you should look beyond that for signs that there is real appetite, like investors requesting to meet before you ask them or starting to help with introductions.

Then, if you have five or more investors who are very keen before the formal fundraising process starts you can manage everyone to a tight timetable and hope that one of them will move very quickly to pre-empt the others. But if you don’t have those five then you should talk to many more potential investors (say 20-30) and figure that a successful the process will take 6-9 months.”

Great tips from Nic who gets pitched every single day. Here the full blog post

In general psychology is at least as important as facts when you’re raising money. I suggest thinking of it like dating and the delicate process.

Fundraising and dating

getting someone to notice you,
convince them you’re “a nice person”
they start considering if you’re worth checking out
ask you for a meeting
are impressed. subsequently check with their friends (other VC and CEOs) what they think about you
become really interested, actively pursue you
marry and live happily ever after (rarely happens but thats another blog post)

Psychology, appeal, chemistry what ever we call it trumps facts every time because you won’t even get that far if these factors are not already in order.

The road to success isn’t linear. And it’s a lot...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:30:10 +0100

The road to success isn’t linear. And it’s a lot longer than it looks when you start. But just hang in there!

Four great ways to organize your time

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:18:15 +0100

Managing your time as a busy exec or a founder is one of the biggest challenges. Creating a system that works for you is very important. Here’s some methods that work.

The Urgent-Important system for To-Do’s

Make an excel sheet with your to-do list. Split it into four sections:

Urgent & Important
Urgent but Not Important
Important but not Urgent,
Not Important & Not urgent

Put all to-dos into one of these and respond accordingly:

Action immediately
Answer fast but very briefly
Prioritize and make sure not to delay
Don’t do

I used this for two years and it works. I stopped because it doesn’t work with my desktop/iPhone todo app (I use Wunderlist and Things) which only has list view.

Strict day allocation: Split your days into areas.

This is used by some of the most successful execs, like Jack Dorsey (Twitter/ Square). Rather than spreading himself thinly across all aspects of both businesses, he zones in on one key area of corporate development, pushing everything else out of sight.

Jack Dorsey’s week:

Monday: Management meetings and “running the company” work
Tuesday: Product development
Wednesday: Marketing, communications and growth
Thursday: Developers and partnerships
Friday: The company and its culture

Personally I use this too. Mondays is ‘Running the Company day’. These are non-travel days for everyone, so we’re all at the office. I have planning meetings with the different teams, and then an all-hands meetings which ensure everyone knows whats going on, also across “departments”.

Wednesday is Sales and Partnership days where I often work from home (in order not to be side-tracked). I schedule most of my Skype calls for this day and am super concentrated all day.

I’ve just decided that Friday is “Admin and Details” day and have set up a folder for all the emails that are not to be replied till then. This is because I’ve get so many emails that Mondays were started to get bogged down by this.

Time of day approach

I know a lot of people who focus on their ‘best performing’ hours.

Most are most productive before lunch so they schedule their “thinking” and difficult work early and have strict no-email-reply before noon. This also works for meetings. If you know you’re energy is down after lunch then schedule not-that-important meetings you can’t get out of for that time.

Oursource Email Management. Email is one of the biggest time stealer and you need to have a disciplined approach to this as a CEO as you’ll get tons of emails. Many really big CEO’s have one or several assistants to filter their emails. Tony Hsiesh of Zappos is said to have 5 people working full time on this.

Here’s a great overview from a PA/ Email ninja:

“I used to have this job for someone many of you have heard of. On an average day there were 800+ pieces of mail. On days when there was news of some sort, it could hit 2000.

Personal mail (almost) always goes through
Media stuff goes to the communications agency
Job requests go to the hiring manager
Some goes to what in this business would be akin to customer service
Charity requests go to the family foundation
Solicitations from scantily clad women looking for a ‘mentor’ go to trash
Some stuff goes to the lawyers”

Read the rest of it here

Good luck organizing your time! I am passionately interested in this topic so if you have any tips or systems I’d love to hear them.

The big trends now. According to google -New marketing...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:57:00 +0100

The big trends now. According to google

-New marketing era

-Multiple screen world

-Social and local

I am at Enter2013, a travel technology conference in Innsbruck, reporting the best parts

Venture Funding in Europe - hard facts

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:29:00 +0100

This shows some of the real reason’s behind why some countries do so much better than others in producing startups. Well done Sweden!

Here’s a link to EVCA’s full report on Status on venture funding in Europe. It’s from 2011 (the latest I could find) but still relevant for the broad overview: http:/ ItsIni/ow.ly/fS3b4 It’s interesting and gives real numbers in an area that’s often speculated about.

Helping next generation’s female leaders. I recently...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 13:33:39 +0100

Helping next generation’s female leaders.

I recently joined three successful women in a Girl Power day doing workshops with young girls studying at Niels Brock. Hopefully lots of these girls will dare to dream and end up becoming executives themselves. Here’s the cute little film they made about it (in danish).

It was organized by the American ambassador and Jette Egelund CEO of VIPP and Sara Helveg Larsen, director of Communications for McDonalds were my partners in crime for the day.