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Chil's comments

Chil | 14 years ago | on: Startup Founders, Take It Easy

When founding a startup it's important to avoid "burnouts". It's all about the balance between efficiency and long hours. Taking some time off is good to take a broader look at your business and being more creative. I always try to take 1 day off a week. So I can start the week with a fresh mind for critical problems.

Chil | 14 years ago | on: Ask HN: Lifehacker mentioned my app & traffic boosted. How to keep momentum?

You should break your problem into pieces, the more your understand your problems, the easiest it will be to improve:

Here 3 subproblems to begin with:

1. How to bring new visitors to your service

2. How to convert new visitors into subscriptions

3. How to retain the users

With no traffic sources, even if you convert all the incoming visitors, you will still have 0 subscriptions. It is not your case, you have the some visitors and a PR momentum so you should have enough visitors to tracks your performance on subproblems 2 and 3. Your product has a viral mechanism. That means that all your active users will expose their facebook friends (throught the vote) to your app. So you should be able to get some organic growth. (that means you shouldn't waste time on traffic acquisition)

Thus 3 success factors: - convert your new visitors into active users

- push your users to promote their "goals" to their friends

- make it easy and appealling for the friends to become user

To be sure you are working on the most important task, use google analytics and track the bottle neck. Even if most of the suggestions you've got there are good marketing tactics, if you are alone, focus on only a few tasks so you can execute them well.

Good luck !

Chil | 14 years ago | on: Education Technology's Hidden Ticking Time Bomb

edtech isn't so different from more classic startups, they just have several years of delay.

We saw the exact same phenomenon with a lot of software and web services. Startups thought blocking data export would put a barrier to entry against competition. Minds evolved and we see more and more openess in the product strategies of technology companies. I'm sure it will be the same with education technology.

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