Friday, April 29, 2011

MixPanel Review

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http://mixpanel.com/

The average student sees an internship as an opportunity to earn credits, gain experience and penetrate social circles that may lead to referrals or future entry-level positions. But Suhail Doshi, the 22-year-old co-founder of San Francisco analytics company Mixpanel, is far from average.

In 2008, following his sophomore year at Arizona State University, Doshi interned at Slide, a developer of social media apps. His stint there resulted in a business idea--and an investor.

As an intern, Doshi became increasingly aware that companies such as Slide, Facebook and social media game maker Zynga all shared a common burden: the need to build custom analytics in-house, because existing alternatives didn't meet their needs.

While services like Google Analytics worked fine for tracking traditional usage metrics, Doshi realized that the new crop of social media, online gaming and application development companies needed a way to measure user engagement and interaction, not just page views. This discovery turned a conventional internship into a commercial idea.

Back at school the following semester, Doshi met the person who would help bring his idea to fruition: Tim Trefren, his classmate in a discrete math course at the time and now Mixpanel's 23-year-old co-founder.

In the spring of 2009, Doshi and Trefren applied for funding through Y Combinator, a California-based seed funder of more than 250 startups, including Reddit, Loopt and Justin.tv. They were accepted into the program and given $15,000 in seed funding, which allowed them to spend the summer building Mixpanel into a viable business.

Upon completing the Y Combinator program, they took an official leave of absence from ASU and used the connections gained from the Slide internship and Y Combinator experience to secure additional investments of around $500,000 from Max Levchin, founder of Slide and co-founder of PayPal, and Michael Birch, co-founder of social networking site Bebo and reminder and e-card site BirthdayAlarm.

The result was Mixpanel, a third-party analytics platform that allows customers to track--in real time--how their users interact with websites, social games, applications and more. Instead of focusing solely on page views, Mixpanel shows insight into user-defined events, such as buying virtual goods in a Facebook game. Mixpanel's clients can capture and compare the data to explore a multitude of variables, such as browser type or retention patterns.

"A lot of companies said they would never use third-party analytics software," Doshi says. "But we continued to build a strong product, and eventually the people who said no started saying yes."

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - Entrepreneur.Com]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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Monday, April 18, 2011

Creative way to lower your mortgage payments.

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You


http://www.adzookie.com

If consumers are willing to accept advertising on their cars, in their personal lives and on their social web pages, then why not their homes as well? That, indeed, is essentially the premise behind a new initiative from California-based mobile ad startup Adzookie, which just this week launched an effort to turn homes into giant advertising billboards.

To be eligible, homes must be owned by the consumer, not rented or leased. Owners must also agree to leave their home in its advertising-emblazoned state for at least three months, extendable up to a year. When those requirements are met, Adzookie will paint the entire outside of accepted houses with advertising, minus the roof, windows and any awnings. The painting process takes approximately three to five days. In exchange, Adzookie says it will pay the homeowner's mortgage for as long as the home remains painted with advertising. If for any reason the owner decides to cancel after three months — or if Adzookie cancels the agreement--the company will repaint the house back to its original colors.

Adzookie launched its effort last Tuesday, and by the afternoon of that same day, it had already received more than 1,000 applications, according to a report on CNN. The lesson to be learned? Never underestimate sellsumers' willingness to go a step further to earn some extra cash. Be inspired!

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - Springwise]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

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Friday, April 08, 2011

$350,000 Selling Shirts

Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You


http://www.blanklabel.com/

For thousands of Shanghai residents, shopping the city's fabric markets represents little more than an errand. But for Fan Bi, a 23-year-old native of Sydney, Australia, a visit during the summer of 2008 represented both a consumer epiphany and an entrepreneurial milestone.

The founder and "chief shirt" of apparel company Blank Label was vacationing between semesters at the University of New South Wales when he first discovered the vast difference between shopping by size for a pre-made garment and shopping by fabric for a custom-made garment.

"I used to buy dress shirts off the rack in Sydney," Bi says. "But this idea of going to a fabric market, being measured, being able to choose different fabrics … I thought, 'Wow, you know, this is a really different experience.'"

Not only was it a superior experience and product, Bi says, but it was also far less expensive than purchasing shirts of similar quality in stores--an advantage that led him to consider college students, a demographic urgently in need of dress shirts and suits upon graduation, but just as desperately in need of savings.

Bi's idea for a new customized apparel company was well timed--it corresponded with a trip to study abroad at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., just a few months later. Faculty helped Bi hone his idea, and he recruited campus sales reps. What he needed, though, was a polished e-commerce approach.

That's when he got a call from Danny Wong, Blank Label's 19-year-old co-founder. Wong saw one of Bi's job postings for campus reps and was interested in the Blank Label concept, but he thought he had more to offer with his knowledge of online operations.

Then a student at Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., Wong initiated what would become both a partnership and a massive company pivot by posing a single question: "What's your SEO strategy?" It wasn't long before Bi and Wong joined forces to leverage the global power of the web and teamed up with a West Coast partner and programmer. By the end of 2009, they had launched the Blank Label website.

"We want to be the destination where people can come and design their own apparel," Bi says. "You see a dress shirt on the left-hand side and then style options on the right-hand side." Indeed, online visitors can build a custom shirt by selecting a fabric, color combination and style of cuff, collar, placket, pocket, button, monogram, even custom label--all for less than $50.

Since the site's launch, customers worldwide have ordered more than 7,000 shirts, generating over $350,000 in revenue. And the web-oriented founders have managed almost the entire process remotely. "Thanks to the Internet," Bi says, "you can work with the best people in the world, not just the best people in your neighborhood."

For more unusual ways to make money, visit this site.

[Via - Entrepreneur]

The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone: Easy New Ways to Make Money from Your Interests, Insights, and Inventions

IdeaSpotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea

How to Make Millions with Your Ideas: An Entrepreneur's Guide by Dan S. Kennedy

101 Businesses You Can Start With Less Than One Thousand Dollars: For Stay-at-Home Moms & Dads

Make Your Ideas Mean Business

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Link of the day - If You Sell Links On Your Site, I Will Buy Them Off You

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