New Venture Tool Kit

DOMAIN NAMES

Get your own website and domain. Don't use your personal "hotmail" email accounts to contact customers! Spell your domain name correctly! (or you'll frustrate search engines and search humans)

Register.com or GoDaddy.com

GETTING OTHERS TO WORK FOR YOU - HUMAN INTELLIGENT TASKS

You and your co-founder (assuming you've convinced another person your idea has merit) need to start developing hypotheses about who your customers are and what their behaviors will be. Pick up the phone and randomly call people? Use Amazon Mechanical Turk instead.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence. The Mechanical Turk service gives businesses access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce and gives Workers a selection of thousands of tasks to complete whenever it's convenient.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details. Traditionally, tasks like this have been accomplished by hiring a large temporary workforce (which is time consuming, expensive, and difficult to scale) or have gone undone.

A Human Intelligence Task, or HIT, is a question that needs an answer. A HIT represents a single, self-contained task that a Worker can work on, submit an answer, and collect a reward for completing.[1]

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

and

Introduction to Amazon.com Mechanical Turk

Turks for Entrepreneurs

If you’ve ever worked with market research firms, built your own panels, or have hit the pavement trying to collect your own market research you know it can be expensive and/or time consuming. The idea of having a broad and cheap sounding board available online is very appealing.

Unfortunately there is no segmentation or guaranteed panel refinement on Mechanical Turk, so you will be at the mercy of self-selection. To overcome this, you can specify in the task description that you are looking for people with certain demographics and then include those sought-after demographics as questions in your survey.

Once you have some basic information on the respondents you've probed, ask if they face the problem your product or service intends to solve. Once you describe the product or service, the survey can ask how likely they would be to use it and how likely they would be to recommend it to others. There can also be a few service-specific questions, some open-ended responses including, “why would you not use the service,” and a general thoughts and feedback form. You might have fancier survey question types than you would care to implement through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API so instead you could host the survey over at SurveyMonkey and have the respondents enter a confirmation code into MTurk upon completion.

LANDING PAGES

A landing page is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on a search engine optimized search result or an online advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement, search result or link.

Landing pages are often linked to from social media, email campaigns or search engine marketing campaigns in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements. The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales or leads. By analyzing activity generated by the linked URL, marketers can use click-through rates and conversion rate to determine the success of an advertisement.

Landing pages are great for posting white papers and getting people to sign up and/or register

See: http://www.landingpages107.com/

Providers: Kickoff Labs, Unbounce, Launchrock.com P

Readworthy: 101 Landing page optimization tips

SOCIAL MEDIA PROMOTION

Get "likes," then turn likes into sales.

Pagemodo.com lets small businesses quickly design and publish a stunning business Facebook Page for free. A Pagemodo-powered Page dazzles and captivates Facebook visitors, turning them into fans and customers. Pagemodo’s Pagebuilder eliminates the need to have any design or technical skills to design a clean, professional, and engaging Facebook Page. Pagemodo provides everything entrepreneurs need: a wide variety of gorgeous and customizable templates, easy-to-add features like slideshows, videos, contact forms, and maps, and powerful social media tools like fan coupons and “like” gates.

Crowdly

When you have thousands of fans, you need to know who your superfans are. Crowdly is a simple yet powerful tool that finds the fans who do more than “like” you and allows them to engage. Share. Be heard. So you can use their energy to feed the entire crowd, creating the most buzz for your brand—and a better community for everyone. Crowdly seamlessly integrates with your Facebook community, so you get much more out of what you’re already doing.

POLLING

PickFu is a tool that provides instant, unbiased and insightful public opinion on questions that you care about. Their polling process gets you both answers and analysis. You need to use polls to get a second (or third, or fiftieth) opinion for your important decisions, especially if those opinions are unbiased.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZING

Trello is a free collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.

PROFESSIONAL PHONE SYSTEMS

Grasshopper lets you run your business with your cell phones

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM)

Pipedrive, Salesforce

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

There are five reasons why web sites exist: (1) ecommerce, (2) lead generation, (3) content publishing, (4) support for products or services, and (5) branding.

Analytics measure what you're trying to accomplish online with actionable data.

KISS METRICS

KISS Metrics is Google Analytics on steroids. $1,800 a year, but your first two weeks are free. Allows up to 500,000 events per month.

All the data in KISSmetrics is in the form people, events and properties. These indicate who your users are, what they do, and additional information about them (which lets you group similar people together).

The core unit in KISSmetrics is a person, not a unique visit or a session. You may often be looking at aggregate reports of user behavior, but at the end of the day, it’s possible to see data for each individual person.

People are represented by ”identities”, usually more than one. There are two types:

• Named Identities: a recognizable word or phrase that represents a person:
  • foo@example.com
  • User #12345
  • Facebook ID #67890
• Anonymous Identities: a randomly-generated string that represents a person before you know who they are:
  • y75Fe33597qBqkR4obZZYV+wF3Y=
  • 6j1KH1zrwBS6T2iIsixvpfnCnxY=

When KISSmetrics is properly implemented, you can follow a person’s lifecycle with your product from when they were just any other visitor to when they finally sign up and repeatedly log in.