Interesting articles for making ideas happen

If you run a business you'll often be asked: What's your exit strategy? I've always found this to be a strange question, probably because I didn't set out in business with the aim of selling it for a handsome dime. I wanted to take control of my life, do things my way and ultimately build a business in my image.

I've tried to write this blog post a few times. The essence of the post was always going to be: How important it is to create a story around your product. How the actual coding takes a back seat. How hard it is to market your app.

For the first three years of Bonobos, I lived with $3,000 in the bank, a $3,000 apartment, and $150,000 of debt. During that time - 2007 to 2010 - I was only a month away from being out of cash. I was paying myself, initially, $70,000.

Innovation. You've either got it or you haven't. Right now, Procter and Gamble hasn't. Its recent mediocre results have been blamed on a drought of new blockbusters. It's not alone. Microsoft has been panned for bringing so little to market, and even Apple's share price has sagged recently as the market tires of tweaks to their existing techno-slabs.Has the corporate world run out of ideas?

As someone who does work on both the development and design side of iOS apps I find that many designers struggle with the transition to UI work, or with the different processes involved in iPhone and iPad app design.

One of the big no-no's we've learnt about early on in Silicon Valley is to publicly share the pitchdeck you've used to raise money. At least, not before you've been acquired or failed or in any other way been removed from stage. That's a real shame, we thought.

Looking at the success trajectories of today's disruptors--from Pandora cofounder Tim Westergren to Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales--it's easy to think that they had everything figured out from a young age. But many of today's success stories learned lessons later in life that they wished they had known as they were beginning their careers.

After all, his blog The Cool Hunter [TCH] is synonymous with disruption. There's a good chance you may already be part of its burgeoning fan base - mostly made up of marketers and designers. And if so, you'll be forgiven for taking inspo from time to time.

Photography: Courtesy of the artist and the Wallace Trust Artwork: Sara Hughes, Download, 2005, acrylic on linen, 1.5 m x 1.5 m, Wallace Trust Collection Launching a new enterprise-whether it's a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation-has always been a hit-or-miss proposition.

Gittip is a weekly gift exchange. We launched about a year ago, and we currently have about 1,000 weekly active users exchanging about $3,000 per week on the platform. I've been trying to dial it to eleven with Gittip in terms of how open and transparent a company can be.

The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail... Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn't want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers.

In this deck you will find 21 different areas of startup marketing where you can employ growth hacking tactics. Little tricks of automation or hackery that help you squeeze more out of your customer / user acquisition strategy.

The following is a guest post by Rob Walling. Rob Walling has been an entrepreneur for most of his life and is author of the book Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup .

A similar cap worn by those taking part in the experiments for Neuromarketing (Getty Images) "That's the first cap I made," he says of the EEG-outfitted woman on the cover. Sands used to work with rhesus monkeys in the psychology department at the University of Texas.

The following is a guest post by Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, a smarter way to post on Social Media. [Note: I'm an angel investor in Buffer and love what they're doing] The Complete Guide to Getting Press Coverage For Your Startup Whoa, this guide was long, long, long overdue.

Richard Slatter, Michael Doherty, Stephen Phillips, who sold their business to Twitter in November. Photo: Mark Medeo Jessica Gardner The three unknown Australians behind the biggest digital product launch of the year had an unusual induction to Twitter.

Some of my favorite ideas, from work or my head, have a certain DNA. The exciting ones, where I think, "YES, do shit like that!" are inspired by a small class of startups, niche websites, communities, and dark corners of the Internet. Rarely do I find corporate marketing as interesting or worth referencing.

An Archive of Research-based Marketing Facts. No Intuition. No Bullshit.

It was Monday, April 9, 2012 and we were at a team dinner. We were launching Everyme the next day at 10:00am. Launch was a Tuesday, of course. Consumers use their phones and the web more on Tuesdays than any other day.

Answer (1 of 21): This approach will help you think of a solid startup idea. It is broken into 5 steps to facilitate progress through a system that in total should take about 30-40 hours to complete over a week or two, if you do it all.

Last week I experienced my first taste of controversy in this arena. I contrasted Posse to Foursquare in an interview with Fast Company, who ran it as a feature with the headline 'What Foursquare would look like if it had been founded by a woman'.

I'm looking for videos that are inspirational as well as informative. Youtube videos are preferred but not required, however all videos should be accessible for free.. Answer 1 of 58: Dave McClure's video on startup metrics is hands down THE BEST 5 MINUTE presentation I've ever seen - ...

Nine months ago we launched Tweaky.com as the marketplace that helps anyone improve their website - from $39 per tweak. It's hard for small businesses to get small changes made to their website. Agencies and freelancers typically don't want to touch jobs less than $500-$1000. The overheads are too high.

As the CEO of the largest outsourcing marketplace, Freelancer.com, Matt Barrie is at the fulcrum of a new shift in human resourcing. He is now using his experiences to educate the next generation of technology entrepreneurs.

Innovation is an ever-moving target, and quantifying its existence can be incredibly difficult, especially on a large scale.