Ryan Carson updates the world on his blog on how cool Treehouse is. Yes, Treehouse is cool, but to write:
We work a 4-day week and just raised $4.75m
The glory is not in the raising of cash. It’s what he actually writes in the main article, that’s worth gloating about:
Profitability (yay!)
$3,000,000+ yearly revenue run rate (and growing fast)
Grown the Team to 34 full-time people and hiring at least 10 more as soon as possible
No wonder people on HackerNews slashed him. There’s a growing resentment of people showing off how much cash they can raise without the prospect of ever creating a business, just a sell-out.
Not Treehouse though.
The “old guard” at Forbes, tells the youngness how it’s done:
Hello there, son: this is biz dev. This is the beating, pumping heart of biz dev. I get the impression, from a lot of these biz dev’ers, that they think of biz dev as fun and sexy. One minute you’re grabbing lunch with Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher and the next minute you’re closing a deal on the phone while you wait in the lobby at Microsoft to give Steve Ballmer the bad news: “No, we will not accept your acquisition offer of 3 trillion dollars.” From there, you head out for cocktails and swirl single-malt Scotch while discussing why Apple is so badass.
It’s like in the good old days, when I had to walk to school barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways.
Never changes.
$30.75mio for the State of Washington.
State officials, in a news conference at a Lacey liquor store Monday morning, said they had no way of knowing how much the auction would bring in because the circumstances were unique, but they described the total take as a windfall for Washington.
Congrats on the $30bio funding for the app Path.
I wonder what the app will look like with ads. Or is the plan for monetizing to not and rather sell?
Pud builds Fandalism, a social network for musicians and it grows but he doesn’t know what to do with it:
But since Fandalism is only me and has no employees, business partners, customers, investors or direct competitors, it dawned on me that I can tell the truth.
What a fantastic problem to have… I think.
Here are some ideas, totally from the top of my head, on how I would monetize the service:
• Is it possible to add a Ticketmaster clone and make money of ticket sales?
• A simple ad network, ala The Deck or my own BLEND is discreet enough to fit into the page without disrupting the flow of content.
• Data: What could be done with the data… that’s what it’s all about. Is there a secondary business that could do something with the data collected.
hmmm…
about one thing, writes Sarah J. Bray:
Business is about one thing: offering something that people need. Bonus points if they already know they need it without any convincing. Extra bonus sparklepoints if they’re discovering the offer at the exact moment that they desperately perceive their need. That’s it. Everything else is just…icing. And probably even getting in the way.
Scratching your own itch is good. Scratching an itch and realizing trends and where the market is shifting is transforming.
Do you need Silicon Valley to build a successful startup? The Startup Genome went out and found that while SXSW tried to tell us that you can try to build a startup anywhere you want, San Francisco is still where it’s at.
Silicon Valley: Biggest throughput. Strong early stage funding ecosystem. More mentors. Most Ambitious. High Risk.
Olympia, WA: risk-averse, little funding, no mentors.
Sigh….
According to Oatmeal the success to gaining more “likes” on Facebook is less marketing douchebaggery.
Updated Wikipedia page just yesterday:
MUJI was transferred to Ryohin-Keikaku in 1990, and is not part of Seiyu.
Walmart bought Seiyu a few years back, which created the assumption last week, that Walmart now owns MUJI. But, according to the updated Wikipedia page this is not correct.
Now your know and can continue your hipster fantasies. Phew… pass me a PBR.
It’s time to say goodbye to advertisers, and hello to sponsors.
Will that work for PandoDaily as well?
Currently it doesn’t.
Popular nerd shirt shop Pixelworkers known for making and selling shirts that well have pixelated stuff on it are branching out and unpixel pixel themselves… smooth move!
Paul Ford for NYMag with a fantastic article on the Instagram purchase by Facebook.
And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.
Founder Sara Lacy:
We have nothing more to say about the move and offer nothing but good wishes to CrunchFund in the future.
The usually talkative Lacy and promoter of transparency chooses to be quiet in her own matters.
If you ask me, it’s probably because MG Siegler didn’t like the Meebo bar.
Wow. $1Billion for Kevin Systrom and his lean team. Here is the Foundation video with the founder.
Zuck says he wants to keep Instagram as a stand-alone app. For now.
A couple updates I found on Twitter:
Instagram = $1billion.
Kodak = bankrupt.
And:
Yahoo paid $35mio for Flickr 7 Years ago.
Founder of MetaFilter stops by and chats with Mike Monteiro with fill in Jessie Char. Great conversation around blogging. MetaFilter has been around for 14! years.
Is going to @GoPro. Not just is it epically funny, it’s also a perfect example of how one can market it’s business on social media outlets and by staying personal reach the audience in a way a pre-formatted, rehearsed and auto-piloted message could never do.
John Gruber fetches now a cool $7,500 a week for the sponsorship on his popular site ‘Daring Fireball’.
Impressive and admirable. I wonder if there is a blogger out there who, without additional ad network, book deal or any other form of monetizing outside the actual self-controlled client relationship can charge that much for advertising? Especially considering that he’s a single voice, not a group of bloggers!
Just curious.
The app is free, and everyone loves it. But where is the path to monetizing?
If startups and developers increasingly need to answer that call, so should designers and iOS apps. Not?
8 Years and 63 stores later, Starbucks still hasn’t turned a profit in France.
While a New Yorker might grab a coffee to go — carryout orders are one of the company’s biggest money makers — French friends tend to sit when they sip. So Starbucks is having to invest huge amounts to give its stores in France additional seating space, along with other renovations.
What’s interesting is that many European businesses equally struggle to find a way to cater to the American consumer.
J.K. Rowling launches her own e-book store for the Harry Potter series, with all copies being available on all e-readers.
Techcrunch:
Mark Coker, the CEO of Smashwords, calls today’s launch a “watershed” moment for the world of publishing because it shows how the balance of power is shifting from traditional distributors to the authors themselves.
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