Building a successful start-up isn’t just about 20-hour days filled with hard slog. According to website Entrepreneur.com,Here are five documentaries that the site says are must-sees for entrepreneurs, and why:
STARTUP.COM
“This film follows the epic rise and fall of dot.com startup govWorks.com founded by high school best friends Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, as a means of allowing people to efficiently deal with local governments online.
BEER WARS
“A genuine David vs. Goliath story, America’s small artisanal brewers try to grab a piece of the market share from fizzy yellow giants like Anheuser-Busch.
“Why it’s a must-see: Any entrepreneur attempting to break into an established market can relate to the challenges faced by these craft breweries. The point to be taken from this film is to always educate your potential customers on the superiority of your product.”
FREAKONOMICS THE MOVIE
“Six top documentarians including Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) tackle a film adaptation of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s best-selling book on incentives-based thinking.
“Why it’s a must-see: The filmmakers weave brief, diverse tales aimed at answering the question: What really makes people do what they do? Will the possibility of a financial reward encourage students to improve their grades? Will sumo wrestlers cheat if given the incentive to do so? The answers are always entertaining and often surprising.”
STEVE JOBS: ONE LAST THING
“Released by [US public broadcaster] PBS just after his death, this doc is an intimate portrait of the peaks and valleys of Jobs’ career from the people who knew him best.
“Why it’s a must-see: Steve Jobs is an entrepreneurship poster boy: He’s bold, unflinching, inspirational and brilliant. Every entrepreneur hopes to affect our creative and professional culture in the profound way that Jobs did and continues to do. Watch the film, take some notes and apply them to your business immediately.”
THE CALL OF THE ENTREPRENEUR
“Acton Media tells the diverse and inspiring stories of a merchant banker, a dairy farmer and a refugee from communist China. These hardworking entrepreneurs all overcome adversity with innovation and creativity.
“Why it’s a must-see: This doc is a non-stop barrage of uplifting tales. The inspiring story of Michigan dairy farmer-turned-composter, Brad Morgan is enough to remind you that our society thrives on entrepreneurial ideas.”
Mark Cuban is an American businessman, investor, film producer, author, television personality and philanthropist. He is the owner of the NBA's Dallas Mavericks.
Brain Williams big break: Why: It's a great reminder that no one gets where they are without being given a opportunity to prove themselves. It's also a great reminder that it's not easy, you really need to have faith yourself.
Richard Branson: Life at 30,000 feet Why: Richard Branson is dyslexic. He didn't let that stop him, instead he embraced his limitations and surrounded himself with talented people who could fill the gaps. Hearing him talk about his experience is truly inspiring.
Startups : Dave Morin of Path - TWiST #216 Why: Dave Morin has an amazing ability to be honest about his product's failures yet optimistic about the future and extremely articulate when it comes to sharing his thought process. Folks are forgiving of pivots if you're honest about your rational and invite feedback. Also worth paying attention to, even though he's talented he is very humble, he shares his successes and gives credit where credit is due.
Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from Why: There is this myth that ideas come from one brilliant person. In reality this simply isn't true. Steven Johnson does a really good job of debunking this myth.
LeWeb 2011 interview with Sean Parker, Shervin Pishevar & Alexia Tsotsis Why: During the Q&A session Shervin Pishevar shares a pretty personal, very real story about his life's journey independent of being an entrepreneur worth listening to. We as a society tend to forget that life is very real and the entrepreneurs' journey can result in personal defeat if not managed well.
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action Why: If your going to do something new and untested you had better knowwhy your doing it.
#1 Paypal’s friend referral bounty By paying $10 cash to each new customer and $10 to the customer who referred them, Paypal was able to hack early growth to tens of millions of users before no longer offering the bonus. Read more here #2 Hotmail Tagline In Hotmail whenever a user would email another user, the email would have a message saying something similar to “This email sent with Hotmail, Join Hotmail now” and “Get your free email at Hotmail.” Read more here #3 Airbnb’s craigslist integration By reverse engineering the craigslist posting process and automating it to the point where it became dead simple to cross-post your airbnb listing to craigslist, AirBnb was able to hack early growth to 10′s of millions of users. Read more here #4 Mailbox wait list By creating an incredibly compelling launch video combined with a very cool interface that showed users how many other users were in front of them on the app’s waiting list, mailbox created a large amount of social chatter and blog attention. Within six weeks, Mailbox had a million users signed up and eagerly waiting for the service. Read more here
#5 Dropbox Incentivized Referral Program Roughly based off of Paypal’s invite system, dropbox allows users to invite their friends for more space. This worked to help dropbox grow from 100,000 users to 4,000,000 in under two years. Read more here #6 Twitter’s suggested followers on-boarding Once Twitter found that users who followed more than 30 people were most likely to become active. They optimized the user experience to encourage this behavior. Read more here #7 Instagram cross-posting By deciding to play nice with other services like twitter and facebook, instagram was able to leverage the distribution of some very large existing platforms to help accelerate the growth of its service in the early days. Read more here #8 Pinterest auto-follow Upon signing up for Pinterest you are automatically following a select group of high quality users. This in turn helps alleviate the cold-start problem, where you have to go looking around the site to find boards and people to follow. Instead they present a sampling of high quality content immediately filling your feed. Read more here #9 Youtube’s liberal interpretation of dmca YouTube tried many tactics to gain differentiation over it’s competitors. In the end, YouTube’s growth hack was the only metric that mattered, conversion of viral buzz into users. Read more here #10 Mint.com content/seo strategy Mint focused on building out a unique personal finance blog, very content-rich, that spoke to a young professional crowd that we felt was being neglected. Eventually the blog became #1 in personal finance, and drove traffic to the app. The infographics and popular articles became regular hits on Digg, Reddit, etc.
Here are five things about online marketing from Neil Patel.
All 5 are extremely powerful tips, so try to implement them in your marketing strategy and you will definitely enjoy a tremendous success.
1. The Best Time to Post on your Social Media Websites
There are certain hours of the day when your visitors access social media platforms more often. Post your content during those periods of the day and enjoy a maximum exposure.
Here is an infographic on Neils Site, QuickSprout that teaches you exactly when to post updates and what to post during each hour of the day. This infographic is powerful and could prove to be a gold-mine for your online business.
I’ll see if I can sum it up, but PLEASE visit QuickSprout for the full report :
Facebook – Thursday and Friday
1pm to get the most shares
3pm to get the most clicks
Broader Suggestion of anytime between 9am – 7pm
Pro Tip from Neil: Use the tool “FanPage Karma” to find the optimal time tailored to your audience!
Twitter
Monday Through Friday – B2b
Wednesday Through Sunday – B2C
5pm for the highest retweets.
12pm and 6pm for highest CTR (possible due to lunch breaks, and people bored on their commutes home from work)
Pro Tip from Neil: Use the tool “Followerwonk” to find the optimal time tailored to your audience
LinkedIn – Tuesday Through Thursday during business hours
10am-11am for the most clicks and shares
According to Fannit, the best times to post are 7am-8am and 5pm-6pm. The worst times are Monday and Friday for US based time zones.
Pinterest – Saturday 2am-4am and 8pm – 11pm (yeah, this surprised me too)
According to SEJ, Pinterest activity peaks at approximately 9pm
Instagram – Engagement stays high all week, with Monday having a slight advantage and a slight dip on Sundays.
3pm-4pm
Google Plus – Monday Through Friday
9am – 11am
According to Buffer, late mornings during weekdays are best to share on Google +
Pro Tip by Neil: Use the tool Timing+ to find the optimal time tailored to your audience.
2. Longer Blog Posts not Only Rank Better, but Get More Social Media Shares
There is no perfect length of a blog post. However, what Neil made me realize is that content has a huge importance when it comes to search engine rankings. Moreover, content is very important to its readers. Well, not all content – only those parts that can be easily scanned. You see, people rarely read posts word by word; instead, they pick out individual words and sentences after scanning the page.
Longer blog posts are better for one simple reason – they contain more information that can be scanned. According to statistics, longer posts perform better on every level – higher content variety, more words to be scanned, more headlines, more backlinks, more LSI keywords & more shares.
3. A Ferrari and Nice Clothes can Make you A Lot of Money
On his blog, Neil explains how (the appearance of owning) a new Ferrari made him over $1,040,000 or how spending $162k on clothes made him just shy of $700k. Things are pretty simple – possessions and the appearance of success build credibility.
Having nice clothes can help you in a business meeting, enabling you build better & stronger relationships. Add to that a nice car like a Lambo or a Ferrari and you’ve potentially got yourself hundreds of business owners interested in doing business with you.
He found that by posting pictures up of the car (below) to his facebook that he generated 193 likes, and was hit up by various exotic car dealerships because they saw the images and assumed he liked fancy cars.
(Want to know the best part? The car in the picture wasn’t even Neil’s. He went with a friend to a racetrack, had the photo taken and posted it on his facebook page.)
Anyways, eventually he was able to build a relationship with a few of these dealers and ended up making an arrangement with an exotic car company that owns 12 dealerships across the United States. As a result of this he was able to generate $1,041,493 for commissions he helped generate for them.
ALL of this as a result of him posting the below picture on his facebook page.
As ANOTHER experiment on lifestyle marketing, he spent $162,301.42 on expensive clothes. Neil points out that “People believe what they see. If people think you look successful, in their eyes you are successful.”
As a result of having nice clothes, Neil gets random compliments all the time. Now, he has not been able to close any business deals as a result of THIS as most random strangers won’t have 6 or 7 figures in their bank account to give you – but he is able to close 4 out of 10 business meetings and noticed that he closes MORE meetings when he dresses extremely successful.
People want to be associated with a successful person, and dressing that way helped him increase his closing ratio from 25% to 40%!
Want to know something funny about Neil?
Despite being so successful and having a pretty significant net worth, he’s NOT a flashy or ‘look at me’ type of guy. He doesn’t own a car, does not drive because he’s actually scared to – and he usually works and watches TV on the floor in his condo when home.
Neil is actually quite frugal. As a investment opportunity, he bought his Vegas condo for $1.7 Million. As a social experiment he spent $230,000 of furniture & decor to portray the image of “being successful.”
After this experiment, he determined that it doesn’t matter what your home looks like because nobody really sees it. He donated all of his furniture (except the bedrooms), and sits and works on the FLOOR.
(You can read more about this story on his Ferrari post if interested)
4. Everything About Consumer Psychology
I was always passionate about psychology. Speaking bluntly, I strongly believe that this is the most important aspect of a marketing campaign. If you are not able to understand how your customers think and act, you will never be able to create products and services that cater to their own needs.
In his complete guide that can be found here, Neil treats every single aspect of customer psychology, including:
The Mind of Today’s Consumer
The Power of Emotions
The Psychology of Online Consumption
The Psychology of Pricing & Color
Avoiding Any Points of Friction
This whole study is very well documented, offering tons of precious info on how 21st century consumers think and act. For instance, I’ve learned that today’s consumers are driven by research, have strong filtering systems and care mostly about their personal gains.
If you want to stay on top of the competitors and break new ground in your niche, you need to read this study and understand how customers think. As a bonus, you can study this image that details the exact path to conversion:
5. What the hell IS Growth Hacking?
This might be a new concept for you, as it was for me a few weeks ago before reading Neil’s guide on Growth Hacking. This new phenomenon is a revolutionary concept that deals with growing your business. In fact, this new concept is all about growth. Growth hacking revolves around company growth, customer database growth and profit growth.
In this growth hacking study, you can find well-documented information about the growth hacking process, the growth hacker funnel, product tactics to get more visitors and pull & push tactics for getting tons of visitors. If you are interested in growing and expanding your company and learning how to retain customers quicker than ever before, check out his guide. It could be exactly what you needed in order to be successful in your industry.
