Something missing here: SEO considerations. It matters less as the days pass, but there is still value to getting an important keyword or two in the domain name (or to be the important keyword, better still).
This is especially true if your business is planning to generate lots of business through organic. Especially false if it doesn't.
The audience for your corporate name is most likely: investors, bankers, family members, and people who know nothing about you.
In light of this, a perfect company name is easy to say over the phone, memorable, and suggestive in roughly that order of importance. A perfect example is "3D Robotics".
Your company name is the only chance you have to verbally communicate everything there is to know about your business in a split second. Your corporate name != your app name, and your app name != your URL.
Comments like "cancel your gym membership" make me think of something like "use a PC from 1995" as an equivalent idea. I like the idea of minimalism but in general downgrading your ability to function (such as using less productive tools/working out in an environment that is less efficient/less likely to promote productivity) is not the right way to go about it. I understand the POV as stated, but it could be mis-applied and cause many people to get lazy and float along/use less sophisticated tools.
It also depends on the circumstances, though. And I've found the problem with gym memberships is that it adds a small obstacle to keeping up exercise habits if you're moving around as often as this guy, and that can make a significant difference. If you've got to find a good gym and sign up to it and potentially have the hassle of only using it for a few months so you can't get the benefit of a 6 month contract, etc, then it's easy to decide to not get a gym membership. Running can provide a lot of the benefits with a lot less hassle.
Aren't there gyms with a national presence. The gym I used to be a member of had either locations or deals with other gyms basically all though Europe.
I've read/heard that it's best to flip your experience with education unless you want to be viewed as someone entry-level. When education is the best thing you've done, sure, list that first. But when you've created things like an actual business, you want to highlight that first and foremost.
Like the inefficiencies of a call to action being hid at the bottom of a page, you want to highlight your best value proposition (most likely to be the most recent thing you've done) closest to the top.
This is not a good strategy - generally, these links won't benefit you for SEO purposes. If you want an "SEO for startups", I heavily recommend this guide: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/seo-for-start-ups/ which comes from one of the top agencies in the field.
In general, blog commenting is good to build relationships, which then can get you links that pass value. However, in the short term, they probably do not help. You should build relationships with influencers in your space - however, it's not necessarily true they will come from inputting these keywords in Google's Blog Search.
If you're paying attention at all (you're running a startup in the vertical, right?) you should know who has influence. Start there, add value, connect - the links and secondary sites who may also be interested will show themselves organically over time.
I've ranked quite a few sites with variations of this exact technique, so I'm not quite sure where the idea that these links won't benefit you is coming from. I absolutely respect your opinion though and do agree that reaching out to influencers and engaging them is a big big deal.
This strategy is simply a component of an overall outreach and SEO campaign for any product. It very much needs to be mixed in with a variety of other techniques for full success.
The reason I shared it was because once you spend the hour or so to set everything up, you can sit down each day with your cup of coffee and spend 15 minutes building some links while interacting with the community in a very easy way. Mix that in with more specific outreach and you have a good strategy for growing exposure to your product.
It's very likely what you did made ranking a correlative rather than causative effect. Most of these comments were probably no-follow, and even if not, devalued b/c below the fold - reasoning: the Reasonable Surfer patent -http://www.seobythesea.com/2010/05/googles-reasonable-surfer...
I agree that this can be helpful, but the way it is framed in this article is dangerous, because it can easily be misinterpreted.
While I don't condone the methods posted in this case study, I think that it goes to show that no-follow links do have value, that your on-page doesn't have to be perfect, and that the types of links that you claim don't work actually do.
Their "Backlink Bomb" provides "50,000+ backlinks from 10,000+ websites powered by 120+ content management systems and not a SINGLE blog comment."
Sounds like blog comments aren't the way to go.
They also advertise this service as "Penguin safe." Maybe if you launch your site between algorithm updates. You can definitely rank with these kind of links, but you will get torched eventually. This is not a long or even medium term strategy for what most of consider a startup.
Great advice. The days of quick spammy links are way over. Now posting a link on someone's blog for obvious SEO benefits is just tacky, and will get LESS people to link to you.
Organic is the key word here. Make links with people not websites.
There's nothing spammy about leaving a genuine comment on a real blog. This method simply automates the collection of possible blog posts to post on, there's nothing spammy about it at all.
Great to see that. There's plenty of "you should learn how to code" posts, Codecademy, Treehouse etc, but there are very few case studies of people who seemingly A) used these tools and/or B) actually ended up being able to wing it learning to code mid-to-late-stage in their career. Not sure if this post really qualifies as either of those, as well. If there's more examples of this that I'm missing, please let me know.
I had a different trajectory, but a similar end point (biology -> freelancing -> full-time web dev).
The biggest similarity I noticed between myself and the OP is that you have to put yourself in the way of opportunity. For me it was building side projects and hosting Startup Frontier. For the OP it was ruby meetups and send out an email to the list.
It takes a lot of guts to cold-email people like that, I have a lot of respect for the OP. Good work!
Not really a case study but my sister went from never having coded, middle-school math teacher to junior consultant at ThoughtWorks in 5 months via DevBootCamp. TW may be a bit unusual though in that they are willing to train you for a year before actually making money on you.
Our industry needs a lot more of this. Many industries expect that new hires are in apprenticeship mode and will be learning on the job. In our industry people are expected to walk in and know exactly what and how to do things.
I don't think that's true at all - every organization I've worked with has planned for a 1-2 month ramp-up program. Generally you start off doing trivial bugfixes until the codebase makes sense and move on from there. Hell, learning on the job extends past this phase and is essentially neverending.
You just need to have enough background to make it through the ramp-up phase and start teaching yourself. That holds true whether you went to college or are self-taught.
(Former ThoughtWorker) TW does have a very solid training program. Before the program ends, the trainees are often contributing bug fixes and features to production codebases, pairing quite a bit with experienced devs and so on (at least in the version in place when I used to work there).
TW is a great company to work for (if you are working on enterprise software, and you don't mind some agile/oo rah rah ism) but for someone with no experience, it is an absolute no brainer. Its training program is the most effective I've seen in my career.
This is going to lead to a loss of confidence amongst many - investors, advertisers, partners - who thought that Twitter was finally past its initial scaling/teething issues. It's not like there is anyone that hasn't heard of Twitter at this point in time. So yes, yes there can be bad publicity once something reaches the scale of twitter.
Did Page dye his hair? A bit off topic but it's a bit shocking that a 39-year-old would have hair that gray. I guess even running a wildly successful company is stressful.
Page doesn't really strike me as the type to invest heavily in appearances.
> it's a bit shocking that a 39-year-old would have hair that gray.
shrug maybe. I've had significant gray hair in my beard since I was 19 or so & my uncles were both bald by 25. Weirder things have happened.
> I guess even running a wildly successful company is stressful.
Probably more so than a failure. At least failures end :-P Having had recently to negotiate various potential outcomes in parallel, with nothing but upside all around, I couldn't believe how incredibly stressful it can be. It's an odd thought to find yourself wishing for (startup) death, to make the stress go away. However, on the other side, most of that type of stress is self-imposed. Maybe the same thing that made him so successful is what made his hair go gray...
I'm surprised that you haven't seen other relatively young people with gray hair. It's more common than you think, and it's not always stress, it just runs on the family sometimes.
Something fundamentally missing from both versions - trust signals. Why does a user want to trust this software? You go to http://www.seomoz.org/, you see Zillow, Home Depot, Yelp and etc "love their software". Same with 37signals - WB and Kellogg's are using Basecamp? http://37signals.com/ Why isn't my company?
It is not explicity apparent that anyone loves this software, especially nobody they know or have heard of, so why should they use it? It doesn't have to be who uses it, but could also be "featured on" if you (Patio11) got coverage and co-linked to the service there as well, which I bet is more prominent. Of course, families don't care about Techcrunch - relevant news is needed.
I think that's important to people that want to be in good company. Not when futzing around with your Macintosh, trying to put together 30+ bingo cards for tomorrow's class.
I just e-mailed this to them, but how they get regular sales leads is through the Universities. The universities want to get their students jobs, and if you have a real value-add service that will do that, they should have no problem posting your link and being aware of you in their offices. Your startup should be the first thing mentioned by their Career Development offices and resume courses when students ask "how do I get a job?". It won't be easy to get in front of all of them, but I bet you can get the ball rolling really fast with this exceptional product.
Why is this getting downvoted? He's only describing what they do: the visual design. Presumably, the customer prints the résumé. Is that correct, dcaldwell?
That's correct. Some people think we do the printing but we actually provide the visual design service. We're considering adding a printing service down the road. Even in doing our photo shoots for the site, we learned a lot about what makes resumes look great in the printed format.
Right now, we send out 2 hi-resolution PDF files - 1 is for full bleed and 1 is for normal printouts on an office or home printer. That way the customer has the option of how they wan to print out the resume.
I'm curious if you found a local pro photographer or diy because the photos look outstanding. They definitely provide a huge level of credibility from my perspective.
I would've liked to see an exact explanation of how the editor's account was compromised, because it's important to know whether or not thenextweb and other sites were compromised through a default-account-setting or because all of these sites happened to have an account with the same vulnerable password. Or did the hacker just attempt a brute attack against a huge swath of sites, and thenextweb and others were just a few that fell to it?
or he might have been writing an article in a Starbucks working on an open wifi.
Anybody who has Wireshark installed can go fish for passwords and other log in credentials in your local Starbucks!
When will people learn that an open Wifi is not secure!
(not claiming this is what actually happened here!)
There are a huge number of WordPress sites. TNW use the word 'Hacked' like it took some level of skill and you end your line with ... which implies a weakness in the software.
It is not the software here that is at fault. The lack of good information out of TNW along with the fairly ridiculous penultimate paragraph of drama would suggest it was them being lax with the security they had control of which caused this to happen.
Linking to a Packetstorm search does not show if core files are involved, if it is a plugin or if the report itself is invalid.
The other 3 are not exclusive to WordPress.
If you are right then each report on each site will tie it together. I say it will not because already you can see that no-one is pointing fingers at WordPress itself.
I found these through a fresher data source than SEOmoz. There may be more impacted (and might show what the security flaw is to someone more sophisticated than me).
This is especially true if your business is planning to generate lots of business through organic. Especially false if it doesn't.