Alex is the real deal! Never have I talked with someone and been so inspired! He has influence to source deals and has heard thousands of stories from entrepreneurs. I trust his expertise.
Great points by Michael here. Kickstarter has opened the doors as a tool to gain initial funding to meet producing an exact product or service.
What I loved most about Michael's post is he talked about the importance of outreach - tweets from other relevant organizations, guest blog posts and contributing to online forums. Though Kickstarter is a "marketplace" - it likely won't get you all the backers you need without doing your own outreach to potential customers and backers. It's essential to understand their pain points and meet it with your product, just as Real Python did.
It's really key to do your own inbound marketing. Like I said, I spend about half my day doing it. I know other people who went at it full time. There's a direct correlation between the amount of outreach/content marketing you do with pledges.
If the person you want to get intro-ed to is too busy to currently help you out, is it typically OK to follow up again just a month later? Or would you recommend trying to get intro-ed by someone else?
I'm assuming this is after the intro is made - no need to get a second intro unless it's after a really long period of time and you have a better connection. It's okay to follow up if you have a good pretense.
Wow! Very inspiring story! I'm glad to hear you stuck to your strengths and didn't desperately force a non-programmer to learn programming. It was a critical part of your business but your full-time employees focusing on their expertise worked out for the best.
No man! You can accept payments directly in-stream on Facebook and Twitter to leverage your social networks for selling your product or service. And today the pricing model was lowered to just 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction - very affordable for all sellers.
It's open to the masses and online. It may not be the traditional style of a course in which you're assigned homework and have exams, but it seems to qualify for the loose definition of a MOOC. I love that you can ask him questions in real time and he's readily available here! Saves so much effort on my behalf to get to know him.
Creating a community around an app is very difficult. Getting traction and sustaining is numero uno on gaining "success". Looking forward to what Alexis has to say!
So impressed with this hackathon! To have 127 hacks submitted for 550 hackers is unreal! The recruiter at Facebook said he was most impressed with these hacks at a student hackathon over any other one.
