Chris Dixon wrote a blog post last week titled, “ Techies and Normals ” in which he defined “Techies” as people who are not just “early adopters” but also have more of a geeky, technical, product bent.  Normals Normals (or “Muggles” as Catarina Fake called them) are people who, unlike Techies, don’t just use products simply because they’re infatuated with them and with showing the world how cool it is that they’re using the latest tech product.  They They use products because the products solve a need they have.

He has a really interesting background as a product manager and now an entrepreneur. Tell me a bit about your background. Like many product managers, my background is fairly eclectic. That's where I learned I enjoyed interacting with customers and working with development teams to build and launch products. From there, I became the first non-founder employee at an e-commerce startup called BITSource, which was the first electronic software distributor delivering electronic volume software licenses to corporations. Visible networking is turning into a really great opportunity to get to know people better, get to meet new people, and have some interesting conversations.

The mess really comes from a developer who was willing to get started on a product that was not fully thought out. I always take a very different approach in early conversations. Please be able to provide me with a few specific examples of different types of customers, what they need, what the system will do for them. Tell me about the business. What are some good examples of similar I just had an all-too common conversation with the founder of a startup who had spent more than a year working with a software development company who had produced a mess. If I’m

As a product guy slash nerd, I often notice when I encounter a user experience that is particularly good–and also when one is not so good. The experience in question was great to me because aside from being a good experience, it is an iconic example of [...] ...Tags: Tags: General Produc Today I want to highlight one of the former. The

Real world examples: Great restaurants sometimes initiate you by forcing you to wait in long lines before you can enjoy them. How this works: Make experiencing your product into a ritual and it’ll become memorable and worthy of conversation. Real world examples: Tiffany makes engagement ring shopping into a ritual by bringing out Champagne and chocolate. One of my goals with Mixergy is to help you build a business that’s as talked about as Cirque du Soleil, Red Bull and adidas. To do that, I invited Bertrand Cesvet, whose firm helped all three of those

Do you have any examples of where any sort of civic engagement outreach/campaign affected legislation? I’m looking for more granular examples than a response like “the civil rights movement”, but more so examples of specific petitions or letter writing campaigns that might have contributed to getting some sort of legislation passed. We’re wanting to synthesize the catalyzing elements so that we can bake them into our products where/when Hey gang- Huge BIG favor that might be really easy for you. I

Increase the production of your content. Create a target list of blogs that could cover your product or content. Follow up with compliments on their writing and get some emails going back and forth, and then pitch your product or service. One of the best examples was when social news aggregator Mixx.com landed its deal to have its links on all of CNN’s online articles, likely “If You Build It…They Will Come” may work for historical baseball ghosts, but it’s not a strategy you can rely on when starting an internet company. Driving traffic

Many of the people I interviewed on Mixergy have told you to find a niche–target bird-lovers, for example. So, instead of selling products that help your customers get fit, for example, show them how to get tighter abs. After looking at Mixergy.com, Bob thought a good product for me to sell might be a compilation of my past interviews. (Can’t see video? Try it on YouTube.)

We keep seeing that people are drawn to elegant products and web sites, but HOW do you design elegance if you weren’t born with Steve Jobs’s design eye? For example, the first time you saw a Jackson Pollock paining you might have thought it was just paint splattered on a canvas. Products that are elegant leave something to the imagination. I asked Matthew May to come to Mixergy and teach you the elements of elegance and give you a framework that will help you create with more elegance.

That is, I’m looking for a great Entrepreneur, a great product and a great deal.  So for an example lets assume a $500k investment in a company with a $600k pre money that professes to have an exit plan that will garner a $5m sale in 5 years.  Excel quants will be able to calculate these fairly simply, and in this example come to $828k (at 10%) and 35% respectively.  Following on the heals of last week’s post from Andrea Belz, we have another guest blogger, Bob Aholt. Bob is a Director and long-time member of the Pasadena Angels, has been investing in early stage