Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
There's almost no clearer indication that the speed of business is quickening at an amazing pace. In the scooter world, the land grab is on, and everyone is looking at ride sharing as the obvious analog, which means raise a lot of money, expand to new cities, and earn market share... quickly.

Whether a couple (or all) of these companies flame out remains to be seen, and is probably likely. But there's also likely to be a winner in this category. And the winner is likely to be worth a lot of money. These companies likely don't "deserve" their valuations based on current metrics like revenue, but the market potential is huge, the growth is high, and the capital requirements are large... so investors seem more than willing to make bets.

Comment · 8 years ago
Speed is one of the most underemphasized traits of a great VC for founders. While fundraising, a quick yes is the best answer, but a quick no is the second best. Investors who follow this are truly founder friendly: it's easy to stall and wait for more data, but it's actually helping the entrepreneur to just say no. Those are the investors I want to pitch again later.

It's no surprise founders rank speed highly while investors don't. Find investors who care about speed and you'll find a great partner.

Comment · 8 years ago
This is correct. The vast majority of funds have at least 1% committed by GPs. This is what Fred means when he writes, "The partners at USV make up a sizeable portion of our funds."
Comment · 13 years ago
We do a lot of crawling various data sources. We spent over 3 years building a really great infrastructure to do this well. This is how we can present rank tracking for you and your competitors over time. The last time I checked, I think the number was actually over 500k... I should update that page!
Comment · 13 years ago
I'm a founder and CEO at MobileDevHQ[1], a startup focused on App Store optimization. We have been doing this work for almost a year and a half now and have built powerful tools for understanding the App Store, including keyword research and market/niche finders.

Appsleak looks interesting, congrats on launching! The app ecosystem needs more tools to help it mature and advance.

To those of you interested in understanding markets/niches and keywords in the app stores, it is important to note a couple main points:

First, there are large differences between Google/other web search volume and search volume in the App Store. At MobileDevHQ, we do lots of work to uncover those differences and provide realistic pictures of what is happening in the app stores themselves. For example, the volume on Google for "puzzles" likely has little relation to the volume in the app stores.

Also, competition as defined by number of search results is a great start to understanding the difficulty it will take for you to rank highly for a particular term, but it doesn't go far enough. At the end of the day, it is not just about number of results, but also the factors that the app stores use to rank results, and how "entrenched" those factors are in current results. You can only begin to understand this with lots of data, which is why we have been collecting this for years now and have even released a tool we call Sonar to help developers and marketers understand when an App Store changes its search algorithm.

There are tons of things I could riff on about App Store search, but those are the 2 most common thigs I see people missing, so I wanted to make sure I mentioned those in particular.

[1] http://www.mobiledevhq.com

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