Thus, Silicon Valley.

" Thus, Silicon Valley." Yes, that's a complete sentence and I find that fascinating.

For more context head over to Caterina's blog, the sentence is about half way into the post.

Build what you cannot afford to buy...

My previous company's product was a sync and backup consumer product SugarSync.

With SugarSync we wrangled constantly with our cost of storage as we launched the service, designed incentives for referrals, tried to figure out optimal duration for free trial and so on.

So I was delighted to see a post on how another start-up is dealing with this issue. It is fantastic that they are able and willing to share their solution in such detail on ther blog.

Short list of lessons from Jeff Bezos

Short list of 3 items (full video here):

• Obsess over customers - Pay attention to competition but remember customers first.
• Invent - Listen to customer, invent for them, innovation is panacea.
  
• Think long term - Critical. 5-7 years time frame perspective. Be willing to be misunderstood. Be willing to change on feedback.

Bonus item:

• It is always day 1. Always, opportunity exists to innovate/obsess over customers.
  

Seth's blog on dashboards

I found some gem's in Seth Godin's blog post on dashboards/metric and their relevance to marketing.

"Building good dashboards isn't difficult, but it's an excellent marketing strategy. A few brainstorms:

1. If you can add a digital dashboard to your service, do it.
2. If you can make the dashboard public, it gets more powerful.
3. Highlight data that changes behavior.
4. Allow the user to highlight the information that matters to them."

In my experience, the last two points are often not even articulated clearly much less thought through and implemented in products.

How are folks discovering apps for their iPhone?

We are trying to understand how are people discovering apps for their iPhone. If you have 2 min to take a short 6 question survey, that would help us out. Just follow the link below

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=nfKMk6P9qNg4VWmIcS7NzQ_3d_3d

The survey is anonymous but do remember to add your email address at the end - we will do a lucky draw on May 1st for $25 Amazon gift certificate and announce the winner on the company blog at http://appletics.blogspot.com

Thanks!