Tag: Internet

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Business

Abstract Job Hunting – Using Google Adwords to land your Dream Job


 thinkoutsidethebox

As an ex recruiter I know a thing or two about how to get a job. I’ve seen a whole bunch of crazy techniques people have used to land themselves their dream job. Some pretty cool, like creative web-pages, some completly idiotic like calling everyday saying “I have job”. I came across this video the other day of a SUPER-EPICLY-AWESOME way to get your next job.

The guy was looking to get senior  job at one of 4 or 5 firms, working for one of the executives. What he did was create a Google Adwords campaign, with the keywords targeted to the names of the Executives he wanted to work for.

If you dont already know, Google Adwords are the sponsored advertisments you see on the top and side of a Google search result. Its basically how they make all their cash. Take a look at the example below:

Google Adwords

The areas in the red are the areas you can “rent” from Google for a price per click. Usually in the 10c – $2 range. Oh and sorry about the funky language, I’m in Budapest at the moment and Google tracks your location to display advertisments close to you.

This guy bought the space for the executives names, so when they Google themself, his advertisment popped up on the top of the search and took them into his website of some sort, which I am guessing was a sales page / resume of him asking for a job.

Check the video he made of the experiement: (click here if you cant see the video)

For all his efforts (probably 1 days work) and money invested ($6) he ended up with two job offers! Genius!

Think of all the cool stuff you could use this for. Tim Ferriss used it for choosing the title of his book. Next time your struggelling to get past that gatekeeper consider the option of putting up a Google ad and see what happens. Now thats abstract living!

Categories
Business Technology

Venturebeat on Facebook Blacklist!?

I tried opening a Venturebeat article from Facebook the other day and got the below screenshot:

Venturebeat on Facebook Blacklist

Just goes to show even the big brands can fall victims to problems like this. Creating a process to test problems like this on a regular basis is crucial and one of the reasons we created Process Street.

Hopefully they can fix this soon!

Categories
Business

4 Reasons Why you Must Document your Business

This was originally a guest post I wrote on The Productivity Blog

Bad process documentation can kill your business dead. Here’s how:

1. Quality of Work

Documenting your processes is proven to improve quality of work. Dr. Atul Gawande in his bestseller, the Checklist Manifesto, presents facts that show using checklists in surgery has significantly increased success rates, resulting in tens of thousands of lives saved. He also shows how a wide range of industries from construction to venture capital have improved quality through documentation.

Poor quality work can destroy your reputation sending your customers running. No customers, no business.

2. Employee Turnover

We all know staff come and go. Keeping on to the good ones is important, but sometimes there is nothing you can do. When a key employee unexpectedly ups and leaves it can have a crippling effect, especially on small businesses.

This pain can further be accelerated if you, the business owner, has non-work related issues to deal with.

If this unfortunate circumstance is ever to happen to you, make sure you have your documentation in order and you just might get through it.

You may also be interested in this: Process Street: The Simplest way to Document and Track Business Processes

3. Rapid Growth

Growth is the most exciting phase of business. It’s the reward for all the blood, sweat and tears. But growth is a double edged sword. With big ups come big downs, and if you are not prepared to manage the growth, your business can implode on itself. Hiring and training new staff, processing larger order quantities, supporting more customers and opening new offices are highly complex processes that if done incorrectly can cost you lots of money or even collapse your business.

Ensuring you have processes in place to manage these growing pains is of the utmost importance.

4. Acquisition

If you ever want to sell your business, having proper documentation is of the utmost importance.

A prospective buyer wants to know the business they are buying is going to run effectively on its own, without you, the former owner having to be there.

Having your standard operating procedures documented can help you close the deal and even get you a sale price. While poor documentation could cause the deal to fall through.
If you still need more proof on the importance of process documentation, check out this book by Michael Gerber – The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.

So what are you waiting for? Document or die.

Categories
Business Technology

Product Idea: Hairdresser Poncho with a Clear Window for Phone/Magazines

Hair Dresser Poncho

So I went to the hairdresser today and… you can probably guess the rest from the post title. I wanted to use my phone while getting a haircut and started to think why there was no clear window in the poncho so I could use my phone without getting hair all over it.

This kind of product would be perfect for a “Muse” (with appropriate testing first of course).

If you don’t know what a Muse is, its a concept from the book The 4 Hour Work Week, the book that inspired me to start my first internet business when I left to go travelling. It refers to a small business, usually internet based that requires very little energy to run once set up as you systemize all parts of the business (one of the things my startup Process Street is designed to help with).

I like the idea of this product because you could sell it wholesale to companies who supply hairdressers, creating a business with decently high revenue but only a few clients, 80/20 that shit (another concept from the book).

See Through Hair Dresser Poncho

I found the above image, its kinda what im talking about except for getting  a haircut.

Categories
Business Technology

Startup Idea: Evernote for Spreadsheets

Evernote-Excel

Someone needs to make this or Evernote needs to integrate spreadsheets into their platform, because my current spreadsheet experience is pretty poor.

I currently have 13 Excel Spreadsheets open, 6 Google Doc Spreadsheets and 2 files open in CSV file editor.

Why is there no solution for me to manage this?

Here are the reasons I want this:

1) Navigation
Using Windows 7, Excel makes me click twice to change sheets, I cant split excel spreadsheets across monitors, and I am switching between excel / chrome / csv editor. Confusing and slow. With an Evernote esq app, I would have everything in one place, and could spawn off spreadsheets into new windows to do with what I needed.

2) Speed
Google Docs uses a TON of memory and I have no way to easily look up or add to spreadsheets.

3) Search
Using an Evernote style app, I should be able to insta-search any spreadsheet, or any bit of data in any spreadsheet. This would make finding data from and adding data to spreadsheets much faster and easier.

Is this something you think you would find useful?

Categories
Business Technology

Start-Up Chile Application Video

Here is the video we did for Start-Up Chile.

Categories
Technology

How to Search on iOS 7 iPhone

To search on iOS 7 you need swipe down from the middle of the screen anywhere in the phone to bring up search.

NOTE: This will not work if you are in an app that uses scroll such as Safari or Mail.

Here is an example:

iPhone iOS 7 Home  Search on iOS 7 iPhone

Categories
Business Technology

How Much Money Does the Facebook Ecosystem Produce?

Facebook went down the other day for the first time I can remember.

Got me thinking about how much money is being lost every minute they are down.

I know individuals who spend upwards of $50,000 each day on Facebook advertising, which is actually nothing compared to the big brands.

If you take into consideration:

  • All the revenue being lost by Facebook themselves
  • The opportunity cost of a large portion of Facebook’s employees not being able to do their jobs properly
  • All the hundreds of thousands of advertisers who’s ads are not being displayed
  • Hundreds of thousands of brands who’s posts are not being read of their fanpage walls
  • All the apps that have gone down, including massive platforms such as Zynga
  • All the third party Fabook developers who cant work right now cause Facebook is down
  • Social media managers who cant do their jobs
  • Loss of data from 3rd party analytics companies
  • Probably many other things I cant think of.

Facebook is SO massive that anything it does has a massive ripple effect. I once read a while back that the Facebook ecosystem had created over 220,000 jobs, that number is probably much larger now.

Crazy to think about.

Categories
Business Technology

Ingredients of a Successful Bootstrapped Startup?

I’ve been meeting lots of people and getting lots of feedback here in San Francisco.

Here are some of the consistent ingredients of successful startups I have collected from observation and feedback.

Note, these elements will probably not leave you with the next Facebok, but just know, for every Facebook, there are 1001 companies who tried to be Facebook and failed.

  • Solve a problem
  • A focused product of which the core feature set can be built relatively fast and cheap
  • Recurring payment model
  • The core feature set (MVP) should be good enough that you can actually charge people for it
  • There is the ability to grow out to different markets/features to increase your customer base and how much you charge (aka scale potential)

This is similar to what 37 Signals teaches. Basically this will remove the NEED for funding, but you can still take it if you want. It will allow you to grow based on revenues of your company, and the fact that it is recurring will create a more stable model.

Vitoto – has almost none of these ingredients. But then again, we want to be the next Facebook 😀

Quite the conundrum….

Categories
Business Technology

Idea: Create Separate Instances of Browsers for Separate Web Apps

I always get lost in my browser tabs. I am a heavy heavy internet user and often find myself with 20-40 tabs open at a time in Chrome. Many of them running web apps that I like to keep open all the time:

  • Multiple gmail accounts
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Docs (Drive)
  • Asana
  • HasOffers
  • Cacoo

The annoying thing about tabs, compared to icons on the bottom of the screen (applies to mac and PCs – I use both) is they its very easy for them to change position.

For example when you open links from a web app, it opens a new tab and pushes all the other tabs over. Meaning your reaction to go back to the 3rd tab to check calendar, is no longer there caus its been pushed along.

What if there were a way to create browser tabs that broke off and could be pinned as an icon to the bottom of the screen. All they did was launch a new Chrome window, but that window was mapped to that icon in the task bar and made it easy to navigate between different chrome “instances” or “apps”.

I know it would make me more productive…

UPDATE: Turns out this feature is already built into chrome 😛 – Click here to see how to do it.