Twitter Posts

Get Venture Hacks on Facebook

Nivi · January 20th, 2010

We now have a Facebook fan page for Venture Hacks. It’s a feed of our blog posts and tweets.

I was surprised to see how many people get their news on Facebook. The fan page already has 677 fans. Check it out.

Here’s how we put it together.

How to get fans

I mentioned the page on Twitter a few times — that’s the first few bumps of fans on the left and middle of this graph.

Then I added a fan page widget to the sidebar on venturehacks.com. That’s the steady slope on the right side of the graph — about 12 new fans a day. Otherwise, I haven’t sent any messages to my Facebook friends asking them to “fan” the page — I think that’s spam.

How to set up your fan page

I looked at a lot of solutions for powering the fan page and this is what I came up with for my needs:

  • HootSuite to publish tweets to Twitter and our fan page at the same time. It also lets me schedule tweets.
  • NetworkedBlogs to publish our blog posts to the fan page.
  • Involver to power the Twitter tab at the top of the fan page.

I also use tweetpo.st to publish our tweets to my personal Facebook profile. I wish tweetpo.st worked on fan pages because it adds pictures to the tweets and changes @names into real names.

(If you’re a complete psychopath, you might like the specs for My Ultimate Twitter Client, which also includes the instructions for my Twitter/Facebook workflow.)

Should I get a fan page?

I recommend a fan page if you’re serious about blogging and tweeting. Facebook already accounts for 5% of the clicks on my bit.ly links:

The top two sources are Twitter of course.

Twitter is my continuous deployment tool

Finally, I like to say that Twitter is my continuous deployment tool. If I build something, I release it that day on Twitter. That’s what I did with our fan page. Even though it took me a few more months to improve it and get around to blogging about it.

Startup News, the first 2 weeks

Nivi · December 6th, 2009

“nicely done as always. i can count on one hand the number of daily emails worth signing up for.”

– Matt Oesterle, Sweepery

Startup News is two weeks old today. I want to share some stats and thoughts about the product.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Startup News is a daily digest of our tweets, with links to the best startup advice on the Web. You can subscribe via email or RSS. It looks like this:

Stats

300 folks have subscribed in two weeks. Almost half of them subscribe via email, the other half subscribe via RSS. Every time I mention Startup News on this blog, we get more subscribers.

In the past, we could never get more than 50 people to subscribe to an RSS feed of our tweets (that’s the flat part on the left side of the graph). Re-positioning the same content as a daily digest made the difference.

If you like the advice on this blog, you’ll like the advice in our tweets. But lots of people don’t use Twitter. And those who do don’t catch all our links. I’ve been searching for a way to get our tweets into your hands and I think this daily digest is a great solution.

Creating a daily digest of your own

If you’ve got interesting tweets, there’s demand for a daily digest. Put one together and tell your subscribers/followers about it. It’s easy to do with FeedBurner (to handle the email and RSS subscriptions) and Twitter Digest (to create a daily digest of your tweets).

Subscribe

If you haven’t checked out Startup News, try it for a week and see if you like it: subscribe via email or RSS.

If you want us to consider including one of your posts in Startup News, submit it to Hacker News — we read it every day. Or tweet it and include: “Tip @venturehacks”.

Morale, distribution, profit, and games

Nivi · December 1st, 2009

Startup thoughts:

Every action in a startup increases or decreases money, time-to-live, and morale.

If you thought product development was hard, wait until you try to distribute it.

“To succeed in business, you have to have a genuine interest in profitability. And most people don’t.” – Derek Sivers

“We didn’t get here by playing the rules of the game. We got here by setting the rules of the game.” – Chris Albrecht, CEO HBO

If you want more links and quotes, sign up for our daily digest of Startup News via email or RSS.

The long tail of VC twitterers

Nivi · November 11th, 2009

We previously posted about the long tail of VC blogs. A few VC blogs capture most of our attention. The rest slog it out in the long tail.

And now, for the first time in the history of mankind, we present the long tail of VC twitterers (click to zoom in):

The underlying data is from Venture Maven’s list of 217 VC twitterers. I removed Chris Sacca, Om Malik, and David Pakman from the dataset because they have too many followers (they were on the Twitter suggested users list).

This widget aggregates all 217 VC twitterers:



(Widget: VC twitterers)

Thanks to Venture Maven for aggregating the underlying data and to Tony Stubblebine and Waldron Faulkner for parsing it.

"Real wealth creation will take founding, seniority, or staggeringly large exits."

Nivi · October 26th, 2009

We wrote a lot of comments on other people’s blogs this week. Then we shared them on Twitter. I think you’ll like them. Here’s the top 4:

How do you raise money if you’re a very early stage companies with no product, traction, or track record? Some thoughts: http://j.mp/Uy0iR. (345 clicks — on the weekend!)

If you want to be a founder, but you’re going to be an employee for now, should you join a startup or non-startup? See http://j.mp/XTpYr. (274 clicks)

Why create a new market if you can resegment an existing market? See http://j.mp/e7wnN. (255 clicks)

Does Sequoia’s investment in Y Combinator hurt YC companies? My thoughts: http://j.mp/1Iytwx. (251 clicks)

Links

And here’s the top 5 links we shared on Twitter this week:

“Startups… punish effort that doesn’t yield results.” – Eric Ries (@ericries), http://j.mp/qI5FE (283 clicks)

“10 Disturbing Similarities Between Dating & Raising Capital” by SEOMoz founder, Rand Fishkin. Video: http://j.mp/1WfnSv. Thanks @zoransa. (234 clicks)

“Real wealth creation will take founding, seniority, or staggeringly large exits.” – Aaron Cohen’s advice to employees, http://j.mp/2CypaP (198 clicks)

Meet a CO-FOUNDER at Founder Dating in the Bay Area: http://j.mp/35teD7. Great idea, great name. (195 clicks)

An oldy but goody from ex-VC Bill Burnham: “Understanding Why Your VC Is Acting Crazy”, http://j.mp/1nswtZ. (166 clicks)

Tweet browser

Chris Turner took our entire tweet archive and categorized the tweets with his tweet browser. I’ve been having fun reading our old tweets — I particularly like reading through the books we’ve tweeted about.

Never miss another tweet again if you subscribe via RSS or email (no more than one email a day; unsubscribe anytime). Of course, you can also follow us on Twitter.

"Your next feature won't save you"

Nivi · October 19th, 2009

Here’s our top 5 tweets from last week. You’ll never miss another tweet if you subscribe via RSS or email (no more than one email a day; unsubscribe anytime). Of course, you can also follow us on Twitter.

Top 5 tweets of the week

We calculated the top 5 tweets of the week by looking at the click-throughs of our j.mp links (example):

438 clicks: Sell your product with fake screenshots. Read http://j.mp/1vTIxI. (This tweet also made it to the top of Hacker News; first tweet ever to make it to the top?).

240 clicks: “The idea that anyone at all would build a business around funding startups is the remarkable thing.” – @pkedrosky, http://j.mp/10ICTQ

217 clicks: VC-backed foursquare uses Google Docs to collect customer feedback: http://j.mp/3Y9QLL. No code, no maintenance. Keeping it minimal baby.

200 clicks: Chris Dixon (@cdixon) on the problem with taking seed money from big VCs: http://j.mp/2BHIPe. Some solutions: http://j.mp/4hFSsL.

182 clicks: “We’re often told that there are no shortcuts to success… There are always shortcuts and loopholes.” – Paul Buchheit (@paultoo), http://j.mp/2PLlcY

Editor’s choice

My favorite tweet of the week:

208 clicks: Your next feature won’t save you. But product/market fit, acquisition optimization, and creative distribution might. See: http://j.mp/23hdE.

Put your tweets on your blog

Nivi · October 13th, 2009

We recently undertook a landmark survey to determine whether our readers want to see our tweets here on this blog. The short answer is: yes.

First, 62% of respondents want to see tweets on the blog at least once a week. And a whopping 75% want to see tweets at least once a month:

Lesson: Consider putting your tweets on your blog. Surprisingly, and yet also, unsurprisingly, people who already follow us on Twitter are more interested in seeing tweets on the blog than people who don’t follow us.

Second, a stunning 30% of respondents want to get our tweets over email:

Third, 65% of respondents already follow us on Twitter:

Fourth, 50% of respondents volunteered to be on our customer development team. Lesson: Ask for help—you might be surprised by the response.

We also learned to pilot and test surveys on Twitter. Before distributing the survey broadly, we put up a tweet asking people to check out the survey. Then we used their feedback to make the survey more clear.

Finally, here’s my favorite comment from one of the respondents:

“[You] guys seem to exhibit a sense of humor. Absent that, all this stuff is unbearable.”

I need to remember that.

Take our Twitter Survey

Nivi · October 8th, 2009

We’re spending more and more timing posting original content and links on Twitter at twitter.com/venturehacks. For example:

smartbear

vcmike

Once in a while, we post a summary of our tweets here on this blog — like this.

Do you like our tweet summaries? Hate them? Want more? Want us to stop? We want your feedback.

Click here to take our Twitter survey.

5 questions. 1 minute of your time. Your feedback: priceless. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and time.

There’s also an opportunity to join our customer development team at the end of the survey. Muchas gracias!

Twitter updates

Nivi · September 15th, 2009

Here’s a snapshot of our latest updates from Twitter. We use Twitter to post links to awesome resources for entrepreneurs. If you don’t use Twitter, subscribe via RSS.