iamvictorious

I believe it was Sean Parker who is credited with helping Mark Zuckerburg maintain control.

He supposedly was the one who got mark 3 of the 5 board seats from the initial round of financing: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/sean-park...

It makes sense ... the guy is running a multi-billion dollar new business line for Google that is their most meaningful business outside of search ads.

it'd be interesting if there were any digital equivalent experience to this ... I'm not even sure what a website without a "sign" or "logo" would look like.

Offering a lower price can definitely stem from having a new innovative manufacturing technique or business model which would certainly give the innovator a huge advantage.

Apple's iPad is a great example where they got the cost of making a tablet (though arguably were the first real tablet) to an incredibly low price and have delivered the best and cheapest product on the market at the time. That said, look at Amazon's Kindle which is radically cheaper now a few years later. I suspect not many people would buy it over the iPad if it weren't so cheap. That's a great advantage for Amazon for selling but I think it says a lot about Apple that it can charge such a premium for its product that really anyone else should be able to make from the same core components.

I was really struck by this phenomena when I asked the day of the iPhone 5 announcement if a co-founder (who isn't an apple fan boy) if he was going to buy the new iphone. He said yes. I asked if he had seen the price yet or read all the new specs. He replied no. How many companies can convince you to buy a product you haven't tried or heard the price for? I doubt anyone would say the same thing of Samsung or Amazon products. Apple definitely puts out the best product and experience if you measure it from that perspective.

yeah, that's absolutely true. Some people prefer to get the title of business development so they feel like they are doing something higher level and justify their education/credentials.

I've noticed also some startups don't call people sales people because then at conferences people aren't turned off by meeting a sales person. I'm not opposed to these tactics but just wanted to point out the functional/true differences.

Most startups are actually selling a better/different version of what does exist. Very few startups are truly category defining so as a result they are mostly doing sales. Business development as a result for most startups is really for getting distribution versus getting customers.

great post Jason!

Polly.IM right now requires you to have a Twitter account and so most current users are already engaging with Twitter. From our surveys and discussions with our trial users, they all nonetheless feel like they could use some help in categorizing tweets and helping with very routine stuff like distributing a promotion to new followers. At the end of the day, many local businesses have 1 person running their twitter account and that person generally is the owner who doubles as marketing if not everything else. Compare that situation to American Airlines which can hire 10 or 20 social media managers and you realize quickly why these folks could use some help organizing responses and conversations with customers.

that's a great idea. we wanted to release a minimal viable product first to get feedback and ideas for new features. our beta actually already yielded a lot of helpful suggestions like allowing manual approval/editing as well as enabling auto-generated coupons for new followers.

we definitely will allow more granular control going forward.