Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 30, 2012

In 2010, Gaia Online started a user acquisition campaign to grow their user base. To simplify the on boarding process, they launched the Big Red Button home page below. It worked. Conversion rates from the home page spiked. Simple user experiences, like this big red button, are effective because users understand what is expected of them. There is just one flow.

Acquisition 102

Acquisition User Experience Pricing 102

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 26, 2012

Two weeks ago, James Reinhart, founder and CEO of ThredUp , led his company through a branding exercise. The team spent an afternoon comparing and contrasting the brand attributes of Starbucks and Peets, Whole Foods and Safeway and a few other competitive pairs. The team quickly distilled each company’s brand into one word. Long ago, each of these brand selected the value that would define their brand.

Branding 102

Branding Marketing 102

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 29, 2012

In every one of my conversations with Peter Lehrman, founder of AxialMarket, he always speaks about AxialMarket as “the business.” Never the company, the startup or any other word. At first blush I thought it was a trivial semantic difference, a New York-ism, but over time I’ve come to realize this word choice marks a significant difference that manifests itself in culture, product and go to market.

Innovation 100

Innovation Startup Engineering Branding 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 28, 2012

Many of the promising marketing and media innovations of the past six years, daily deals, subscription ecommerce, social gaming and social media, have been struggling. This trend is plain to see from IPO performance and negative press cycles. I’ve been asked a few times whether there is consumer investment fatigue as a result. Fatigue is too strong a characterization.

Investment 100

Investment Social Media Mobile Innovation 100

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Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 25, 2012

Must content distribution platforms be reinvented every few years? Left to its own devices, the mob will augment, accessorize, spam, degrade and noisify whatever they have access to, until it loses beauty and function and becomes something else. Seth Godin. Given the noise and misinformation disseminated on Twitter both during the election and the Sandy disaster , I’ve been wondering how Godin’s thoughts apply to new information networks: blogs and feeds.

Government 100

Government Trends Metrics 100