Itay Adam

Husband. Father. Entrepreneur.

[itayadam-blog]

To be a +40 entrepreneur

To be a +40 entrepreneur means you’ve launched many startups. It means you’ve probably been in the game for 15–20 years. 15–20 years is a lifetime. You’ve won few times. You’ve failed time and time again. You’ve learned to live modestly; you’ve learned to live large. You’ve learned to dedicate yourself like an Olympic athlete. You respect fear and no longer treat it with disdain. You embrace failures like a normal human embraces moments of joy. Your wife is in it; your kids are in it; you dream the same dream. You are a leader. You are wise and not impulsive.

You truly enjoy the competition — you must. Your mind and soul work together. You’ve learned how to listen to your gut and analyze it with your brain. You are thorough, agile and decisive. You research everything and once you have a clear picture, you build the leanest strategy to test your assumption. Life taught you to be humbled.

When an opportunity comes, you are better skilled to identify it. Once you feel a pulse, you don’t need to think, you’ve developed an impulse to act.

You believe. Any entrepreneur believes in something. Whether it is God or karma, all +40 entrepreneurs will agree that they can “feel it” when it’s right.

You accept your ego. You no longer claim that your decisions are not affected by your ego. You now know you have an ego. You learn from it. You let it push you forward. Being a +40 web entrepreneur. It’s like riding long-waves on a longboard with Bob.  

[itayadam-blog]

The StartLab Model

Yesterday I published a sort of an article to Medium. It is a blueprint for mining success.  https://medium.com/@iAdam/the-startlab-model-9eaebda005d7

[itayadam-blog]

McDonald's, Porn and YO - The SnapCentury

Here's an image for you: 20 year old college student, laying on his dorm bed, searching for some porn flick while eating what's left from his French-fries Big Mac meal and sending a YO to his next door classmate.  

Welcome to the 21 century. The SnapCentury.  

McDonald's is the porn of nutrition.

Pornography is the porn of human emotions. 

Yo is the porn of communication skills.

Life is heading to a single button...

Build something that will allow people to stay lazy and they WILL use it.

[itayadam-blog]

B2C - If it's not viral, kill it.

To the point, if you're building a product, a B2C product and you're not seeing growth after 3 months, you're doing something wrong and for the time being, you need to kill it and go back to the drawing board. 

Don't raise funds, don't build a massive product, don't hire people and don't rent an office space. Do only one thing: Find out if you can go viral. 

If there's only one thing that I suggest you mark as "think worthy" from this post is this: Don't even build a product. You need to first figure out if you own this tiny little thing that you know, that will go viral. 

I'll share an example:

You are the owner of the domain: hytz009xx.com

It's a white, single webpage, with an image of the iPhone 5S and buy button. You are selling this iPhone for $90, you own 5000 pieces on your inventory and Michael Arrington just posted on TechCrunch an article saying: "I don't know how this guys selling the iPhone 5S for $90 but this is the real deal".

How long do you think it will take till your inventory will run out? 

No branding, no advertising, no PR, no nothing, just a solid offer. 

The only thing that you should think of is this:

What will make my product go viral. There are are only two ways that will make it go viral. 

1. It's in the offer -  (iPhone 5S for $90)

2. It's in the UX - (Mailbox queue, CandyCrush share mechanism, SongPOP product behavior) 

Now think, does your startup stands to these criterions? 

If your product is a B2C product and your answer is no, kill it, it's anal. 

[itayadam-blog]

SnapChat is not the next Facebook

  At the last NY TechCrunch disrupt, it was Chamath Palihapitya who talked about how raw with innovation the Silicon Valley turning to be. He talked about Snapchat with such a disdain that for a moment there, I believed him. But then I thought about it and I believe that Snapchat is on a verge of turning its "tiny app", to a business. Snapchat is looking to disrupt the TV world.  

[itayadam-blog]

Web-Celebs VS. Web-Slaves

There are so many talented people out there. So many cool, “out of the box”, designers, coders and marketers are willing to jump in on a project. Unfortunately, so many of them end up being used and underpaid. Few days ago I was supposed to lecture at the PixelPerfect designers conference. I had so many things that I wanted to tell these guys, but due to some frustrating flu, I had to cancel my show. Bottom line, here are my “Basic Notes” for the talented coder/designer /marketer.

1. Start by doubling your per-hour fee. Don’t argue. Double it. You deserve a lot more. 2. If he tells you: “I just need to secure the round, let’s just start with the initial look and feel”, you tell him: “I love to design a product flow, but first, pay me”. 3. If he says: “Can you draft a logo?” You say: “Sure, pay me”. 4. If he’s not willing to leave his day-job, but ask you to part-time work on the project you say: “I love the fact that we share the same points at the company. But please, either give me more points, or just pay me.” 5. If you’re not sitting at the same office for the same hours, working on the same project you say: “Pay me”. 6. If he ask you to “run a sanity check” of the concept by hacking a quick pre-alpha version, you say: “Pay me”. - - - - - - There are so many talented coders/designers/marketers out there. If you guys are reading this blog post, please treat yourself with the proper respect. Your time = money. Ask for it.  

[itayadam-blog]

Startups Fiction

When the bellboy recommends a certain stock, it’s time for you to sell it. If you’ve been trading the stock market, you know that when the public start to buy a stock, it means that someone is selling it. Who’s selling? The guys at the penthouse. Who’s buying? The bellboys.

Don’t be a bellboy!

I keep hearing urban legends about these guys who bootstrapped their startup from thin air and went from zero to hero overnight. Yeah right...

Guys,

YouTube went from zero to hero overnight? Really? Come on! YouTube used to spend over million dollars a month on marketing. Buying  hits and “fake traffic” just to show the world they’re growing.

Groupon had 3 years of nothing and then a spike? Ask yourself, where did this spike came from?  One word: Spammers. It’s a well known "secret" among the online marketing community (hell, let them sue me if they want me to produce evidence…).

AirBNB,  I just love that story about the hurricane… Are you for real? Let’s read between the lines here. Again, nothing comes out of the blue. It’s all hard work and most of this work is done by online marketing specialists behind the scenes.

The stories you hear in the media make you dream and dream big; they’ll get you spending years and millions perfecting your site or service in the hope that when you release it, it will gain traction from the get go. That’s not really how it works; a product needs time, effort and a lot of hard work to really grow.

Hell, nobody wants to hear about a 42 year old entrepreneur who worked all his life around the clock and sold his company for 40 million after 10 years of hard work and risking everything he had. People want to hear about the 17 year old kid who ordered a website on Elance and in 1 month the site’s rank spiked to 250 on compete. Funny.

Here’s the truth and it’s a tough one to swallow -

Whatever your marketing budget is, triple it.  Please, triple it. And please don’t tell me that you’re counting on Google sponsored search for traffic. If this is the case, you should stop now and go get a real job.