Which would make a more memorable family vacation - Chicago or Boston?
Never been to either of these cities but both seem interesting. I have a family of 6 (all over 18), but we're not into night clubs or bars, and none of us are big sports fans. So I think we'd mostly go for sightseeing, landmarks, shopping, nature, and maybe a theme park. Thanks!
What are some good stories about startups before they gained significant traction?
1. HOTMAILThe old story is about Hotmail. When it started, it had a problem with acquiring new users. After a few months of struggling an investor suggested adding a call to action ('get free webmail account at hotmail') into the bottom of every email. It took off extremely fast and became known to many as one of the first growth hacks.2. EVENTBRITEFirst Kevin Hartz asked Julia to marry him. Then he asked her to build a company with him. They both teamed up with Renaud Visage and started Eventbrite. They were working for two years from their respective homes. Kevin and Julia in California and Renaud overseas in France. After two years they decided to raise funding. It was 2008, the crisis was in full swing. No investor would invest in them. They decided to persevere and bootstrap. After a year they started talking to a few investors. They were surprised that the projected numbers that Eventbrite planned, were now reality. Most startups project unrealistic number, Eventbrite delivered. In 2013 Eventbrite sold tickets worth over $1 billion.Picture: Renaud, Julia and Kevin on stage at Startup Grind LondonJawboneJawbone was founded by Hosain Rahman and Alexander Asseily. When Alex was talking about the story, he stressed that back then Chinese manufacturers were not yet used to work with startups like they are now, in the time of Kickstarter. It was a few weeks before Jawbone was planning to launch. Alex was in China for several months. The prototypes didn't work and money was running out quickly. At some point he remembered they had less than $5000 left on their corporate bank account. He was very close to giving up. It took the company only a few months and they had $1 million on their bank account. A year later (hope I remember it correctly) they had $100 million on their bank account. This is a story of perseverance and hard work. Respect to Hosain and Alex for pushing through! In 2010 the company was awarded Design of the Decade from IDSA and Jawbone now holds over 230 patents.
Grubwithus: Who are Grubwith.us' competitors?
Lifecrowd Applies the GWU business model to a variety of leisure events, many of which are unrelated to food.From volunteering to arts and crafts, Lifecrowd is testing the model's durability in offering awesome social experiences that don't revolve around a table and meal.SidetourSimilar to Lifecrowd with various activities you can book, but missing the social element of seeing who else has prebooked. Only in NYC currently. Intructional cooking events seem to be quite popular. A TechStars NYC startup that raised 1.5m in Oct 2011.
Are most products that gain significant traction "great since day one"?
Anecdotally, it seems much, much more common for it to take a while. Sometimes, you have to go through pretty severe course corrections. Think PayPal going from Palm encryption to web payments, or YouTube going from online dating to video hosting. Other times, it's just that it takes a while for people to adopt it, like with Twitter. Finally, there are cases where you just have to roll the dice a bunch of times before you come up with something big - Rovio, OMGPOP, etc.So, products that are hot from day one, like arguably Instagram, are the exception to the rule.