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At Virgin Pulse, we’re passionate about changing lives and businesses for good®. We want to make a difference in the world by helping people be their best, every day, at work and home. Our people drive our business and our culture reflects that. As an organization, we focus on our three core values: One Team One Dream, We Deliver, and Live and Breathe It. We understand that our diversity is our strength, we have a responsibility to innovate and lead the industry, and we embody a culture of health and wellbeing that inspires our clients as well as our own employees. As the #1 global wellbeing solution provider, Virgin Pulse supports 14 million members in 21 languages across 190 countries. Featuring the industry’s only true Homebase for Health® that unifies and simplifies the health and wellbeing journey, Virgin Pulse fuses high-tech, high-touch, predictive analytics, AI and data to support clients and members across the entire health, wellbeing and benefits lifecycle— including screening and assessment, activation, behavior change, adoption of sustainable, healthy habits, benefits navigation, condition management, gaps in care closure and digital therapeutics. With employee wellbeing experts located around the world, we help our clients build the ultimate employee experience. We're proud to say our clients leverage Virgin Pulse’s digital and live solutions to change their lives—and businesses—for good. Virgin Pulse values and celebrates diversity and is committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We believe in creating teams made up of individuals with various backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, inspires innovation, collaboration, and challenges us to produce better solutions. As a global employer, we seek to recruit, develop, and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool.

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welltok

Yale New Haven Health was among the CT health systems affected by the data breach of MOVEit, a tool used by Denver-based company Welltok.

More than 800,000 CT residents impacted by data breach

Colorado-based healthcare IT services company Welltok has added another 1.9 million individuals to the number of people affected as a result of the MOVEit Transfer breach it suffered last year.

teiss - News - Healthcare IT giant Welltok says MOVEit data breach impacted close to 4 million individuals

From Local 3 News: Welltok, Inc. shared a data breach notice that may affect some people's private information, including CHI Memorial patients. Welltok is a company that provides a healthcare consumer platform. The company's website says Welltok helps employers and providers connect users ...

Welltok announces data breach that may affect CHI Memorial patients - Mix 104.1 FM - WCLE - Cleveland, Tennessee

New graduate? Jump on board one of these high flying companies Graduating students hungry to dive into the (aka ) often struggle to select the right, specific opportunity to start their career. startup community StartUpLand Each spring, I provide a comprehensive list of exciting, growing, hiring startups–both private or recently public–that are worthy of consideration as places to start or continue a career in StartupLand. The criteria for being on the list is subjective but is a mix of fundraising (typically > $10m in the most recent round), scale (typically > 50 employees), momentum (typically growing revenue or users > 50%) and hiring (typically > 10 open reqs, including a number of entry level positions that would be a fit for recent college or business school graduates). Before we get into the companies themselves, I suggest checking out my posts and , where I give some more detailed advice on how to select the right company for you and position yourself to secure a job. Getting Your First Startup Job Are You Suited For A StartUp? Once you have reviewed this framework for deciding what you’re looking for, this post will give you to research and approach. a list of over 500 companies As usual, the list is compiled and organized based on location since I believe in selecting a geography to plug in to (and contribute to) a community and ecosystem. I received fantastic input from angels, entrepreneurs, lawyers and VCs across the world, helping me pressure test and compile this list (note: Flybridge portfolio companies are in blue). I recognize that the list contains no companies from India or China. I hope to cover those geographies in the future but just didn’t feel I had good enough intelligence at this time. I’d also point folks to Stanford’s Andy Rachleff’s , which he publishes each fall with a similar theme (albeit more Silicon Valley focused). terrific list I’m sure I made many mistakes and omissions, which are all my own. Feedback welcome! East Coast West Coast International Other Startup Hubs Bitpay, Ionic Security, Kabbage, MailChimp ATL: AvantCredit, , BucketFeet, Civis Analytics, Dough, Fooda, Groupon, Iris Mobile, Kapow, Narrative Sciences, , Raise.com, ShopRunner, Shiftgig, SpotHero, SproutSocial, Tastyworks, Uptake CHI: bloXroute Precognitive FullContact, Ibotta, LogRhythm, Rally, SendGrid, Sympoz, TeamSnap, VictorOps, Webroot, CO: Welltok 2U, Cvent, Optoro, Sonatype, Vox Media, WeddingWire DC: Apptio, Avalara, Avvo, ExtraHop, Julep, Juno, Koru, OfferUp, Outreach, Peach, Porch, Pro, Redfin, Rover.com SEA: Bamboo HR, Canopy Tax, Domo, Health Catalyst, HireVue, InsideSales, Instructure, Lucid Software, Observe Point, Pluralsight, Qualtrics, Solution Reach, Workfront UT: That’s it! Special thanks to all those who provided me with anonymous input as well as my colleague, , who did most of the heavy lifting to help me in compiling this list. Caroline Constable

The Rocket Ship Startup List: 2018

“I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man!” - Jay Z “Uncomfortable Chair” - top NFT-based artwork from Foundation. This essay has been originally published through my newsletter, Borsalino Test. You can subscribe here . . ‘Ninja’, the most famous Twitch streamer, earns between $400k - $800k a month. . The top-earning writer on Substack earns more than $500,000 a year. These trends reflect a broader movement of “Enterprization" of individuals. It is often referred to as "Passion economy" or "Creators' economy". Four creators have now made $10M+ on Teachable Cohort-based courses are also picking up momentum The past decade of consumer tech has sowed the seeds of many gig economy platforms of the likes of Uber and Airbnb. They allow anyone to monetize undifferentiated assets, like couriers’ time or vehicles. To be clear, this isn’t going anywhere, especially during and after this pandemic. The creators' economy instead is building the opportunity to capitalize on differentiated talents. This has huge implications for entrepreneurship and what we’ll think of as a “job” in the future. Now, what if your favorite creators were your portfolio stocks? What if these creators could get their fans to fund their work? Creators produce content first and then get paid for it - that's the established paradigm. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a way to flip this model on its head. The intersection of patronage and profit is already fertile ground for experiments. Financing, distribution, and social validation People need money to create things. The vast majority of creators take on incredible amounts of risk (e.g., opportunity for income smoothing, no access to health insurance, ...). Some start young and perfect their craft for a while. Emerging creators lack upfront financing. If it works, they stick to it. If not, well...too bad. For creators with an established audience (e.g., a sizable Twitter following, in the tens of thousands, ...) it could take a year to reach critical mass and make a living off of (e.g., see Lenny Rachitsky’s ). true fans case This process would take longer for the long tail of middle-of-the-pack creators. Many creators would enjoy a more structured way to finance their dreams upfront. Top creators actually don't need financing that much. Everything is about distribution for them. How much does it cost for , the most popular Western TikTok star, to create a video? Next to nothing. What all creators need is an engaged fanbase or community. Top creators want to grow their audience. Charli D’Amelio Creators could sell a piece of themselves to their early fans. That would prove "skin in the game", and engage communities. Fame is a self-reinforcing phenomenon with clear network effect implications. Yet today, there's no way for creators to leverage an early fanbase as a distribution channel. For most fans, there is a strong social validation element in being part of a creator's community. It's almost like a flex: “I was the first person to be a fan” or “I’m the biggest fan”. Say you get a new badge or sticker when you donate more than $500 to your favorite creator. Or after you complete an online course. Early fans want validation. That would signal you are a super fan. It's a similar mechanism to Twitch's donations today. The social side of fan bases exist because people crave validation. I dedicate at least a fourth of my online time to creators. I am part of several Slack communities (e.g, and read dozens of Substack newsletters. Today, this trait of my online identity goes entirely unnoticed by social media. RadReads) There is reflexive value in communities around people or ideas. The more people manifest interest in something, the higher the value of the thing. Part of the value is social signaling. Part of it is creating a common cultural touchstone. Reflexive value is dynamic, not static. Equity ownership > subscriptions. Scale breeds further scale, alongside improved community engagement. Today, most paid content is monetized through subscriptions. Subscriptions translate into equally-sized, cadenced cash outlays from fans. This model has no intrinsic reflexive value. What if the quality of content produced dilutes over time? What happens when members of a community 10x? Subscriptions are imperfect monetization models that do not capture the value fan-creator relationships. The creator’s economy calls for dynamic pricing, instead of flat, recurring revenues. The opportunity for non fungible tokens (NFTs) The first iteration of the concept of equity ownership in creators would look like a toy. As the crypto world fusses over Bitcoin, another digital asset has gained traction. Exciting use cases for non‑fungible tokens (NFTs) are cropping up all the time. NFTs are unique digital items such as collectibles, artworks, badges and stickers. Creator-issued collectibles. NFTs' actual ownership is blockchain-managed and they command some . They are unique, rare and indivisible digital assets. Non-fungible tokens contain permanent metadata - like a certificate of authenticity for a rare painting. Also, developers have the power to limit the number of rare NFTs, making them scarce and desirable. Finally, NFTs cannot be split into smaller denominations - you can only trade them as a whole. serious cash NFTs offer a flexible method of recognising achievements and symbolize the fan-creator relationship. Here a few use cases we will likely see in the future. NFTs issued at completion of online courses. E.g., ' ' by Tiago Forte could have its own collection of NFT badges for each cohort Online courses: Building a Second Brain NFTs to confirm participation to an online program. E.g., each cohort of fellows could get their own badge Cohort-based programs: On Deck exclusive, limited edition NFTs for early fans. E.g., a Substack writer could release an NFT for its first 100 subscribers, then for its first 1,000...10,000... Newsletter subscriptions: creators could issue NFTs with "voting rights" to a selected group of super fans. They could then express preferences on the desired content of the next YouTube video Voting rights: NFTs issued to a subset of community members to reward their active engagement Online communities: In this scenario, creators would be the sole party allowed to create their own NFTs. The initial purpose of this model would not be to trade and speculate amongst fanbases. Creator-issued collectibles would allow creators establish a direct relationship with fans. Collecting digital art, in-game assets (e.g., swords, garments...), and tradable cards is very easy and fun. It also does not involve any financial construct. Users see their entire interaction with the interface as a fun game. They earn emotional reward from the ownership of a unique object. NFTs address the same pattern that makes people collect paintings and vases. A visual representation with an immutable record of ownership is psychologically appealing. Simplicity and fun. Pricing of scarce items is a zero-sum game. People choose the objects they believe will be in demand by others and thus expect growth in price. When you can't measure performance, networks drive success. Emerging artists produce a limited number of works to signal scarcity. This promotes price growth. The extrinsic value of an NFT stems from psychological and social dynamics of the fan-creator relationship. And grows with them. Scarcity and investment attractiveness. NFTs will define fans' identity as content consumers. They would help narrate articulate stories about tastes and preferences. Fans will store NFT-based badges, stickers and art in personal galleries or wallets. Handovers and trades would be time tracked, reflecting the longevity of fan-creator relationships. Fans will enjoy the social validation from discovering creators early in their journey. Social validation. Crypto unlocks the potential for a community to have autonomy from the platform. Each individual creator could have some existing leaderboard tied to an existing platform. With NFTs, creators could bootstrap their community off of that ranking. A community can uproot itself from its platform and create its own 'digital nation'. It’s a way for creators to shift power from current platforms and own their communities. This will also foster cross-community discoverability and growth. Early fans of a Substack writer could discover online courses by peeking at their peers' gallery of collectibles. Autonomous fanbases. Crypto could change the dynamics between communities and creators. It could claim back the idea of the stock market to benefit creators and fans directly. When a creator releases their new work, each piece would tokenized into an NFT. As more fans engage with each content piece, the corresponding NFT would rise in value. Developers can NFTs can to wire a cut of each handover to artists. This would allow originators to capitalize on the hype they create. You could also redeem tokens in exchange of merchandise or experiences. Think dinner with your favorite creator, or picking the next game they are going to play on Twitch. Content tokenization. Early use cases should not have any kind financial flavour. Hardcore tokenization of somebody’s income stream requires a high level of trust. People are comfortable messing around with art, badges and stickers use cases. Collectibles are a mental crutch to get people familiar with digital ownership. That's Stage 1 of the transition towards owning an economic stake in a creator’s work. A necessary first step. I like big TAMs (Total Addressable Market) and I cannot lie The market size for crypto-native creative content tokens is hard to estimate. It barely exists today. Analytical forecastings always fail when applied to markets that don’t yet exist. It is impossible to predict how disruptive these products will be. A notable example of how wrong forecasts for disruptive innovations can be is Uber. Its original pitch deck forecasted a best-case scenario of $1B annual revenue. At the moment I am writing this, Uber’s market cap exceeds $70B. Potentially very large. With that said: We are in the early days of NFTs. In early July 2020, the total sales of nonfungible tokens hit $100 million. at the moment I am writing amount to $8.5B. And this is just the start. The leading cryptocurrencies started their rally to yearly highs. We would soon see a nice in the NFT space as well. Sales of NFTs during the past month hockey-stick Creators’ market size: a bottom-up analysis Here’s a bottom-up that adds up to 50 million creators. – Making content full-time: Professional Individual Creators (~2M+) of the 31M channels on YouTube, ~1M creators have over 10K subscribers ( ) YouTube: source of the 1B accounts on Instagram, ~500K have over 100k followers and are considered active influencers ( ) Instagram: source of the 3M streamers on Twitch, ~300K have either Partner or Affiliate status ( ) Twitch: source Others: including musicians, podcasters, writers, illustrators, etc total ~200K ( ) source – Monetizing content creation part-time: Amateur Individual Creators (~46.7M) of the 31M channels on YouTube, ~12M have between 100-10K subscribers ( ) YouTube: source of the 1bn accounts on Instagram, ~30M have between 50-100K followers ( ) Instagram: source of the 3M streamers on Twitch, ~2.7M are non Partner or Affiliates ( ) Twitch: source including musicians, podcasters, writers, illustrators, account for a total of ~2M ( ) Others: source Creators’ market size: a top-down estimate. American internet creators earned a baseline of $6.8 billion on the nine platforms in 2017. That number rose by ~$1B a year, every year (or 10-15% year-over-year). Those earnings increased faster for the creators on Instagram, Twitch, Tumblr and YouTube. From collectibles marketplaces to social money (not exhaustive) enables users to create a tradable digital collectible. The platform enables user-generated artwork with proof of provenance. It also facilitates the sale and terms of sale on their marketplace, and at near zero costs. Since its launch (Nov 2019), almost 40 thousand artworks have been created on Rarible. That translated into a total transacted value of almost $10M. Rarible 's idea is: you can tokenize creative products of any kind. The platform lets you buy, sell or redeem a token. The result is a liquid marketplace from day one. Both the creator and their fans can take advantage of being early in the marketplace. Or from secondary market appreciation. It’s one interesting experiment where owning the token signals being early to the market. There’s also an obvious financial layer on top of it. Foundation is a blockchain infrastructure for social money. "Social money" is lingo for branded tokens. They allow users to own, control and coordinate the value created across platforms. After signing up to the Roll platform, you get assigned 2M units of social money. Roll lets anyone create their personalized branded social money. More importantly, it provides pathways to encapsulate value via existing networks. Each issuer has their own unique network, which has its own unique social value. This value is captured by the currency issuer and their network, and not a third-party or platform. Roll is a social network for art creators and collectors, backed by blockchain. On the SuperRare platform, artists create a piece of art and tokenize it. Once the NFT is on SuperRare, it can be bought, sold, or even held as a long term investment. Artists can either put their creation up for an auction-style bidding process or sell it for a set price. Once the NFT is sold to a buyer, it can then be resold at any price on a variety of NFT trading platforms. SuperRare is a digital collectible ecosystem. It aims to create with VR/AR taking digital collectibles. It is a similar concept to the Pokémon Go integration of AR gaming with the real world. (Pokemon Go accrued more than 550 million installs in its first 80 days from launch!). Whilst some digital collectibles are game-related, most digital collectibles are simply static images. The company has created the Terra Virtua Fancave - a personal 3D environment. User would gather there to display their collectibles there. Terra Virtua “a deeper sensory experience” is a gaming community platform which now has over 20 million users. Enjin’s co-founder and CTO, , a new standard for video game tokens. With ERC-1155, a single smart contract can govern an infinite number of tokens. So a ERC-1155 contract could contain a wide variety of game items, from weapons to health potions. The Enjin token already powers over 1 billion digital assets. Enjin’s tokenized objects support developers with in-game monetization. Enjin developed ERC-1155 More, quirkier experiments: from socks to securitized humans is a crypto company that ran an experiment for fun. They created a bunch of physical socks (“ ”) and tokenized them. The crypto tokens are redeemable for the socks and trade on the open crypto market. The socks were launched at $14. At the moment I am writing this, they’re now trading for $3,000 each. So far only 30% of the tokens have been redeemed for the physical socks. There’s been about $130,000 in trading volume on 500 pairs of Unisocks. So about 70% of the volume is speculation vs people “actually buying” the socks. And half the trades are people trading fractional pairs of socks! Uniswap Unisocks is an artist-driven platform. It makes it easy for creators to authenticate, showcase and sell artwork. In 2018, they had 330+ artists on the platform, over 4000 editions and more than 12,000 digital artworks sold. KnownOrigin is among the first few people that I'm aware of to tokenize themselves. His tokens were redeemable for an hour of his time. And you could speculate on the future value of his time as a designer. So you can redeem the token for his time or you could just hold it as a sign of “I was there first”. If he becomes this famous designer, you could cash in on that later. Dapp Boi . Outside of crypto there are other experiments that have been run. Mike Merrill, literally securitized himself so shareholders can vote on life decisions. Mike Merrill , the star of the Brooklyn Nets, issued a bond based on his future NBA earnings. That's similar to the . It's a very explicit financialization of a person. Spencer Dinwiddie David Bowie Bonds The initial pitch for was that you were never even going to get your physical shoes. The original thesis was: “I know the new Yeezys are coming out, I know they’re going to go up in price, just let me buy shares in it.” StockX is fascinating because they're a large existing platform trying to tokenize. MOON is a community token for the r/Cryptocurrency subreddit. Technically it has a market cap of over $2.88 septillion (that’s 24 zeroes) in September 2020. This astounding number is obviously just a market quirk. Most of this value remains unrealized. If more subreddit contributors decide to convert their holdings, MOON will fall massively. Reddit Acknowledgements: thank you Li , Jesse , Bryant , Aaron for turning on your flashlights as I went down this rabbit hole. If you enjoyed this piece, consider subscribing to my newsletter Thank you! 'Borsalino Test'. Previously published at https://michelecanzi.substack.com/p/borsalino-test-5-the-next-stock-exchange

Creators' Economy: Market Size, Scope, Social Validation, and NFTs

Growth hacks, usually not shared, that got us 1K subscribers in one month. Not so long ago I did a re-launch of a digital marketing newsletter, a side hustle of mine. The facelift or rather was the first part of the story I wanted to share. Growing the newsletter more is the second part. theKatapult moving my side hustle to Jamstack Brace yourself, this is the story about it. My and I have run this newsletter for almost 5 years for folks interested in digital marketing in Serbia. As explained in our ‘making of’ post we got a bit lazy so the newsletter was stale for a couple of months. friend Basically, we started from scratch, and even though we’ve had some presence we needed to rethink our approach. If we had time we’d take it slow with a carefully planned strategy based on content marketing and keywords… but we did not have the time and honestly, it is a pet project, a side hustle, an MVP. So we opted out to low-maintenance growth hacks we both use oftentimes in our everyday work to make it work. A brief overview of the work ahead As an MVP that’s not gonna bring us any $ (though or two), we needed to put the minimum effort for maximum results in a tight time frame. So, we laid out key points we need to take care of upfront ie before the official re-launch: we might get a beer Take care of branding essentials ie logo, color palette, typography, imagery, etc Standardize slogans, brand voice, mission statement. Work on the official content style guide + resources (after all we are a curated newsletter in essence). Define buyers persona (up to 3) and find their favorite digital hangouts. Build and engage with the audience via social channels we already have. Own distribution. Make / own social media channels. This includes setting up Linkedin and Facebook groups and Reddit channel. Build their audience, engage with it. Quick keyword research and then map out content marketing strategy. Newsletter facelift. Growth hacks to increase the numbers of followers on social channels and ultimately subscribers. Defining Lead Generation Channels Channels Even though we didn’t plan for this to be a business (but it can certainly grow into one) in order to make it happen we needed to treat it as one. This meant we’d have to define our channels so we know where and how to focus. We opted out to organic social (Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook) and organic search. lead generation 4 Weeks Head Start We decided to have a 4 weeks head start from the website overhaul. That should give us some time to set our social channels and start with setting expectations for the audience i.e. the quality we’ll be sharing. All of the branding work is previously explained in that ‘making of’ post of ours. Buyers personas In a small market such as Serbia and with a clear niche insight, our buyers’ personas practically wrote themselves. Broadly, anybody that’s into marketing. A bit more focused: marketing managers, business developers, and marketing agency CEOs, all in the mid-20s to mid-40s with a clear interest in tech and digital innovations and best practices. Keyword research is there to help you find strategic keywords you ought to target with your website’s content and that are in line with your website’s ability to rank for them. Keyword research Usually, I choose a set of keywords that help me navigate and look for the ones that are the most likely target for a website/business. Then do competition research for their KWs and cross-check it all for a set of KWs that I’ll be using. For this project, I did the keyword research a bit differently. I used a single keyword and and did the rest. digitalni marketing SEMRush SurfSEO Now, we were considering making a blog page for each newsletter. For that reason, we needed to find keywords we could use. However, that would also mean that the best approach would be to curate newsletters each week per topic i.e. the first week for SEO, second week for PPC, etc. That was not the original idea, neither we had time for such a broad approach. Still, we needed this to be done before the website re-do. Hangouts and the audience With buyers personas and keyword research done, and with lead gen channels defined, finding hangouts was easy. For us, that meant Linkedin and Facebook groups with the general interest in digital marketing (focus on Serbia) + official channel. Reddit Serbia Besides the hangouts, we needed to identify a number of influences in the field whose audience we should approach as well. Best and the fastest way to do that is to use , an easy to use audience intelligence tool. SparkToro A simple search with our keywords by , profile KWs, and #hashtag usage gave us a nice list of influences whose audience, especially on Twitter, we could reach out to. interest (Frequently talks about) While defining the hangouts we were set out to make/own distribution channels as well. We made a Linkedin group on the subject of digital marketing and we were planning on the same approach on Facebook and Reddit. All of this basically meant that the audience building would go through: official newsletter profiles and pages personal profiles and page group promotion This alone is a huge amount of work and we needed it to be done, or at least start with it, before the re-launch. The growth hacks below explain what we did, why we did it, and how we did it. Newsletter facelift Just as we updated/upgraded our website we needed to upgrade or facelift our newsletter as well. We use Mailchimp for new subscribers. Thankfully they provide you with the basic setup for forms and double-opt-in email automation + in our case much needed Serbian translation. We wanted to take it a bit further. There are two types of email automation: Trigger-based automation usually associated with ecommerce (like abandonment cart emails for example) and drip campaigns ie automatic emails sent in succession (like product onboarding emails for example). It is not a common practice with curated B2B newsletters but we wanted to give value to new subscribers upfront by providing them with a comprehensive and useful first email. So, we created a one email drip campaign that sends an introduction email one day after the subscription. I guess most of you have heard of Gary Vee, right? You can love him, or not but you can’t say he’s not walking the walk. And one of the best things he preaches is his approach to content strategy. Basically, you make one outstanding and then re-use it in many different shapes and forms adapted to the channels you are using it on. pillar piece of content With that in mind, we’ve created 2 re-launch emails (sent on Tuesday and Friday of the same week) packed with the best guides covering different aspects of digital marketing (SEO, PPC, email, project management, etc.) which we then used to create other pieces of content like email for drip campaign, keyworded blog posts, and a lot of different Tweets, FB and Linkedin posts all mentioning or pinging influencers (and their audience) we’ve gathered. Growth hacks As I explained, we did not have enough time to set up a comprehensive strategy so we opted out to growth hacks that helped us reach a wider audience and ultimately grow our subscription base from original 2k subscribers to 3k in a month. An important thing to keep in mind is that you always aim to keep the audience of a soc network on that same network first. Once you filter them out you can send them wherever you want. For example, if you’re working with a Linkedin audience, try and keep them on Linkedin either by connecting with them or sending them to a group you run (rather than a business page). Once you are connected as 1st connection you can hit them via message or they can see your posts on their wall (it helps if you have someone to comment or link your posts since engaged posts get more visibility from Linkedin). In groups, you can use the option to share your message with all group members. Recommend Growing Twitter followers You can grow Twitter following by running an engagement ad campaign, sharing original and quality tweets, and engaging with the community or by simply following others. To simplify Tweet posting as much as possible we used for scheduling Tweets (always 3 tweets within 5min as it raises your chances to show in Twitter feed). Buffer Also, we used to automate adding the users who follow known users, influencers, and communities/news we already defined. Tweepie Given that we’ve had 2 personal and official brand profiles you can imagine how much we’ve had to do. Growing Linkedin group and profile audience Thanks to the group we’ve made the approach to reaching out to new audiences via Linkedin is a bit different. Since we already knew Linkedin groups of our interest we used to visit, connect with, and invite people in those groups to join our group. Dux Soup We also used scraper on other groups to make a personal connection first then invite them to our group. Phantombuster LinkedIn Group Members Finally, we used the option to automatically extract all the LinkedIn users who liked a list of posts or articles we've gathered previous;y. Then automatically send invitations to the people previously extracted with . LinkedIn Post Likers LinkedIn Network Booster Growing Facebook page, group, and profile audience To grow page, group, and personal profiles on Facebook we used Pahntombster in pretty much similar fashion as for Linkedin. For example, we used their in combination with most of the time. Facebook Group Extractor Facebook Message Sender The results All of these brought additional 1K subscribers in a little over a month. That is quite amazing when you take a look at how big the audience is. A simple Linkedin search of people in digital marketing in Serbia shows 13k results. Well...take a look. OK but what about newsletter results. While the open rate is up clicks are pretty much on the same level. Give the amount of time invested the results so far are better than we expected. While there is a lot of work ahead this proved to be a working blueprint for most B2B businesses with actual growth hacks that you can use to grow your audience with a little to expenses.

Low Maintenance Growth Hacks That No One Tells You About

To kick off this interview, can you tell us what companies you have worked for? I have worked for a couple of eСommerce players like and , and currently I am building products for corporates at . Monoqi Outfittery BCG Digital Ventures Would you say that all great products have been built by great teams? I think there have been equal amount of great products built by average teams and average products build by outstanding teams. I do believe that there is a lot of serendipity in building a great product. There’s a lot of serendipity in building a great product. What are the qualities of a great team to you? I find a healthy amount of respectful disagreement to be one of the key features of a great team. Being able to challenge each other ideas is extremely valuable and helps to weed out mediocre ideas. I also noticed that teams which do not obsess with roles and titles and do not fear to pick up tasks from other domains if that’s the right thing to do at the moment produce much more solid result. And fun of course. Having a good laugh even in the most stressful situations is very important. Having had experience with multiple products, what are the things you would never do again? SOOOOOO many things! Overcomplicate things. Try to come up with The Perfect Solution from the first try and cover all the edge cases Roll out a solution which kind of works, but still requires the user to suffer a bit Listen to theorists and “experts” who did not build anything significant. Compromise on things if my gut tells me not to. Can you tell us about a widely accepted idea that you believe is overrated or wrong? Design thinking is the silver bullet for all sorts of products and teams. In my experience, it often ends up being quite prescriptive and limits the possibility for exploration and for actually thinking out of the box. I also feel like at times design thinking is used to cover the lack of craft and expertise — we (as product team) just hand off the solution design to the user under the flag of empathy, instead of actually doing our homework thoroughly. In many cases you can achieve 80% of the result with 20% of effort. In others — you need to go all the way. How do you decide when to stop? If the extra effort goes completely unnoticed, or if the change in the metric you are targeting is disproportionally low compared to the invested effort — it is probably a good time to stop. You now work in tech, but digital products are a relatively new thing. What would you do, had you been born 50 years earlier? I’d probably either be a flight attendant or work in entertainment industry. Someone would need to coordinate all those disco folks to get the Saturday night fever going. What apps do you have on your Home Screen? , , , , , and and all the communication apps are the standard. I download a few apps a week — currently I am obsessed with mindfulness and wellness apps. My favourite of the last weeks is . They are using the phone flashlight to measure your heart rate variability — not sure I trust the accuracy of it entirely, but I found the solution itself to be super neat! Bookmate Notion Trello Toggl Komoot iNaturalist Headspace Welltory What is your favourite product that hasn’t become mainstream yet? It’s a tough one. I have a few favourite products that I do not use, but love the idea — and to name a couple. Frankly, I do not think they will ever become mainstream, because they are focusing on very specific problems (scientific research and farming respectively). None the less, I watch them closely and cheer for them because their aspiration resonates with me, I like the teams behind these products, and the way they communicate their values and products is just inspiring to me. LabTwin OneSoil What’s your favourite Jira alternative? Physical kanban board beats Jira any time ;) on a more serious note, Trello gives more flexibility and incorporates issue-specific knowledge management quite well. I love using it for my own projects, sadly it never took off with any development team I worked with. Unpopular opinion: I actually don’t hate Jira. It takes a moment or two to set it up well, but I made good experiences with it managing 3 products in parallel, and I value the possibility to connect an issue to related knowledge fairly easily. Many products that do one thing really well or one product that is ok at many things? Many products that do one thing really well — focus is the key to excellence. Where are you on the scale from “Deploy early and often” to “Only deploy when you are 100% sure there are no new bugs”? Early and often on staging, much more careful on production. I have been mostly working with B2B products and internal software solutions, and one thing I’ve learned is that users that are forced to use your product are a very unforgiving audience. How much do you think the culture of “Move fast and break things” has affected the quality of modern products? It is terrible. I recently listened to , where among other things he talks about recording all the software bugs and issues he experienced in a day. Bottom line: we do not even expect software to work any more. Jonathan Blow’s talk from DevGAMM 2019 We are so used to it, that we do not notice it in day-to-day app usage, but when you think how much of our life depends on the software — it just becomes really scary. We do not even expect software to work any more. How do you approach Quality Assurance in your teams? At DV (BCG Digital Ventures), engineering teams put a lot of emphasis on quality as a part of the development workflow, through processes like peer reviews and marinating a certain level of test coverage in code. We also encourage the teams to use the products they are working on frequently to spot unobvious issues, and we host regular bug-bashing sessions before major releases. How do you like to split testing between Product Managers and QA? So far I did not have too many opportunities to work with QA. So in most cases I do testing for the functional requirements while engineering team takes care of non-functional requirements. What makes a bug report great? Enough detail for developer to get a few ideas what might be the problem makes a great report. Be it screenshots, console messages, or video recordings, the idea is to not have developer to spend extra time figuring out what the problem is, but focus on investigating why it occurs and how to fix it. If tomorrow your whole team could spend 0 time bugs, where would you invest those time savings? On fixing technical debt and making the product stable and secure.

"We Don't Expect Software to Work Any Longer": A Non-trivial Interview with Natallia Shauchenka

Mention the words or to a Millennial and you will likely be greeted with awkward silence or a vitriolic gaze. And for good reason. Many watched as the 2008 recession gutted their parent’s life savings in a matter of days. Hell, I watched my teenage home value (albeit inflated) plummet from $600,000 to less than $300,000 (we ended up foreclosing). stock portfolio investments This mistrust of the system mixed with a tightening and increasingly automated job market, low wages, and student loan debt makes for a misguided cocktail every hipster is ready to pound at Sunday brunch. So how do you start getting young people to think about investing? Overhaul The Experience & Meet Us Halfway The problem with most platforms is that they archaic, hard to understand, and often require a high barrier to entry. They simply do not mesh with the wiring of a young person’s brain or the daily experiences and interactions they have with other technology on a day-to-day basis. Access must be mobile-first and a cardinal rule. investment simplicity Robinhood to the Rescue Robinhood is an iOS and Android app that allows anyone to buy and sell stocks with zero fees. Seriously, that’s it. And zero fees . really means zero fees This kicks major brokers who charge up to $8 per trade squarely in the teeth. No complicated, buzzword-laden platforms to navigate, no visits to Margaret the 48-year old broker or worse — Byron, the handsome dude with a pompadour, five years your younger, who rakes in an annual salary three times what you will earn in a lifetime. Margaret is tolerable, but Byron can go sip Hemlock atop a high-rise condo while clutching his French Bulldog.  Launched in 2014, Robinhood combines beauty and a no-frills approach toward stock trading to create a mobile experience that is digestible and a wonderful introduction to what has largely been disorienting, if not scary, concept for the average person. The app is dead simple to use, presents information thoughtfully, and has a signup process that takes less than five minutes. How to Pick Stocks When You Don’t Know What You’re Doing No penny stocks (tell your Uncle Raymond he’s an idiot) No mutual funds No pre-IPO shares Companies actively listed on major U.S. exchanges only While these may seem like a lot of “rules,” it is with great purpose: to protect you from overly risky investments. Find Stocks That Have a Proven History of Growth and Future Potential Welltower growth Picking stocks is only hard if you make it that way. One of the first companies I put any significant amount of money into is Welltower, a senior living REIT, a type of security that invests in real estate through property or mortgages and often trades on major exchanges like a stock. Here are the main things I asked myself: Senior care and housing, sweet. My Nonni will love me for this! What service impacts a significant portion of the population and is a necessity? Welltower has a market cap over $25 billion. Which company in this sector is a leader or dominant force? Welltower has paid quarterly dividends since 1987 and has consistently increased that payout ever since. It currently pays $0.86 per share every quarter. Who pays dividends? Welltower wasn’t crushed by the 2008 collapse, but it definitely took a ding. How do they fair in an economic downturn? In January 2011, the oldest post-World War II baby boomers began turning 65; since then, roughly 10,000 boomers have celebrated their 65th birthday every day. By the time the last of this generation approaches retirement age in 2029, 18 percent of the U.S. will be at least that age. There was a whole lotta humpin’ after WWII. It isn’t rocket science to see there is a large, steadily increasing percentage of the population who will need a specific service or product for years to come. This fact, coupled with the criteria above, led to my decision. And we still haven’t even begun talking about the rest of the world’s aging population (which Welltower serves)… Start With Your Heart (and common sense) To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. You must supply the emotional discipline.- Warren Buffet You’re probably thinking to yourself that I’ve lost my damn mind and my advice to “start with your heart” is directly at odds with Mr. Buffet’s statement. In truth, it isn’t and here’s why: 1. Buffet is referring to the emotional reactions you will undoubtedly face you have begun investing. That is to say, will you sell off your entire holding in Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg got caught punching an Alpaca and is being forced to resign? Or will you keep your wits, weather the storm, pay attention to the current health of the company, and its direction? Okay, maybe Zuck can go hang with Byron in this case. after 2. By starting with your heart, you are investing in companies . Does cheating on your wife or girlfriend depend on your ability to send unwarranted, disappearing penis pics? You may consider Snapchat. you truly believe in The first company I ever bought stock in was Taser (now Axon). Yes, Taser as in the BZZZZZZ electrified, make you urinate (or defecate) your pants weapon used by police. Almost every day we hear about police shooting unarmed humans dead in the street and their homes. For me, this is simply unacceptable and I wanted to put my money toward something non-lethal that will hopefully change the shocking number of officer-involved murders. While I feel Axon is a step in the right direction, that is not to say it isn’t devoid of flaws. Reuters 1,005 incidents in the United States in which people died after police stunned them with Tasers, nearly all since the early 2000s. documented Another factor that led to my decision was that Axon started selling body cameras and online file storage in 2008. The demand has been increasing as public pressure continues to swell for holding officers responsible for their actions. , right? What could possibly go wrong Conclusion Author’s Robinhood Portfolio I started this journey in January 2016 with a few hundred bucks. Whenever I had extra money laying around, I’d invest a bit more. Am I a millionaire? Hell no. And that’s okay. I’ve put fear aside (check those emotions at the door) and dipped my toes into a world that too many are scared of — after all, only 9% of Millennials as investors. describe themselves I’m learning along the way and am currently beating the average annual S&P return with investments in companies that represent strong performance and growth potential, as well as believing in them morally. Some parting advice if you decide to start investing: You’re not and likely never will be Wolf of Wall Street — chill out. Don’t check the health of your stocks every day. You will drive yourself mad and there’s zero purpose or benefit. At most, give it a 6-month or annual evaluation. Whatever money you put in, consider it gone. This is tough at first, but if you can train your mind that this money is no longer yours, you will be much better off in the long run. It helps remove the emotion and sets you up for the long term (AKA the smart play — just ask Mr. Buffet). Remember to do your taxes, dummy. This past year I got them professionally done for the first time. I use (promo code: FYLE-VINCEA0G will get you $20 off) and I could not have had a better experience. Taxfyle — — DISCLOSURE: I own stocks in the two companies referenced in the article; Welltower Inc. and Axon Enterprise Inc. While I was not paid to write this article (wouldn’t that kick ass?), I do get one free stock if you s . Godspeed, you filthy capitalist scum! ign up for Robinhood I write other nerdy stuff like this @ ! nerdyminutes.com

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