Investments have been in the news this week quite a bit. Grubwithus picked up $5 million in new investments this week. One of the biggest venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins is facing a lawsuit. You may also want to look at what happens when a fan of your company shows up unexpectedly when you’re meeting with an investor. We’ve got all this and more below.
If you’ve got news you’d like to share about your own projects, hit reply and let us know!
- Thursday
Investors Dish Out $5M to Social Dining Startup Grubwithus
Y Combinator alum Grubwithus brought in $5 million during a Series A round of investment. The startup makes it easy to connect with people for meals in person and the funding is expected to help the company increase the number of restaurants it works with, as well as expanding into new markets.
How to build verifications into your service or marketplace
Trust is a key issue for many companies operating online, especially when they’re providing a marketplace to service providers or sellers. Scaffold, a provider of identity and reputation systems, published an article detailing how to build verifications into a marketplace.
Here is the complaint Ellen Pao filed in California before she sued Kleiner Perkins for sexism
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is one of the largest venture capital firms in the U.S. and one of its employees, Ellen Pao, is suing the firm for discrimination. Betabeat has a copy of Pao’s complaint. While there have been other discussions of gender discrimination in the startup community, what sets Pao’s case apart is that Kleiner Perkins is known for hiring more women than other venture capital firms.
Freemium pricing for SaaS: Optimizing paid conversion upgrades
Rishi Shah’s guest post at OnStartups lays out the big question of just how to make sure you convert as many free users to paying users as possible. He compares a whole slew of pricing models, many of which you’ll recognize.
20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time
Let’s be honest: understanding the results that you get from an A/B test can be tough. You only know about two different versions of your page and you have to do endless tests to refine. But Steve Hanov has twenty lines of code that can make the process a lot more efficient.
How APIs should be: Drop in keys, running in 1 minute
If you’re even considering offering an API, it’s worth reading through this article from Merijn Terheggen on what makes an API successful. You can use these points as a checklist to make sure that anyone using your API will get the full benefit of it.
Now That’s What I Call Social Proof (Thanks, Arthur!)
Right in the middle of a pitch to an investor, Joey Flores, CEO of Earbits, had a user walk up to him to say thanks for a great service. Is that something you’d like to see happen at one of your meetings? Read Flores’ response to see the potential issue.
Retro link of the week:
How to strike a balance between giving content away for free and earning a living
Offering content for free is an effective marketing technique, but you have to make money somewhere along the way. This post from Pam Slim is an oldy-but-goody on how to maintain a balance with free content.
