Vanity metrics are the numbers that look very good on paper, but in reality, means nothing. As a startup, everyone loves to point to the bigger audience. This bigger number of audience is often a sign of attraction due to which press loves to publish them. When it comes to metrics and tracking campaigns one of the easiest mistakes they can make is they focus on vanity metrics. A number of downloads, followers, registered users, and page views are the vanity metrics things tha

AirBnb is one of the pioneers of the sharing economy. The owners started this $30 billion USD company out of a necessity. They were short of rent for their apartment so they decided to rent out 3 air mattresses. They created a simple website with a map and simple listing and called it airbedandbreakfast.com. It was their minimum viable product’s initial success that gave them enough confidence to completely go for the idea. You can start your own Airbnb type platform. Maybe y

E-commerce in future is going to happen on social platforms. Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter are increasingly releasing features like buy buttons, e-commerce platform integrations, donate buttons, shop now options. News feeds and timelines from your favorite sellers and buyers are the future of commerce. Instead of companies like Amazon, AliExpress pushing products to you on the homepage based on your recent history. Social E-commerce Platforms can show you the produc

Success of Uber has disrupted the taxi market and at the time of writing this article the company is valued at 50 billion USD. The success of Uber is not just a success of a single app. It’s the success of a whole new type of apps. Uber is a platform that has disrupted the taxi market. Since the success of Uber, there have been a lot of other success stories in demand industry. There have been apps like: @Hotel Tonight which is Uber for Last Minute Hotels, @Nimbl – Uber for c

Entrepreneurship is Experimentation! This article first appeared on Barkan Saeed’s profile on Linkedin. Barkan is Founder and CEO at Vizteck and writes about entrepreneurship and startups. Here is the whole article You had an idea of a product. You find out a way to sell it, it works and your company starts making money. Maybe you are a services guy, you first start selling your skills and then you find out you can sell skills of other people who you hire. You reach a stage w

Marketplaces have their unique challenge of paying to 100’s and 1000’s of their vendors. It is very difficult for a marketplace startup to build an entire system for paying their vendors as well as managing things like securing the system, paying the vendors after cutting their share, integrating multiple payment gateways and also managing payment to different bank accounts of vendors. Payment gateways like PayPal, authorize.net were good and did the job. However, there are m

This is one of the most asked questions by our clients. This question is usually very hard to answer because an app can be of very different types. A simple app like a basic calculator may take 1 to 2 weeks to develop. However, a more complex app like a marketplace for buyers and sellers, Uber, something like Instagram or Airbnb usually takes around 3 to 4 months of development time. Please note that Airbnb, Instagram and uber now have a lot more that’s invisible like analyti