As entrepreneur, we need to test our ideas by making a product fast. Its difficult to predict about success. So the speed to create a new product matters a lot. So that you can try more ideas fast. So if you have a mindset of entrepreneur, I recommend to choose a programming language that suits your personality well. For example, as web entrepreneur you should develop skills on highly productive programming language. I started my career with Java development and doing it for last 5 years. I created a few web products but it took a lot of time to develop because of long code-compile-deploy cycle. And less availability of plugins/gems. Now I see, If I have done that work using more productive language (e.g. Ruby on Rails, PHP etc), I would have test my ideas faster. So if you happen to be a web entrepreneur, don't go into Java or .Net development. Prefer Rails or PHP. It would help you in long run to test your web ideas fast. You may think, some language are more fast as others (...

Yesterday my brother asked me, I want to work online but I am unable to understand what type of online work is available there. And does one must know programming to work online? Or anybody can do work online. And more importantly what does it mean by work online? Does it means one must be connected the internet, and what if somebody do not have an internet connection continuously. Here I share it briefly: 1. Online work means, doing some work to make money using Internet. This is not a requirement, that you should always be connected to internet to work online. For example, once you got a project (we will later see how) from someone via internet, and the work description is well understood. Then, you can work offline too, and when you work is done, you can submit the deliverable (code, design, article, or anything else) after connecting to internet. In some cases, client may require you to install a software into your system so that he can track exactly how many hours you spent on...

About this post: Last days I prepared financial projections for a business plan. I searched internet, but could not find any ... After I have make it,  I thought to share. Google lets publishes to serve ads at their sites, the ads serving and management system working behind is called Google Adsense. Before presenting Adsense forecasts, I want to briefly describe a few terms, concepts, and rules that are used in Adsense. One must know these fundamentals to understand the presented forecasts. Page Impressions:  It is a count of how many times Adsense script was processed on a page that display ads. For general understanding, we may think it as number of page views in specific time period (although details encompass little differences). Page Impression Increase:  This is my estimation of Page Impressions’ percent increase in the current specified period as compare to last period (i.e. a month or year). Effective Cost Per 1000 Impressions (eCPM):  It is also called Cost...

LUMS organized TiE Khudee Competition in 2008, in which people from all Pakistan were invited to send their business ideas. They selected a few team after evaulating their ideas and business plans’ executive summary. We (I with my friend, Umar) were one of them. All teams were offered 5 days workshop on entrepreneurship to facilitate writing final business plan. Ok, I keep it short. The CEO of Naseeb Networks was their at workshop as entrepreneurship trainer and guest speaker, named Monis Rehman. Rozee.pk is his own idea and a product of Naseeb Networks. At workshop, he shared his success story of Rozee.pk that contains a really great lesson (that I infact realized later). He told, he was an electronics engineer at Intel and member of 386 processor design team. He was use to using different job sites at US. So, when returned to Pakistan, he searched job sites to apply for the job. He come to know there was no such job portal but one that owns extremely low quality. He was just fed up b...

I was very curious knowing how much one can earn from a facebook app. I come up, the earning from Facebook app depends on following factors: 1. How many active users you app have. Active users are those who use your app daily, for example if you have 20,000 users but only 1000 use it daily, the active users are 1000. 2. In which economy (or country) your facebook app users are. Here are some facts shared by a very successful Facebook apps developer, "1. If your apps can attract around 1000 unique users per day with atleast 60 % from High earning countries(HEC) like Autralia, US, UK and Canada , you can make around 10$ per day. 2. 10000 unique users with 60-70% from HEC will earn you around 40-50$ per day 3. 15000 unique users —> 90-100$ per day 4. 35000 unique users —> 150-200$ pd 5. 45000 unique users —-> 250-350$ pd 5. 60000 unique users —-> 400-600$ pd 6. 1.2 lakhs unique users— 1000-1500$ pd" Reference: udayogra.com

So you are writing some application, or building something new. One of the fundamental source of ideas for new features are the people who are most close to your product. In case of soft products, these are  users  and  developers  (they are in-touch with your live product, more than you). They know well, what the product should offer next, that can be the next killer feature. But for it, you should must give them an environment, respect and service, that they love to share with you. Read a conversation with  Werner Vogels  (Amazon CTO), how they have make strategy to involve developers and clients for development directions and better service. Google itself uses  Google Moderator , to let users share new ideas for a particular product which other users vote for. So in this way they can just pick the top new feature ideas and implement.

Couple of months earlier, I worked on a web project. We implemented a lot of features, specifically in admin area. But after launch, what I see is, only 20% of the features are being used by 80% of the users. It convinced me, we must make and release small features as fast as possible and plan the roadmap with market feedback. It remind me, Pareto Principle, which stats that " roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes " ...  for example,  20% of the software functions are used 80% of the time i.e.  80% users used only 20% of a software (just analyse you usage of MS Word, for example) And, If there is 100 lines of code snippet facing performance bottlenecks. There are only about 20 lines that need optimization.  Even Microsoft noted,  when they removed 20% of the most reported bugs, 80% crashes were removed. Its so beautiful and great lesson for me. I can visualize it very deeply.

In my opinion, these are the primary web business models, which are followed by some of the highly successful websites. Marketplace Model , This is one of highly profitable model, because it directly deliver some financial (or other) benefit to both involved parties which connect through it. This model connect the sellers and buyers. All Free Lancing, B2B, B2C protals comes under this category. Example of web sites following marketplace web business model are  eBay.com ,  oDesk.com ,  AliBaba.com , etc. Community-Driven Model , The contents of websites which follow the community-driven web business model are filled or populated by its users. The example sites include:  StackOverflow.com  and  Wikipedia.com , etc. In addition idea and implementation of a community-driven web product, its more important to answer a fundamental question - why users would give their time to add contents? If you can't somehow convince users to give your site sometime and great k...

The (most) Chinese do not use Facebook but have their own social network e.g.  http://renren.com . The government strategy to discourage Facebook.com (by banning or somehow else) resulted into great saving of national reserve. How? When we advertise things on Facebook, we pay money directly to Facebook. Even when our target market is local. All this money goes out of the country. If there is a national social network (e.g. in case of China), it will not go out. China did same for the micro blogging platform (e.g. twitter.com) by making  http://weibo.com .