#nj tech

#NJTech Meetup 64 w/ Kevin Ryan, Founder: Gilt, MongoDB, Business Insider

Here is something I wrote for this Wednesday’s NJ Tech Meetup with special guest Kevin Ryan.

  DoubleClick, Mongo DB, ShopWiki, Gilt, Zola, The Ladders, HotJobs, Business Insider. One thing they all have in common is Kevin Ryan, “The Godfather” of NYC tech.

What started it all? How did he become an entrepreneur?

Dilbert made him do it. Yeah, that Dilbert. Back in the early days of…

Its been a long day. 

Its been a lot of long days. 

Entreprenuriship is definitely glamorous. 

It was a typical day. 

Wake up - shower, dress, get kid to school

Remember to give her lots of cash.  For lunch money.  For afterschool snack.  For taxi service to tennis lesson.  For dinner at tennis club.  

Make taxi reservation.

Drop her tennis stuff off at my sister’s house so she has it afterschool. 

Go to starbucks.  Order Venti Mocha.  

Kill 30 minutes reviewing emails and site stats. 

Try to order breakfast sandwich - learn deli is not serving breakfast. 

Go to work (and by work I mean the temp job I do 40 hours a week to keep food on the table!)

Work. 

Eat sleeve of ritz crackers for lunch. 

More work.

Leave work. 

Drive through bumper to bumper traffic to Hoboken. 

Attend NJ Tech Meetup group. 

Smile and chat with people during networking session. 

Tweet brilliant angel investor’s talk. 

Hoof it back to car and drive 30 minutes home. 

Spend 5 minutes of quality time with kid.  

Eat leftover quesadilla that kid didn’t finish for dinner. (silently berate myself for not yet going to supermarket to replenish food lost to Hurricane Sandy 12 day power outage).

Work on site stuff. 

Put together info for pitch to brands.

Procrastinate working on white paper. 

Decide to write Tumblr post.  

Take picture for post.  Spend 5 minutes lamenting how my fat knees look. (How does one get fat knees when all one has eaten all day is a coffee, a sleeve of ritz, and two pieces of leftover chicken quesadilla????)

Procrastinate on going to bed because I’m just going to lay there thinking of the million and one things I should be working on. 

Hope to get 6 hours of sleep before I do it again. 

You know why I will do it again?  Because I love it. 

You know how I can do it again?  Because I helped build www.hatchedit.com the very site that as a mom - lets me stay organized and coordinated with my support network. 

NJ Tech Meetup raises thousands in one day to 'Heal Hoboken', The Jersey Journal --

We're so inspired by the NJ Tech Meetup's initiative!

I consider myself very lucky. I was able to flee to my parents house last Wednesday after the Hurricane hit and have been warm and comfortable in their house waiting for electricity and heat to be restored to my apartment in Springfield.  

However, having 5 days with nothing to do and not much planned is not ideal when you are an entrepreneur and are chomping at the bit to get USERS USERS USERS!!!

So - I sat here, made a list and tackled everything I could in the downtime - rather than be tempted by all of the soap operas my mom has had running on the television.  Hopefully this may give someone else some ideas of things that can be done in downtime. 

1.  Create a new video.  

I used Powerpoint and Camtasia to create the below video which we will swap out with our old one and use on our landing page.  I think it looks pretty sleek!  I bought the music online pretty cheap, and bought all of the images on iPhoto (I'm paranoid about copyright infringements - and I'm also an artist that likes to play by the book when it comes to other artists' work).  The music site I found was pretty damned cool - melodyloops.  

Pretty cool right?

I'm also working on some step-by-step videos for some areas on the site that need better "how to" prompting.  Videos are hard because they really require a person to sit down and think it out and create and edit at a few hours a clip.  You can't really just do it for a few minutes at a time - so this hurricane refugee thing really worked well on forcing me to sit still and get this all worked out.  

Also - FYI - it took quite a few tries to get "right".  At first I had a lot of wordy voiceover talking.  But then - I thought about my filmmaking roots (NYU TISCH Grad here!) and everyone knows you only use voiceover when your story or imagery is weak.  So I rethought all of the imagery and found we didnt' really need the voiceover at all for this video.  (Although I will do voiceovers for the briefer "How To" videos) And isn't that music great?

2.  SEO your YouTube Account - I went back in to our videos on our YouTube channel and tried to really make them more search engine friendly.  Re-tagged them and put in our new lingo. 

3.  Brush up on your social media skills.  This weekend I learned all about buying youtube views as well.  We're experimenting with that - we'll see what happens.  I find all of this very interesting.  And heck - its cheap - so we'll see.  I will take it with a grain of salt now if anyone ever tells me a video of theirs has gotten 100k views.  Because you can get that for about $100!!

I am also taking the time to try and be more vigilant about interacting with our Facebook followers - and using Embedle.com to upload interesting stories to my Twitter feed.  

4.  Check your Brand.  How are your branding efforts doing?  Thinking about tweaking some things?  Take some time to sit down and really think about what should define you to your users.  Then go back and see if your wording on the site and in social media - matches what you want your brand perception to be. 

We were so blown away by the results that we got advertising on StumbleUpon - that we couldn't keep it to ourselves.  We wrote about them in Forbes (HERE) and then were thrilled to contribute data so the company itself could do a case study. 

CASE STUDY: Hatchedit Books New Users With StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon, Google and Facebook composed the marketing budget for the HatchedIt team. During the window from March 8-25, they allocated equally between StumbleUpon and Google, and half of the budget of each to Facebook. With each service, the team looked to target women who were 30+, seeking to hit the sweet spot with moms.