I think the organizer should have been upfront with you about what he/she wanted you to talk on. That said, I don't think it was an offensive request. The organizer wasn't being presumptuous that you would be interested in speaking on this topic just because you're female -- he/she was merely asking you... As a woman in tech, I get how it's these little things compounded over time that get annoying, but this ask on its own is not unreasonable is it? You can always just say no (as you did). :)
Do we need to pander to VCs? I'm also not sure that your assertion that it hurts their credibility is true.
Fred Wilson has publicly admitted himself that he hasn't led a deal all year. I don't think that affects his reputation. If anything, I think people applaud him for his transparent efforts.
While the data may not be 100% accurate, I think the author makes a lot of great points about finding out what series A deals a particular investor has done to know whether this is a good fit.
If I were to do that all over again, I would've focused on building an audience around a pinterest-like blog or FB page with cool retail items so that we would've had people to launch to.
Soneca, you are absolutely right. In this case, we shut it down, and my co-founder decided to move on. This just wasn't meant to be. After that, I decided to team up with a different friend of mine, and we are working on LaunchBit. So, while that was the end for Parrotview, it's not the end of my startup journey. :)
Good question! I've found it's easiest through progress in this manual sort of way. It's a much easier pitch to say, "hey, I need you, because we have all these paying customers who are going crazy, because there is no website" than it is to say I have "this awesome idea but no one is using it yet."
They are speaking at the Lean Startup conf right now. Amazing idea -- they create mushroom kits so ppl can grow them in their own home. They use used coffee grounds from Peet's all around the Bay Area.
I'm in the same boat. I've tried using Dragon, because talking is easier than writing for me. But then, I end up with a lot of umms and uhs and unstructured posts. Copywriting is super important, very difficult for non-writers, and time-consuming (for non-writers)
Oh, I didn't think it was obvious at all... Like in my example, say List A has 1000 people and a 50% open. List B has 2000 ppl and a 25% open rate. In both cases, the same number of absolute ppl are opening the email. Why should List A necessarily get more clicks than List B? And yet consistently, it does. That's not obvious to me...
Great comment, Samuel_Michon. One thing that is interesting to me is that your newsletter requires ppl to click through to read the entire article (as does Peter's newsletters). This probably also helps with the accuracy of open rates. Even if a reader doesn't display images, Mailchimp (as well as other email service providers) will know if he/she opened the email via the click. So, it may be a more accurate count over an email that doesn't have any links in it... (just some speculation)
I can also vouch for that for Peter's list and all the other lists that are over the 50% mark in the graph on my blog post. Quite frankly, it IS HARD to get this high of an open rate. Peter and all the other publishers who are able to do it consistently are somewhat of an anomaly.
That said, another way I've seen this done is I know publishers who will actively unsubscribe people who are not opening. And, this will give you a much higher concentration of people who consistently open...
agreed. but, unfortunately, ppl always ask questions like this, and saying "it depends" isn't particularly satisfying. :( so, i thought i would put a stake in this conversation by offering our data.
Not sure what you mean...the first paragraph reads "Lots of marketers combat this by creating banners that stand out in a “spammy-esque” way to achieve a high click-through-rate, but how do you do this without being spammy?" With this sentence, I had intended this to beg the question how can marketers get a higher click-through-rate without being spammy, but I apologize if that isn't clear.