Say what you will about the Newsweek slipping in its standards for political and general news reporting (and I certainly do at times), it still produces fine writing on business and social trends. Here’s a wonderfully insightful article the buyout of Mint.com, a small 2007 start-up, by Intuit, makers of Quicken (and financial bully-boys). It’s not good news for consumers looking for financial help because Intuit will quickly start killing the competition for their sacred cash cow Quicken, but read carefully the tools Mint.com used to develop and market their product.
These are the same free and low-cost online tools I’ve been pointed out to my classes and they used them exactly as I’ve been recommending. Notice that the site was Wordpress-based, most of the marketing budget was Pay-Per-Click advertising for a relatively small sum and much of the product development analysis came from Google Analytics and customer sureys from a low-cost online survey service. These are tools we all can use.
I’ve got new classes starting in November at the Peninsula College Entrepreneur Institute and will have more articles posted in October, including one on troubleshooting to make it easier for us all to work with technical people (including our mechanics and home repair people). Plus I’m going to be listing some workshops available in other cities for 2010. So check back soon and get excited about the new opportunities available.
Oh, and if you are looking for the a great hosting service that supports all the new Wordpress features including auto-upgrades, Akismet spam prevention and plugin installation from the administration panel check out my reviews of Westhost and Dreamhost in the Recommended Resources category. I just got to put Westhost to the test with the security upgrade for Wordpress 2.8.4 and several plugins when I upgraded 12 student work sites in 10 minutes! (Plus they’ve been running some new account specials this fall. Shhh!)
