Unfortunately, 'startup pivot' is one of the most mis-used terms today. It's like when folks started defining 'software engineering' back in 1990s.  Pivot means change. If you are pivoting for a business model, you are pivoting to find a model that can scale and grow.  Companies nowadays are being built around niches.  Not portals.  Once you find the model for your niche that can grow and scale, you are done.

Marketing your blog or company on Twitter is very fun!  You can do all kinds of fun stuff, talk to interesting people and share content.  You can make great connections and friends.  You can reach so many more people by following or search tags for conferences and meet ups.  Twitter users are very engaging.  They love constant flow of information.  Here is how @mytweetmark can help you find interesting people.  Please find interesting tweets that are marketing tweets.  Use our auto tweets.  Let's measure the impact through our analytics.

• Login to @mytweetmark with your @twitter account. 
• To test the value of your tweet by page views, go to Analytics, type in the twitter status with a link back to your @mytweetmark profile.  For example, "Please try out http://www.mytweetmark.com/<usera> for #newtwitter #analytics ".
• To find the best hashtag to use, please visit http://www.wefollow.com or http://search.twitter.com .
• Once you have measured marketing tweets, please go to Auto Tweet section and fill in 20 tweets.  In the tweets, please also have links to your blog that is measurable through analytics.
• Please give it a month.  Let's measure the quality and quantity of your followers and page views.
  

Tweet Tweet!

Starting a company from the ground up is a challenge - Here I am going to outline the decisions and trade offs I made.  Easy blue print to start coding a startup.

• Getting up to speed with technology: Unless you graduated a few years ago, the curriculum and paradigms are outdated.  Business students are learning about Steve Jobs from 80s or Computer Science student studying C or Java is not really practical in the work field.  Pick up a few books and thoroughly get updated with technology.  I picked Grails because I can always go back to Java if needed.  Grails is a full on web framework with GSP like JSP, MVC, spring, hibernate, syntax mixture of Rails, Java, PHP, etc.  It has built in application server, dependency injection, logging, many plugins.  It also has plugins for twitter, facebook, paypal, etc.  Code can be written 1/10th of lines compared to before. 
• Selecting hosting: I started with 1and1 hosting, but Rackspace is awesome.  Great service, new company, easier product to use, cloud computing rocks and they also provide file transfer service through their cloud as well.  You can upgrade or downgrade memory and CPU environment without having to reinstall anything. 
• Source control: Subversion SVN works great for startups.  Very low overhead, lots of documentation on the internet.  Many people in the industry are using it so easy to get help.
• Database: I choose postgres over mypsql because I have previous experience using it.  Either one is fine.
• Docs: Sharing documents among team members or even contractors is never been easier than using Google docs. 
• Scripting: I am a strong believer in writing strong shell scripts to minimize the amount of typing and making errors.  A strong script when written well never fails.  I usually just login to server and type 'reinstall' to get the latest deploy from my laptop onto the server.  Keep it really simple.
• Process:  Using continuous deployment patterns, It takes 3 minutes from the point I checkin my code into repository to code being deployment on production server.  There are many shell scripts to run commands and do the validations.  The key is to make the process sooo simple that the focus is 100% on the product development. 
• UI/UX Skills: Technology is getting so simple that more and more startups are leaning towards Lean Startup to make software development faster.  Startups engineers are not only expected to know backend, but really understand User Interfacing design and experience.  Hence html, javascript, css skills have to be sharp.
• Platform: Twitter and Facebook provides great details on users using their authentication schemes.  Signups are dead.  People don't trust them as much.  Twitter and Facebook provide really easy API to use.  I use Twitter4J for all Twitter api calls because it's written in Java.
• Security: Web is very insecure, hence it's important to code with security in mind.  Input forms should always check for hacker code in Javascript, server should have ssh security with ports, etc.

So there you have the blueprint on how to start a startup.  Please contact bilal at mytweetmark dot com with any questions.

Startups are tough!  Here is a blue print that I followed building @mytweetmark and @homecookme.  Your strength and endurance through the process is key.  People break with pressures.  However I always believe that you go after the knowledge and gain.  Win or loose, nobody can take away your knowledge.  Live each day like it's your last.  Make each hour count towards productivity of your company.  Bootstrapping is very difficult because money is small.  You have to make it happen.  Your self-discipline matters.  Yoga, exercise, etc. helps.  You have to keep producing, while having a good internal balance.  Break the time into the building the product, or interacting with customers.  Everything is moving at a much faster pace as the product evolves, but so are you.  Just know that you are making yourself stronger day by day by going through the process.  Without pain, there is no gain, right?  Welcome to entrepreneurship!

• Idea: Start out with a simple idea.  What is needed?  How can I make the world a better place?  Do research.  Come up with first wire frame, or screen shot of the product.   
• Money:  Burn rate.  Everybody has expenses.  Nights and weekends to start out the product.  Spreadsheet to calculate month by month expenses into the product. 
• Project Plan:  Helps a lot!  You can start seeing a picture of tasks that needs to be accomplished.  Really helps with head down focusing and breaking things down in design.  Write down the task, duration, priority, description, date, etc.
• Market:  What's the market size?  @mytweetmark heavily utilizes @twitter therefore it was key to spend a lot of time on twitter and understand the culture, users, product and figure out how to offer additional services.  I spent more time on market that anything else in the beginning.  Learn about investors through Twitter because they help you understand demand and competition.  Twitter has over 100 million users and Facebook has over 500 million users.  Search tags # help penetrate the market through tweets.
• Validation:  By building a limited feature product and deploying in front of twitter audience.  Conferences help a lot, etc. #chirp, #sxsw, #f8.  Also, by asking the correct questions to VC and Angel investors.  Remember @drspiritcom, @mytweetsports, @viralfactors?  Yup, I deployed 5 websites, and dropped 3, kept only @mytweetmark and @homecookme.  Fail fast and accept the grief quickly.
• Focus:  Reiterating back into the product.  Found a new niche with farmers markets customers desperately needing social media.  Introduced v2 of @mytweetmark.  The demand utilizes both @mytweetmark and @homecookme products so no work lost.
• Pivot:  Changing the product so it fits the demand of the farmers markets audience.
• Market:  Understanding the market size, competition, execution time, etc.  Farmers market is $1 billion business in United States.  16% growth in past 1 year due to economy crises.  Produce brings cash.  Farming community is way behind on social media.  Willingness and ability to hand hold, and help the audience.
• Customer Validation:  Early customers using the product and giving feedback.  Their like, dislike, eye popping, eye brows up, etc. signals are key.  Measuring happiness.
• Influence:  How is your product changing the market?  Can you measure the influence? Klout score helps.  Also, how is your customer influencing the market?  For example, TV commercial ads play over and over again.  When you are ready the buy a certain product, obviously seeing the right advertising helps make that decisions.  Auto tweets help us emulate that behavior for farmers and customers on Twitter.  Our customers on radio station, interviewed by bloggers, New York times, etc.
• Ranking:  We are the largest network of social media farmers market businesses in Northern California.   
• Pivot:  Never stop changing.
• Growth: Backlog of features to implement next.  How can I influence the market and grow?  Klout scores to individual farmers, deploying on one forty platform, viral, iphone application, coupons, etc. are all ideas for growth coming next.

So there you have it.  Please also view recent videos on youtube,

• #sfnewtech September 15, 2010  #sfnewtech Video I
• #sfnewtech September 15, 2010 #sfnewtech Video II

Any questions, please feel free to contact bilal at mytweetmark dot com.  Cheers!

@homecookme:

Plan 0. :

FREE Plan.  If you are a local farmers market association, please ask us about giving you administration rights so you can fix location information for your markets.  We also provide facebook fan page integration, auto tweets, google maps and yelp reviews to create a dashboard of farmers administration.

Any local business, please login for free and use the product.  Please contact us for any questions.

Plan 1.  $30/month:

Any local business, we will provide consulting to get you started.  We will help you target your audience.  Let's create campaigns, measure them daily and generate business contacts!  You sell your product, we do your internet marketing in ALL local Bay area farmer's markets.  You will receive daily email reports of new business leads.  You can contact them yourself through twitter.  We want your business brand to be popular in all of California bay area! 

@mytweetmark: 

Plan 0.  Free:

Login for free and use the product.  Contact us for any questions.

Plan 1.  $30/month:

We will provide consulting to get you started on Twitter.  We will help you target your audience.  Let's create campaigns, measure them daily and generate business contacts!  Weekly 1-hour consulting status meeting.

Contact us at bilal at mytweetmark dot com!

Create, target and measure twitter marketing campaigns!

mytweetmark is now offering monthly subscription plans to our twitter customers.  We want to help you reach and target your audience.  Let's work together to increase your sales.  We will provide you with consulting and get you going on twitter.  We will setup auto tweet for you.  You decide what you want your customers to see, whether links to your website, coupons, etc. in tweets.  We will send out weighed tweets on your behalf to your customers.

Create

Create your brand content.  Blogs, links and business contacts.  

Target

Target your audience by twitter hash tag. 

Measure

mytweetmark give you analytics charts.  We show you daily page views that twitter doesn't!  We show you followers increase per day chart, % incremental daily.

Contact us today at bilal at mytweetmark dot com.  We would love to help you. 

People know I have spent a lot of time with metrics and dashboards.  If I see any piece of important data, I build a dashboard around it so with charts and graphs, I can identify patterns.  These patterns are usually the secret sauce for understanding your business.  Yes, I have gotten people fired before for exposing too much data.  But that's all because it's in the best interest of the company.  Nothing personal, just business. 

on myTweetmark, we are exploring the Twitter ecosystem on hashtags and reach.  I could create simple categories for my content, and get instant page views because of using proper hash tags.  But the fun doesn't stop there.  Once the users on twitter clicks on mytweetmark link and come back to the site, we have all sorts of interesting referral data to play with.  Currently, I am displaying the hosts % break down by google visualization api charts.  I could however get information about country, page views, uniques, time spent, etc. from this powerful referral data.  There is lots to be explored in this area.  Think about it.  You are driving a marketing campaign, and you want to know everything about your traffic.  This allows you to fine tune your campaigns and get the most for your buck.  Trust me,  I spent a lot of time with marketing initiatives from engineering angle for a couple of extra large social networks   The more the data, the better the metrics.

Hello!

mytweetmark is here to help business brands reach larger audience for FREE through internet viral marketing   We are an extension of twitter, which means all your tweet data belongs to twitter, which is a great benefit of using our service.  Twitter is here to scale and will continue to evolve into the giant ecosystem where many online businesses will flourish and get free presence (so far).  We are one of the first ones to really understand this phenomena and are putting all our energy and power into building the tools necessary to accelerate the growth of these businesses.  You will get huge attention, measured by page views and whole set of user analytical features.  There is absolutely NO COST to you.  All you need is a twitter account to log into our system and you are ready to start.

How?

• Login to our system using twitter credentials.  We will pull your profile photo and create a profile account.  Once you register with us, you are responsible for manually keeping user profile information concurrent with twitter.
• By default, any content, i.e. bookmarks, posts and blogs you create for your brand, will be tweeted to your twitter account with a link back to your profile.  So if you would like to work on your profile first and then tweet, turn the tweet option off.  You can work on your profile and when ready, turn tweets on.
• We allow you to specify a myHash tag which is a feature developed specifically for you to reach your users.  For example, if you want everybody that is talking about 'thanksgiving' see your brand profile, simply use 'thanksgiving' as your myHash tag and every time you create any content, the tweet will contain the myHash term you defined.  It's very very powerful.
• We allow you to view popular search terms being used on twitter, so you can decide which search terms are the right ones to use on myHash.  Choose wisely please.  Some search terms are being used so often that your power tweet is only being viewed for a short period of time.  Please mix and match different myHash for your tweets.  You are allowed to change myHash as many times as possible.  Think of your tweet like a free ad. 
• You will see within minutes and seconds your page views going up!  These are free clicks of users coming to view your brand profile.  The users are a mixture of twitter followers, search term viewers and mytweetmark users.  Your content reaches far and distant places where you never had access.  All of this free!  Compare this to cost of displaying ads on google, bing or facebook and you know what we are talking about.  
• There are many other features like retweet, twitter update and widgets, community bookmarks and posts where you can view other mytweetmark user content.  Most importantly, take some time to understand the product and brand yourself.
• We are currently providing information regarding where your link backs to your profile are coming from in the 'Analytics' section.  It's great to know details on your users.  We are going to continue to enhance this section for your benefit.  With powerful metrics, you will be able to measure your internet viral marketing campaigns successfully

Please feel free to email bilal (at) mytweetmark (dot) com for any questions.  Cheers. 

Here is a list of enhancement/features that are currently on mytweetmark. 

• User Signup, authentication and security.
• Homepage A/B tested.
• Profile page. 
• Importing address book, viral tracking and dashboard.
• Admin dashboard
• Retention dashboard
• Geo ip lookup
• Referer tracking
• Email integration
• External ip monitoring
• Memcached
• Country setup via ip lookup
• Feature toggle (on/off)
• url mapping for vanity URLs
• Search (lucene)
• Twitter api integration
• Ajax interactions
• mytweetmark brand on twitter
• Blogs
• Posts
• Bookmarks