9 lessons learned from redesigning an e-commerce app for growth

PreviousNext2 CommentsShareTweetHNTomas Dirvonskas is the co-founder and CEO at mobile product design boutique Lemon Labs. You can follow him and the company on Twitter: 

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Growth vs. profit: What should rising startups focus on first?

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George Deeb is the Managing Partner at Chicago-based Red Rocket Ventures, a startup consulting and financial advisory firm based in Chicago.

This really is not a simple question to answer. There are so many nuances that go into assessing the right answer:

What is going on with the economy?How liquid is the fundraising climate?Are you B2B or B2C?Are you the first mover?How defensible is your business, with patents, product complexity or otherwise?What are your competitors doing?How big is the market opportunity?How quickly is it emerging?Are you trying to dominate the world, or build a nice lifestyle business?Are you venture-backed, or privately owned?

So, in light of all these moving pieces, I will do my best to layout some high level guidance.

Based on the above questions:

(i) the softer the economy, the more you should protect your cash reserves to weather the storm;

(ii) the better the financing climate, the more comfortable you should feel in accelerating growth with access to investors;

(iii) I think B2C businesses need to think

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With Eye On Growth, Just Eat Buys Meal2Go To Offer EPOS Tech To Its Takeaway Partners

Online fast food ordering startup Just Eat has acquired Meal2Go, a maker of electronic point of sale technology tailored to the restaurant sector, in a move aimed at growing its business by offering its takeaway partners additional services.

Just Eat has not disclosed how much it’s spending on the acquisition of Birmingham, U.K.-based Meal2Go.

“This deal will enable us to provide an even better service to our takeaway restaurant partners,” said Graham Corfield, UK MD of Just Eat, in a statement. “We know there is huge demand amongst takeaway businesses for great value, high quality EPOS technology, which we will now be able to offer.

“This move is part of our wider strategy to make the bolt-on acquisitions and partnership deals that will ensure we continue to innovate and drive further significant growth for our takeaway restaurant partners.”

Meal2Go’s technology will allow Just Eat to offer the takeaways that power its online food ordering business a central system for managing orders — whether online, ‘walk-in’ or over the phone — incentivizing them to continue to work with it, and luring more restaurant partners into its fold.

In the U.K., Just Eat currently has some 20,000

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Report: Kindle and Surface gained most tablet Web share over holidays, iPhone only smartphone to see growth

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Concrete tablet and smartphone sales numbers for the holiday season won’t be out for another few weeks, but early data is already starting to trickle in. It appears that Amazon and Microsoft both saw solid sales for their respective tablets, while Apple was the only big winner in the smartphone space.

The latest figures come from Chitika, which says it surveyed a sample of 300 million impressions from its advertising network that spans 300,000 websites. While Chitika tends to show a market with skewed share in favor of Apple, the trends it has found are nevertheless quite interesting:

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Nextdoor Talks Growth, Now Being Used In One In Six Neighborhoods In The US

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Nextdoor, the fast-growing startup that has been compared to a Facebook for your neighborhood, has revealed some new numbers today in a TCTV interview with co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia and Greylock partner and Nextdoor investor Josh Elman. As Tolia tells us, Nextdoor just launched its 25,000th neighborhood (up from 22,500 neighborhoods in October, and 6,000 neighborhoods a year ago.) He also said that the network is now being used in 1-in-6 neighborhoods.

In the video above, Tolia and Elman talked about how they have worked together on growth ‘hacks’ for the network. Prior to Greylock, Elman helped Twitter grow its active user base nearly tenfold, led the launch of Facebook Connect, led product management for Zazzle, and was also part of the early team at LinkedIn focused on growth and jobs. As Tolia tells us in the video above, Elman’s insight and experience in growing a network has been instrumental in the startup’s continued engagement from users.

On one project Elman and Tolia worked alongside the company’s designers and engineers to make the Nextdoor member experience in a neighborhood of ten members be different from in a neighborhood of 1,000 members. They’ve also worked through methodologies and frameworks around how to adapt a product once it starts to reach scale.

Check out the video above for more on Tolia’s ‘growth hacks,’ Elman’s advice for thinking about growth and more.

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