The 50 Startup Toolkit

Over the last decade, Internet has re-written every bit of the old business strategy and tactic we have ever known. Technology has opened the doors for everyone to do 'more with less' and that too 'faster and cheaper'. Now it takes much less time and cost to turn great ideas into profitable business opportunities. And that's because, technology has provided us great tools which can take care of so many of our operational issues, leaving us more time to focus on what is important to us, our passion. This book is a collection of hundreds of such online resources, tools and utilities that are being used by thousands of micro-business entrepreneurs world wide. Attempt has been made to ensure that most of these resources are free or affordable by small businesses or wannabe start-ups. You will be exposed to several resources across the below categories. I. Chapter I – Startup Ideas/Research (Massage your creativity) II. Chapter II – Getting off the ground (Preparations before you begin) III. Chapter III – Getting yourself funded (If you only had a bit more money) IV. Chapter IV – Brand & Identity (Who you are and why you exist) V. Chapter V – Operations setup (Backbone to your business) VI. Chapter VI – Engage and excel (Continuously) Appendix (Many more Utilities and Education resources)

Every day Entrepreneurs take the leap of faith to start, grow, and sustain their businesses. Many of us have no clue of how to do this and end up failing. This workbook is designed to facilitate a process to help your business become profitable and successful. This workbook is meant to guide you from an idea to actually running a well planned and highly efficient business. Do miss the opportunity to utilize this workbook in the efforts of starting, growing, and sustaining your business.

While you work hard building your startup, one of the biggest challenges you’ll face will be around your product’s ability to solve a big enough problem and its success in the market. Agile Analytics for Startups will help you navigate the complexity of early-stage business analytics, performance measurement, and the metrics that matter to your company. You can use the proven frameworks in this book to validate your product idea and the product/market fit, and understand your customers more granularly while you scale your business for automation. You can test and use many tools and solutions provided in the book and interact with different features of those solutions as you engage with other users of those products. This book will provide you with a step-by-step framework, examples and powerful solutions, from ideation to growth and all the way to scaling your business as you build your company with the power of analytics. -Agility is your advantage over large companies -Understand business analytics essentials and define how you will measure the success of your business early -Once you define your solution for “the problem” you tackle, validate your customer -Keep a short list of KPIs for the success of your product -Engage your customers throughout the development cycle -Product/market fit should happen before you go to market big -Keep testing your product, reiterate continuously -Know when to pivot as you modify and optimize your roadmap Be ready to speed up and maximize your output before the significant funding milestone(s)

Starting up your own business can be an exciting yet daunting venture. The case studies, interviews, debates and articles in this ebook will provide valuable insight for the aspiring entrepreneur. They address areas such as marketing and finance, legal issues, time management and the effective use of social media.

An innovation guide for business leaders, managers, and new product developers. The Innovator's Toolkit explains all the fundamental tools and concepts anyone involved in innovation should be familiar with--especially methods and strategies for improving products and services and developing new ones. This book is written in an easy-to-use reference format that helps readers understand why, when, and how to apply each tool. The tools and techniques in this book are organized around a four-step innovation methodology--define, discover, develop, and demonstrate--that takes readers through problem identification, then flows into idea generation, idea selection, and, finally, idea implementation. Constant innovation is a necessity for business success today; The Innovator's Toolkit presents an effective plan for achieving it.

Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service but didn’t take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or at work, have you had what you thought could be a big idea for your company—perhaps changing the way you develop or distribute a product, provide customer service, or hire and train your employees? If you have, but you haven’t known how to take the next step, you need to understand what the authors call the innovator’s method—a set of tools emerging from lean start-up, design thinking, and agile software development that are revolutionizing how new ideas are created, refined, and brought to market. To date these tools have helped entrepreneurs, designers, and software developers manage uncertainty—through cheap and rapid experiments that systematically lower failure rates and risk. But many managers and leaders struggle to apply these powerful tools within their organizations, as they often run counter to traditional managerial thinking and practice. Authors Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer wrote this book to address that very problem. Following the breakout success of The Innovator’s DNA—which Dyer wrote with Hal Gregersen and bestselling author Clay Christensen to provide a framework for generating ideas—this book shows how to make those ideas actually happen, to commercialize them for success. Based on their research inside corporations and successful start-ups, Furr and Dyer developed the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. They show when and how to apply the tools of their method, how to adapt them to your business, and how to answer commonly asked questions about the method itself, including: How do we know if this idea is worth pursuing? Have we found the right solution? What is the best business model for this new offering? This book focuses on the “how”—how to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use. Whether you’re launching a start-up, leading an established one, or simply working to get a new product off the ground in an existing company, this book is for you.

Cu> Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java development framework for building Ajax-enabled web applications. Instead of the hodgepodge of technologies that developers typically use for Ajax–JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and XMLHttpRequest–GWT lets developers implement rich client applications with pure Java, using familiar idioms from the AWT, Swing, and SWT. GWT goes beyond most Ajax frameworks by making it easy to build desktop-like applications that run in the ubiquitous browser, where the richness of the user interface is limited only by the developer’s imagination. This book focuses on the more advanced aspects of GWT that you need to implement real-world applications with rich user interfaces but without the heavy lifting of JavaScript and other Ajax-related technologies. Each solution in this practical, hands-on book is more than a recipe. The sample programs are carefully explained in detail to help you quickly master advanced GWT techniques, such as implementing drag-and-drop, integrating JavaScript libraries, and using advanced event handling methodologies. Solutions covered include • Building custom GWT widgets, including both high-level composites and low-level components • Implementing a viewport class that includes iPhone-style automated scrolling • Integrating web services with GWT applications • Incorporating the Script.aculo.us JavaScript framework into GWT applications • Combining Hibernate and GWT to implement database-backed web applications • Extending the GWT PopupPanel class to implement a draggable and resizable window • Creating a drag-and-drop module, complete with drag sources and drop targets • Deploying GWT applications to an external server • Dynamically resizing flex tables • Using GWT widgets in legacy applications developed with other frameworks, such as Struts and JavaServer Faces Complete Sample Code Available at www.coolandusefulgwt.com All of the code used in this book has been tested, both in hosted and web modes, and in an external version of Tomcat (version 5.5.17), under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. For Windows and Linux, we used 1.4.60, and for the Mac we used 1.4.61. NOTE: There are three separate versions of the code. Please download the correct JAR file for the operating system you are using. Foreword xiii Preface xvi Acknowledgments xviii About the Authors xix Solution 1: GWT Fundamentals and Beyond 1 Solution 2: JavaScript Integration 53 Solution 3: Custom Widget Implementation 71 Solution 4: Viewports and Maps 103 Solution 5: Access to Online Web Services 133 Solution 6: Drag and Drop 167 Solution 7: Simple Windows 199 Solution 8: Flex Tables 237 Solution 9: File Uploads 283 Solution 10: Hibernate Integration 303 Solution 11: Deployment to an External Server 325 Solution 12: GWT and Legacy Code 343 Index 371