Building Digital Products

Etgar Shpivak: Use customer’s pain to build an effective product strategy

The pains are the most important because based on this pain you will build your solution because firstly there should be a pain and the solution goes afterward, not vice versa.
An outstanding marketing expert with many years of experience, in addition to being an author, speaker, and the one helping startups and entrepreneurs improve their ways of doing business, the СЕО at Fixel - Etgar Shpivak helps us to understand the customer audience so clearly and precisely, that it will increase your profits and make marketing much more efficient.
Etgar Shpivak came to the marketing world accidentally. His journey started as a programmer, he even experienced it in the Israeli army. Then, his father asked him to work for his IT website. He did a number of roles in some advertising agencies, from sales to business development, marketing, and lots of hands-on experience.
- What personal pain brought Etgar to marketing
- Why he started active educational activities for business owners
- Etgar’s recommendations for entrepreneurs building the new digital product
- Why is customer discovery important, its steps
- What to consider when you build an effective strategy
- Can we win with just a simple promise?
- Key challenges entrepreneurs face in the digital era
- Number one pitfall when starting a startup
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/use-customer-s-pain-to-build-an-effective-product-strategy-the-talk-with-etgar-shpivak/

Gal Klein reveals audio content potential as a digital product

If you're not into audio right now, you're missing out. So, if you're not, you should start doing this.
The digital innovator, Gal Klein, today’s co-CEO at AI-based Voice Search platform Audioburst, and his recommendations to everybody who wants to find their digital product or who doesn’t even suspect of various opportunities such tools can give.
Gal Klein started his career with mechanics serving for six years in the army as a mechanical engineer. In addition, he had some tech background. Then, he worked for a company computerizing it, creating technical manuals and catalogues for aircraft in the IAF. In 2000 Gal established his own company, which started providing solutions in the media world, e.g. personalized CDs, and there was also worked as CTO in mBox for international companies on creating technology to cut songs, video clips into short pieces of audio.
After that Gal founded another company PLYmedia. It allowed users to create layers on top of videos, like a speech or thought bubble, live captioning for such companies as Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and big events like Oprah Winfrey.
- Blitz story of Gal’s journey
- How Audioburst came to birth
- Challenges of the product development process
- Product market fit: how to outline your audience, your segment of the market
- Bevelop their own digital product
- How the audio content can help other business
- Getting investments for your digital product
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/how-good-decision-making-drives-success-to-digital-product-david-siegel/

How to use Artificial Intelligence to boost your business

It is high time to stop being afraid of Artificial Intelligence, as it helps to enhance your business and opens new horizons for its development.
Amit Bendor, the Head of AI and data science in Artlist (a company offering high-quality royalty-free music, sound effects, and video footage), shares his experience in building art startups, digital product, and business innovation.
Amit will help you to understand where and how to find the ‘long hanging fruit’.

👉🏻 Which challenges wait for your startup
👉🏻 What is a better solution: to focus on a little thing or to deal with all aspects at once
👉🏻 How to attract investors
👉🏻 What is AI
👉🏻 The benefits of artificial intelligence for business
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/how-to-use-artificial-intelligence-to-boost-your-business/

War in Ukraine and its impact on the Tech Industry: work process at Linkup Studio

On February 24 Russia started a full-scale war against Ukraine. Ukraine has been brave, defending itself against the aggressor, which is 28 times bigger than us. So, in today’s record we want to talk about our company journey during these dark times.
Despite the bombs, the missiles, we continue doing business, accepting contracts, keeping our promises. We are still shocked, but very motivated to do our job to win.
We want to tell you how we have organized our life in the new reality, how we feel, what we do, how our employees feel, and what the reaction of our clients to the situation was.
We will help you to get a clear idea of current processes and cope with business circumstances in times of war.
- Which challenges we have dealt with since the beginning of the war;
- How to handle these challenges in your business during war time;
- Working under air alarms is stressful, but possible;
- How to survive in business during the war;
- What is the best way to help us as a business.
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/war-in-ukraine-and-its-impact-on-the-tech-industry-work-process-at-linkup-studio/

How to quit being a CEO and help other CEOs with their problems: a story of Peter Sorgenfrei

Our team had a conversation with one of our clients, Peter Sorgenfrei, the former CEO of an autonomous mobile company and a couch, a mentor and sometimes even a therapist for other CEOs.
Peter shares his experience of being a CEO of the company that was the ambassador of self-driving cars in Scandinavia and Northern Europe.
He also tells how he got sick and why he left it. And how come that due to this sickness he has found a new role in his life, and why CEOs now need his advice and his shoulder to lean on.
👉🏻 How Peter started his career
👉🏻 If money doesn’t matter, then what?
👉🏻 What would our life be with 3D printed autonomous vehicles?
👉🏻 Why he left his company
👉🏻 How his sickness helped him find a new role in life
👉🏻 Is he a therapist or a couch right now?
👉🏻 Advice to those who build digital products
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/a-ceo-special-talk-the-intriguing-story-of-peter-sorgenfrei/

WordPress VS custom Website: How to scale from WP to custom software

Figuring out the right time to say goodbye to WordPress and finding out how to do it painlessly.
One day you may realize that you need to scale to make your business larger and to add more functionalities. And then, most definitely, you will face different kinds of technical limitations from WordPress.
Things will get fuzzy, you won’t know what decision will be right, as you will probably be the one with a business model that works for years and brings you some money. Well, don’t worry, it’s a very common situation. WordPress might be very good to start with, but not good enough to continue.
WordPress is the CMS system that was originally created as a block publishing tool giving people the ability to make their own websites easily, fast and cheap. Social media weren’t so popular back then, some of them didn’t exist at all, so people were happy to share stories on their own sites.
A lot of engineers and designers started to work with WordPress too. They updated it with different themes and plugins which made functionality bigger. And that is why people started to use WordPress for other aims like making business websites, advertising websites or online shops.
According to the latest data, 35% of all the websites in the world are developed with WordPress (this is huge!). There are two main reasons for that. First, it is very simple. Any person without engineering knowledge can understand how it works. Second, the installation is fast and cheap. But...
👉🏻 Why WordPress is so popular
👉🏻 Why it may actually be not the best solution for your business
👉🏻 When you should get off your dead horse
👉🏻 Three things that will help you to make the right decision
💻 Read the text version on the blog 
https://linkupst.com/blog/how-to-scale-from-wordpress-to-custom-software/

High-quality software development: is it worth the cost?

The founders of new digital products are mostly not technical people, so they may not fully understand what quality of the software means.
Quality development is more than just the code, it’s a more complex approach with a lot of different rules that every team member has to follow during the development process.
Let's talk about the difference between good and bad development, all the benefits you get if you care about quality from the very beginning, and how it saves you time and money in the long run.
Listen to our new podcast and find out:
- Why quality code doesn't mean a quality product;
- The difference between good and bad development;
- The role of documentation;
- Why you should let the professional test code;
- What is code verification;
- How bad MVP can lead you to technical debt;
- How to make your team much happy.
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/high-quality-software-development-is-it-worth-the-cost/

Digital transformation for business: 5 tips to upgrade your company to the next level

 Your business is not fully digitalized, but are you looking for new ways to satisfy your customers and win the market? Here’s what we can recommend — 5 tips on how you and your business can grow with technologies, software development, and digitalizing.
Check out our new podcast and find out:
How to make your own and your employees' lives easier with CRM;
Why you shouldn't be prejudiced about email marketing;
Why nudges and gamification win;
What you will gain from a community;
How you can use IoT. 
💻 Read the text version on the blog 
https://linkupst.com/blog/5-tips-to-upgrade-your-business-to-the-next-level/

Jay Severson on how to succeed as a business-minded chess player

A story of LinkUp’s client, Jay Severson, the co-founder of chess.com, the creator of other brilliant ideas, and his advice to those who are about to start their things
Jay Severson story starts with programming, which he studied both in high school and in college. Then he worked as a software engineer for several years, before his friend from college decided to start chess.com.
Then it all took off: a long journey with its ups and downs, risks and working all nights long. So what the two friends achieved, and which new idea Jay’s working on right now: let him speak for himself.
00:00 Intro
00:32 Meet Jay Severson
03:00 How to build a site with over 60 million users
08:40 Does Jay miss the time he wrote the code?
14:38 Why Jay dropped chess.com
19:28 What people do next after building a million business?
27:53 Single play experience vs party games - and how it affects on app`s profit
34:56 Three main advices for digital entrepreneurs from Jay
41:45 Short questions
42:53 Conclusion
Find Jay's Landover here 👉🏻 https://discord.gg/mv4BHpf
Also check the article about app monetization strategies - https://bit.ly/3kP7eXY
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/jay-severson-on-how-to-succeed-as-a-business-minded-chess-player/

How to integrate an offshore dev team into your business

Describing main types of problems businesses have before starting to work with software teams, and sharing our experience about three main steps of this process.
You are running your business, and now it’s time for you to find a software team. How to work with those guys and what to expect from them? Let’s try to find out.
- Which problems current businesses face
- How new or updated software may help them
- What your cooperation will probably look like
- What are the main stages of starting this work
- What kind of hard decision you should make
💻 Read the text version on the blog
https://linkupst.com/blog/how-to-integrate-an-offshore-dev-team-into-your-business/