There's been a lot of debate recently about the quality of startups that go through multiple accelerators. This all kicked-off with Sam Altman's post Getting Into YCombinator which discouraged the...| Imran's blog
I’ve had a few startups ask me recently regarding the pros-and-cons of going the open source route especially regarding the types of business models that are viable for open source based...| Imran's blog
"Uber for X" has become commonplace model for startups but often such startups overly-focus on ease-of-delivery rather than what made Uber truly disruptive. Uber built a marketplace in a highly...| Imran's blog
As part of my research into marketplaces I've been digging into the IPO prospectuses of three recent marketplace IPOs: Just-Eat - International takeaway marketplace; IPO'd in April on the LSE at...| Imran's blog
Marketplace pricing strategies tend to fall into one of three categories: Flat-rate fees - where a fixed price is charged typically per-listing or per-lead generated. Subscription - where...| Imran's blog
This weekend was #FutureBookHack, a hackathon which brought together hackers that were digital leaders from top-tier publishers (Faber, Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and...| Imran's blog
Following on from Y Combinator's Demo Day yesterday I ran an analysis on the companies that presented looking at how they made money. I looked at two factors: Whether they were primarily b2b or...| Imran's blog
Last night I attended a poker game sponsored by AngelPad (and kindly hosted by Pusher) who were looking to promote AngelPad as an accelerator to UK based startups. Thomas (founder of AngelPad)...| Imran's blog
One complaint I hear from startup founders raising seed rounds is that it's often hard to know which VCs are open to doing early stage seed round investments and what size of investments they...| Imran's blog
Last weekend Seedcamp ran their inaugural seedhack, a weekend hackathon style event bring together industry specialists and developers to form new startups. Seedhack was pitched as a much more...| Imran's blog
(this article was initially written but not published before Michael Arrington's resignation, as a result of MG Siegler's post suggesting Michael was pushed I've decided to publish it anyway. It...| Imran's blog
Even though I'd spent a long time following the startup scene and reading all the standard blogs and books before founding my first startup CoderStack (a job board for software developers) when it...| Imran's blog
Since the launch of Y Combinator six years ago there have been countless competitors spring up all around the world, the primary competitive differentiator being that of location. YC's stellar...| Imran's blog
Whenever people talk about Facebook Ads (or even more generally "Can Facebook justify their $50bn valuation?") the conversation always tends to swing around to how poorly Facebook Ads perform. ...| Imran's blog
This is my fourth blog in the last three years, but it's the first I'm publishing directly under my own name. My last three blogs all achieved reasonable success each managing to build readerships...| Imran's blog
In Feb 2007 Paul Graham launched Hacker News with the following announcement: Yesterday we launched Startup News, a new component of our site with a user-ranked list of startup-related links. We...| Imran's blog