User research focuses on understanding human behavior, while market research focuses on human perception. They can work together to understand users and customers better. The key is keeping both areas integrated and aware of the different business objectives they solve. Collaboration like this leads to enhanced personas, increased segmentation insights, a clearer understanding of user problems, and more efficient research.
Design color themes based on color theory with this color palette generator. It uses AI and color harmonies on the color wheel to generate beautiful color palettes.
Add accessibility annotations to the interactive elements of your Figma designs and share these instructions with engineers as part of your deliverables.
Lummi offers an extensive collection of AI-generated stock photos and royalty-free images with a more artistic and unusual vibe.
Cursive classes have returned to schools even though the Gen-Z can’t read it and brands avoid it. We’re beginning a new cycle. If younger generations can confidently read script typefaces, designers and brands won’t be afraid to use them.
Design executive Abigail Brody has worked at Apple and other Fortune 500 companies for over a decade. While at Apple, Brody learned to never settle for less than the best, make informed decisions, and say no to unnecessary features.
This guide details a step-by-step method for designing, organizing, and shipping icons using Figma. The simple and effective system is based on evaluating icons' meaning, consistency, and context.
2024.03.15·blog.streamlinehq.com·7 min read·TLDR Design People might ask questions or challenge your decisions when you show your visual designs to them. Here are 14 notes on how to make your visual design easier to defend.
Only artists can tell the story behind their creations. Sometimes, sharing the process of creating something can be just as enjoyable as the result.
Fruit of the Loom’s logo has never featured a cornucopia - the whole thing seems to be a case of the “Mandela effect.”
The “IPO window” (best time to go public) has been mostly closed for the past two years, but that could start to change in 2024. Preparing for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) requires careful planning, sometimes taking more than two years to get ready for the public market. Here’s a breakdown that addresses accounting and governance challenges and highlights the complex process of IPO preparation, emphasizing early planning, and assembling the right team.
The landscape of pre-seed investing is evolving. Many small and new funds are decreasing their involvement or transitioning towards larger seed rounds. This indicates a shift in investment focus from startups that have not yet gained traction or achieved Product Market Fit to those that have already gained some level of traction. This trend poses a challenge for founders who are seeking pre-seed funding.
This report analyzes growth trends and benchmarks for over 2,200 SaaS businesses. SaaS growth rates have stabilized in the last three quarters, but the top tier of startups is growing faster. The fastest-growing SaaS businesses reach $1M ARR in nine months and $10M ARR in under three years. The median startup takes around three years to reach $1M ARR and over five years to reach $10M ARR.
Programmatic SEO is a popular and cost-effective way to quickly grow startups. This guide makes it easy to understand, showcasing how companies such as Poly, Redfin, and Zapier utilized pSEO to gain hundreds of thousands of website visitors in a short amount of time - some in as little as 4 weeks.
There has been some skepticism towards the "Lean Startup" methodology in recent months. However, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is still important in validating assumptions about a product's market fit. While the tech industry has evolved significantly since the introduction of the Lean Startup methodology, its core principles remain valuable for entrepreneurs, albeit with some necessary reinterpretations.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the go-to metric for customer sentiment. However, it may not be as effective as believed due to its lack of actionable insights and issues with timing and sampling. Customer Effort Score (CES), rigorous and random sampling in feedback, qualitative feedback, customer journey analytics, and Net Dollar Retention Rate (NDR) arguably provide a more holistic and actionable understanding of customer sentiment.
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Copy.ai, an AI-powered writing tool, managed to acquire an impressive 10 million users within just four years. Key strategies that contributed to their rapid growth include creating and testing five quick versions within 90 days, utilizing social media to generate early buzz, prioritizing SEO, and offering free trials. This article provides exclusive insights into the tools and thought processes that fueled Copy.ai's remarkable success.
Running a startup is like surfing - the founder is like the surfer, the product is like a surfboard, and the waves represent external factors. The founder's skill is crucial, akin to a surfer's ability to catch waves. While the product's quality matters, it can be refined. The external environment, represented by the waves, poses unpredictable challenges that are difficult to control.
It can be tempting to put off taking action in the short term when you have a distant deadline. However, by breaking down your work into shorter delivery cycles - say, six weeks at a time - you're more likely to be proactive and address issues promptly. This approach fosters a culture of constantly prioritizing and working on the most important tasks.
Employees who work some evenings and weekends are the least likely to resign, while those who don't work at all during these times are more likely to quit.
Engagement can happen quickly if a startup can solve a critical unmet need and present a targeted pitch to the right decision-maker.
Nissan will be informing around 100,000 people in Australia and New Zealand that their data was breached over the next few weeks. Up to ten percent of victims had government identification stolen while the rest had other PII stolen. Nissan will be offering 12 months of free credit monitoring for affected individuals.
Fortinet has a critical vulnerability in its FortiClient EMS that enables remote code execution. The SQL injection vulnerability enables unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary commands. Horizon3 said that it will release a technical deep dive and proof-of-concept exploit code next week.
Salt Labs discovered vulnerabilities in ChatGPT and its third-party plugins, including a zero-click exploit that gives attackers access to victims' private GitHub repositories. OAuth implementation flaws were found in ChatGPT and multiple plugins, potentially allowing unauthorized access by a malicious actor to proprietary data. The vulnerabilities were reported to OpenAI and plugin developers in July and September 2023 and have since been resolved.
2024.03.15·packetstormsecurity.com·4 min read·GitHub repository·TLDR InfoSec Researchers have discovered a new side-channel attack called token inference that can be used to infer the topic behind 55% of chats between an AI assistant and users on all platforms other than Gemini. The attack makes use of the fact that most AI Assistants send messages back token by token to provide faster responses. The encrypted token length is identical to the token length so the researchers were able to train two LLMs based on stylistic patterns in public chats from the various AI Assistants.
This blog post from Google discusses its threat model for post-quantum cryptography, which emphasizes the urgency of adopting quantum-safe algorithms to protect data from future quantum computing threats. It also outlines recommendations for prioritizing quantum threats and deploying hybrid post-quantum cryptography solutions and addresses specific use cases like encryption in transit, firmware signatures, software signatures, public key infrastructure, tokens, and other scenarios vulnerable to quantum threats.
This document, part of a two-part series, delves into practical and theoretical attacks in the industrial landscape, focusing on the vulnerabilities and potential methods attackers can use to disrupt automation processes within a factory setting.
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AI Goat is a series of vulnerable LLM CTF challenges for learning AI security. The challenge set is built on Vicuna LLM, which is derived from LLaMA and coupled with ChatGPT’s response data.
403JUMP is a tool designed for penetration testers and bug bounty hunters to audit the security of web applications. It bypasses HTTP 403 (forbidden) pages by employing various techniques like using different HTTP verbs and headers and managing concurrency.
Excalibur is a CLI tool that sends alerts if a given X account has been archived. It can also be used to find associated Mastodon, Medium, and Product Hunt accounts.
Red Canary has released its annual threat detection report, which provides an overview of the current threat landscape. Humans remain the most exploited vulnerabilities. Cloud account compromise has increased 16-fold. Containers are now nearly omnipresent, and MacOS malware is on the rise. MFA fatigue attacks have become increasingly prevalent and Cobalt Strike is no longer in the top 10 C2 platforms.
Modified versions of text editors were found in search results on a popular Chinese search engine. The fake software contained backdoors designed to execute remote commands and communicate with a malicious server. This kind of "malvertising" has been used to lure victims to malicious sites.
Data privacy company Onerep.com, supposedly based in Virginia, helps individuals remove personal information from people-search websites for a fee. However, investigations reveal the company actually operates from Belarus and Cyprus. The company's founder, Dimitri Shelest, has launched numerous people-search services over the years. Despite claims of independence, connections between Onerep.com and Nuwber.com raise questions about their relationship and practices.
Attackers have started to hijack user accounts on service providers' platforms and apps to initiate procedures to port victims' numbers to other devices or generate QR codes to activate new eSIMs.
The Federal Communications Commission has approved a new U.S. Cyber Trust Mark for consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices that will denote that devices such as 'smart' home appliances meet baseline security standards.
Tech support firms Restoro and Reimage have been fined $26 million by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) due to their use of scare tactics to trick customers into paying for unnecessary computer repair services.
Reddit revealed new free-form ads that mirror user posts, aiming to bolster engagement and advertiser interest ahead of its IPO. The new format will offer flexibility in content creation and quick information delivery inspired by popular megathreads. While advertisers may benefit from enhanced engagement, users might perceive ads blending with regular content as intrusive.
90% of ad buyers are shifting personalization tactics as a result of increased privacy legislation and signal loss, with ad budgets increasingly allocated to channels that leverage first-party data, such as CTV, retail media, and social media. One challenge marketers are likely to face as they focus more on first-party data is a lack of interoperability between these channels, which makes it harder to assess effectiveness.
The endowment effect is when people irrationally overvalue things once they have a sense of ownership over them. Potential customers will value your product more if you can give them the feeling that they own it. Free trials and test drives make customers feel this way even though they haven’t bought anything. A money-back guarantee allows people to truly own something with minimal risk. Giveaways make the customer used to the paid experience. Using “you” or “your” in copywriting subtly makes the reader feel more ownership.
This interview with marketers from a renowned copywriting agency discusses strategies for crafting compelling social media captions. The interviewees stress the significance of authenticity, clarity, and relatability in engaging audiences and building brand credibility. Brands can create more impactful and memorable content by focusing on genuine communication and avoiding overly sales-oriented or artificial language.
Yahoo is testing a new creator program that will allow certain writers to publish and monetize stories under the Yahoo News brand. The draw to creators is the chance to expand their audience bases while earning ad and affiliate revenue. 21 creators have been invited to join the platform’s beta test. Yahoo plans to expand its creator network into the hundreds over the next couple of months.
Creator Search Insights, a new analytics element on TikTok, gives creators insight into topics people are searching for on TikTok. Creators can see which topics are most popular based on a popularity score or the Recommended Topic label next to the search term. TikTok is also building “search value” into its Creator Rewards Program calculations, enabling creators to increase their payouts by uploading videos that align with search trends.
The three most common problems with value propositions are failing to make it clear what the product or service does, forgetting to mention valuable benefits, and neglecting to tell your prospect what will happen if they buy. Always use plain and clear language to describe value propositions, particularly for complex products or services. Ensure that all elements of value are listed on websites so visitors understand the full benefits. Make the post-sale experience clear so users know what to expect - this can be achieved with a future-pacing flowchart.
Both-ism is a cultural phenomenon where contradictory elements coexist harmoniously, influencing trends in commerce, technology, and social dynamics. Some examples include omni-commerce fusing digital and brick-and-mortar, 'worcation' or 'bleisure', and alcohol-free spirits for mocktails. Brands can offer innovative solutions and offer novel experiences by embracing both sides of a dichotomy.
This piece contains budgeting hacks and budget management tips from a CMO’s perspective. Always budget for holdbacks and headcount holdbacks, but do not name it a “slush fund” or “extra headcount” as finance teams may eliminate them. Plan for a “grab bag” for great ideas that aren’t in the budget but that could be activated quickly if budget becomes available. This post also includes a template for what a summary budget page should cover — plan, actuals, forecast, left to spend, YoY increases, and more.