Internet Business - Blogs|| Haig Kayserian

24 January 2012My interview with TrueNYC

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TrueNYC is an educational and networking resource for entrepreneurs in New York City. I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Jeff Reekers in TrueNYC's Wall Street studio about my deeds at KAYWEB and KAYWEB Angels.

The interview, section-by-section, is embedded below. If you wish to watch the whole 53 minutes, please click here.

The interview is described by TrueNYC as follows:

In this interview, Haig Kayserian of KAYWEB Angels takes a moment to sit down with TrueNYC and Jeff Reekers to discuss his path as an entrepreneur. Kayserian discusses how he utilized the momentum he built up early in KAYWEB Angels to take the company to into new ventures and opportunities that would have been difficult to foresee at the start.

Kayserian offers insights into how to pick up this momentum as an entrepreneur, along with how to grow an effective company culture across multiple offices.

Finally, as an Angel Investment company, Kayserian provides insight into how his company's investment philososphies and the some of the keys to entrepreneurial success.

07 December 2011Why I registered kayweb.xxx

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I just posted a blog at KAYWEB, explaining why I have registered the domain name, kayweb.xxx.

Click here to read.

18 August 2011My guide for pitchers on what investors expect

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I have written a blog for Social Times, share some of my key pointers for entrepreneurs and startups preparing to apply for angel or VC funding.

After assessing over 200 applications in the last KAYWEB Angels round of investing, I hoped this would assist startups AND investors in any future rounds.

CLICK HERE TO READ

29 July 2011What we can learn from the Netflix situation

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Recently, Netflix announced a price increase to its hugely popular video streaming and rental service, enraging over 25 million subscribers.

Those who used to pay $9.99 for both the DVD (one-at-a-time) service and the live streaming will soon be forced to pay $15.98 per month for the same offering. They said the increase will be to improve streaming, as well as their collection of material available online.

On the back of this, many abandoned Netflix and the company’s stocks took a dive.

I wrote a blog for Social Times, explaining what startups can learn from the Netflix disaster. Click here to read!

27 May 2011My AOL feature video introducing KAYWEB Angels

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NEW YORK: Internet media giant AOL shot a video at their New York headquarters of KAYWEB Angels CEO Haig Kayserian, allowing him to introduce the company to the small business community of the United States.

See video below or by clicking here:

27 May 2011US tech media gobbles up KAYWEB Angels

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My latest company KAYWEB Angels - a New York-based angel investment company - has been attracting serious media attention since launching two months ago.

My board and I knew we had a clear point of difference and felt it was newsworthy.

The point of difference is that our angel investment company provides development services and mentoring in exchange for equity in web and mobile startups. A traditional angel investor provides cash, but we felt that stats were compelling that most U.S. states, especially New York, had many more ideas people than tech people, and KAYWEB Angels would be a way some of these ideas could get off the ground and take New York by storm.

Our newsworthiness hunch graduated to reality when we were covered by the San Francisco Chronicle, ABC7 Online, Mashable, Venture Beat, Social Times, Yahoo Asia, and other smaller magazines and publications, with more to come.

I personally was also featured in an interview on YoungEntrepreneur.com and a video piece by internet media giant AOL.

The importance of being 'disruptive' with your startup idea has been proven by the publicity we have received. As a former journalist, I can assert with some authority that if you give them a story, they will write about it.

And the importance of PR is huge. It is usually free, as it has been for KAYWEB Angels, and usually converts better than any form of paid advertising one can do. We have received hundreds of registrants on our website (www.kaywebangels.com) since media coverage began, and plenty of worthy applications to our fund.

28 April 2011My Social Times article goes viral

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Recently, I began contributing articles to one of the biggest social media news websites in the world, Social Times after the editor declared his interest in having me write on my expertise of 'startups' and 'web and mobile business' once or twice a week.

The article I wrote the other day went seriously viral.

It was called 'Cosmo Kramer Saw Facebook Potential - A Lesson For Entrepreneurs' and explored an uncanny link between the loved Seinfeld star and the fastest-growing web business in the world.

It received nearly 100 Tweets and over 100 Facebook Likes. I read much of people's comments when they tweeted and retweeted, and they loved the pop culture approach to teaching a lesson for startups and entrepreneurs. Many led people to the article by writing something smart such as 'Kramer invented Facebook', 'Winklevosses have no case' and 'Facebook ownership puzzle solved' in their status update.

Even a fake Kramer Twitter account that is widely-followed wrote 'I came up with Facebook - giddy up!'

This is a lesson for me in blogging and one I wish to share with all bloggers. Write clever stuff and they will come!

CLICK HERE TO READ ARTICLE.

28 April 2011My new startup for New York startups - KAYWEB Angels, LLC

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We have long been hearing about the need for quality engineering talent to keep up with the demands of ideas-centric New York City.

New York startup founders of the non-technical variety have long struggled to find skilful, technical co-founders. These individuals are not often immediately monetized in order to be able to afford the services of the limited developer talent pool available in the big city.

KAYWEB Angels, LLC is the 'angel development company' founded to fill this gap and plug New York's developer hole.

KAYWEB Angels is majority-owned by KAYWEB, the web and mobile development company with offices in New York, Sydney, Melbourne and Manila. KAYWEB employs 20 full-time staff, including 14 programmers specializing in developing websites and applications using various languages and technologies.

With over 200 clients using our systems, including our state-of-the-art content management system KAYWEB CMS, KAYWEB is well-equipped to build the next great web and mobile startup projects originating in New York City.

KAYWEB Angels has been founded to facilitate this process by providing our considerable resources in exchange for equity in founders' projects.

Our resources include website, application and mobile application designers, developers and project managers.

It also includes a mentoring network headed by our board of directors, who bring an outstanding level of expertise to the table.

Sidney Minassian is a Silicon Valley-based CEO, who has led one of his previous startups through significant levels of funding and a launch at DEMO which won his product the peak marketing prize.

Shant Soghomonian is an executive at VMware, with over 12 years of IT sales, management and leadership experience in Asia, the Pacific and Japan.

Foad Fadaghi, formerly with Friendster, brings over 15 years of experience in technology research and consulting, having authored ground-breaking studies into paid search, social networking, online group buying and tablet computing.

John Buckman is a corporate attorney and the founder of Buckman Group - Corporate Counsel, which actively provides transactional and corporate legal services to a variety of businesses, specializing in startups.

I, Haig Kayserian, am the Founder and CEO. I am an internet and mobile business consultant with clients across Australia, the United States of America and Asia. I founded KAYWEB seven years ago and have personally managed and advised on hundreds of website and applications projects for clients, which include businesses, organizations, government and individuals.

KAYWEB Angels, LLC has three New York projects as active investments already and we are actively inviting applicants to submit their ideas as we look to take that number to five by July 2011.

Click here to apply.

09 April 2011Smartphone gaming a serious business

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I had the pleasure of moderating a panel on Smartphone Gaming at "Socialize - Monetizing Social Media" conference at The New Yorker Hotel in New York last week.

The panel included international experts providing international perspectives on the mobile gaming industry, which is growing at an alarming rate. Silicon Valley California, Japan, China and Germany were all represented on the panel, which revealed:

the importance of an international strategy when creating a mobile game;
how to build games easily for multiple platforms;
how to take games viral to maximize downloads and users;
how to monetize mobile games; and
how to best use mobile games for brand marketing.

It was an extremely interesting discussion, and very topical considering the successes being registered by smartphone gaming companies, like Rovio, every day. Rovio is the developers behind the hugely popular game Angry Birds, which according to Wire UK, is played a total of 200 million minutes every day!

Rovio typifies the business successes being registered in the smartphone gaming business, recently raising over $40 million in funding to further advance its empire.

Anybody thinking of coming up with 'the next big thing' should stop and give some thought to games that may become highly addictive, international and monetize-able :)

21 March 2011Starting an Online Business: Quirkiness is cheap

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The roads to virality hence success of the great internet startups that consume our everyday lives, like Facebook, Twitter and Groupon to name a few, have been less conventional than the roads to a similar result experienced by traditional startup businesses.

These great internet startups have proven that ‘quirkiness’ can replace the billions of marketing dollars spent by traditional businesses to build a brand and cult following.

Quirkiness comes in many forms.

Quirky could be the idea of virtualizing the everyday lives of Ivy League students like Facebook did to attract the majority of Harvard, then other College students before ending up with profiles of 1 in 14 humans living on planet Earth.

Quirky could be enforcing a 140-character limit on status updates like Twitter did before attracting a gigantic user base that includes world leaders, business tycoons and celebrities to its application.

Quirky could be coming up with win-win deals with local businesses and spreading them as cleverly-worded coupons to a bargain-hungry audience, like Groupon has done to become a company that rakes in over $1 billion in revenue per year after less than three years in operation.

None of these businesses spent millions of dollars on television ads, bus stop advertising or a Times Square billboard. Planned or not, quirkiness was one of their key means to go viral and attract a critical following of their business. They have built online empires that are today valued at between $10 billion and $65 billion, depending on who you ask.

When starting your online business, plan quirkiness. It is an affordable way to take your business viral and save critical marketing dollars.

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Quirkiness comes in many forms.

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