Startups + Marketing + Geekery. From someone who's been there: Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software.
Listening to first-time entrepreneurs talk about their competitive advantages is as predictably invalid as the local weatherman's 10-day forecast.
Here's the top, invalid competitive advantages startup founders like to claim.
After reviewing several hundred startup pitches for Capital Factory, I found several extremely common problems. You're probably making the same mistakes -- I did have too ten years ago -- so let's get that fixed.
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The Daily WTF, also known as "Worse than Failure" during most of 2007, is a humorous blog dedicated to "Curious Perversions in Information Technology". The blog, run by Alex Papadimoulis, "offers living examples of code that invites the exclamation 'WTF!?'" and "recounts tales of disastrous development, from project management gone spectacularly bad to inexplicable coding choices."
In addition to horror stories, The Daily WTF "serves as a repository of knowledge and discussion forums for inquisitive web designers and developers" and has introduced several anti-patterns, including Softcoding and the Inner-Platform Effect.
When you work in IT, your family turns to you as the ultimate computer expert. Since Reggie worked in IT for the direct mail industry, not only did he get carpet bombed with the usual computer questions, but also with questions about the piles of junkmail his family received. "Why do they send so many? How do they afford that?" "Is the furniture store really going out of business?" "I got the same thing twice. Do you think I can double up the coupons?"
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When Eric C. arrived at his new job, it was with a huge sense of relief. His old workplace had been a haven for cowboy coders and anarchic hackers, where the only semblance of consistency was in everyone's preference to modify code directly in production.
"Finally," Eric thought as he flipped through the Developer's Handbook. "Real processes!"
It's not as if Eric was a paper-pushing Process Nazi. He was just happy to see a bit of structure. But as he delved deeper into the handbook Eric grew worried. The processes seemed designed for a behemoth organization that had user advocates working with defect analysts to assess and manage issues in their software. But this company was a small financial services firm with no more than 30 employees.
Jason Calacanis is a successful entrepreneur and journalist blogging at calacanis.com and also sending a newsletter every week.
Over the last six months, I''ve been pitched by over 90 startup companies, and have invested in eight. With Open Angel Forum team, we''ve selected 37 companies to present in front of 20 power-angel investors. About half of those companies have already succeeded in raising their angel rounds.
Original postI remember seeing dozens of these “we’re shutting down” messages during the dotcom crash. How many CEOs have written those notes, tears rolling down, in the middle of the night with the door shut tight. Years of dreaming, pumping people up only to end with a static HTML page for the bloggers and press to [...]
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Mark Suster is a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. I started my first company in 1999 and was headquartered in London. I left this company in 2005 and sold it to a publicly traded French services company. I founded my second company in Palo Alto in 2005 and sold this company to Salesforce.com where I became VP Product Management. This company now forms what is known as Salesforce Content. I joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner. I focus on early-stage technology companies – usually looking at Series A investments.
We started this week’s show with a Q&A session where I answered viewer questions about fund raising and the VC industry. If you enjoy this blog I think you’ll enjoy watching the first 14 minutes of this video (just click on the image of me below). Heck, stick around and watch me discuss the seed [...]
Original postYesterday I wrote a post about top-down versus bottom-up thinking. There is a corollary to that advice, which is “doing the right things is more important than doing things right.” Sounds simple but in practice I promise you most organization fall into the latter trap. Here’s how it goes: You have a business development group [...]
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Helping microISVs and startups succeed.
…from calculating what time it is across multiple time zones, thanks EveryTimeZone.com by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs.
Besides being a dead-easy way to figure out what time will work for a Skype conference call with three people in three different time zones, it’s:
a) A very cool HTML5 example pointed out by John Allsopp in Lesson 1 [...]
Just got an online training offer from SitePoint – the awesome Australian IT powerhouse: “The course costs just $9.95 and includes eight lessons containing a mix of videos, mini articles, and exercises, as well as two live Q&A sessions where you can ask questions of John directly. You’ll also gain access to a private forum where you can [...]
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Founded in March 2008, Balsamiq Studios creates rich, elegant, high quality plugins for Web Office applications. Balsamiq is a Micro-ISV, which in English means "a tiny software company". We like to compete on usability and customer service.
Our first product is Balsamiq Mockups. Launched in June 2008, Mockups helps software designers and developers build great software by letting them easily sketch out their ideas, then quickly collaborate and iterate over them. Balsamiq Mockups has netted over $800,000 in sales in its first year of business and is gathering rave reviews.
I mentioned today that I feel like Balsamiq (the company) is really just starting now. The team is in place, the processes are pretty smooth, the revenue somewhat stable, the work for the next year or so clearly defined. To kick off our company’s next phase, I have invited everyone on team Balsamiq and their [...]
Original postI am thrilled to announce that my very good friend Natalie Gould has joined the Balsamiq team! We’re not sure about what her final job title will be, but “like Valerie, but on Central European Time” should give you a pretty good idea… Based out of our brand new Bologna office (I know!), she will [...]
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Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.
I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried [...]
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[Ed. note: I attended Secretary Clinton's speech on internet freedom on Thursday the 21st, which I thought was a good combination of principle, policy, and illustrative stories. Talking to people afterwards, the commonest question was "What did the Secretary commit the State Department to?" The text below is my attempt to answer that question.
I don't have any inside information about the particulars of the State department's plans; the text below is simply an abridged version of the speech, from which I removed everything except statements you could judge future actions of the State Department on. Stripped of it's context (and with my apologies to the speech writers), my read of the speech is that the success or failure of our internet freedom policy will come down to our ability to live up to the principles outlined below. -clay]
If you go to high-tech industry events, or read about them afterwards, you're familiar with the phrase "and one more thing." When it's spoken by Apple's Steve Jobs, it electrifies the crowd – and it was a pleasure to have that same energy in the room today in San Jose,...
Original postWhen people use the phrase, "think outside the box," I suspect that many aren't aware of the nine-dots puzzle that's generally considered the origin of that expression. Draw a three-by-three grid of dots and challenge someone to connect them with a continuous stroke of a pen drawing four straight lines....
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Coding Horror is Jeff Atwood's blog. He lives in Berkeley, CA with his wife, two cats, and a whole lot of computers. He was weaned as a software developer on various implementations of Microsoft's BASIC in the 80's, starting with his first microcomputer, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. He continued on the PC with Visual Basic 3.0 and Windows 3.1 in the early 90's, although he also spent significant time writing Pascal code in the first versions of Delphi. He is now quite comfortable in VB.NET or C#, despite the evils of case sensitivity. He considers himself a reasonably experienced Windows software developer with a particular interest in the human side of software development, as represented in his recommended developer reading list.
Remember that Scene in Star Trek IV where Scotty tried to use a Mac Plus?
Using a mouse or keyboard to control a computer? Don't be silly. In the future, clearly there's only one way computers will be controlled: by speaking to them.
There's only one teeny-tiny problem with this magical future world of computers we control with our voices.
It doesn't work.
After we created Stack Overflow, some people were convinced we had built a marginally better mousetrap for asking and answering questions. The inevitable speculation began: can we use your engine to build a Q&A site about {topic}? Our answer was Stack Exchange. Pay us $129 a month (and up), and you too can create a hosted Q&A community on our engine -- for whatever topic you like!
Well, I have a confession to make: my heart was never in Stack Exchange. It was a parallel effort in a parallel universe only tangentially related to my own. There's a whole host of reasons why, but if I had to summarize it in a sentence, I'd say that money is poisonous to communities. That $129/month doesn't sound like much -- and it isn't -- but the commercial nature of the enterprise permeated and distorted everything from the get-go.
Pamela Slim is a seasoned coach and writer who helps frustrated employees in corporate jobs break out and start their own business. Her blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation, is one of the top career and marketing blogs on the web. A former corporate manager and entrepreneur herself for more than a decade, she deeply understands the questions and concerns faced by first-time entrepreneurs. Her expertise in personal and business change was developed through many years consulting inside corporations such as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Charles Schwab, where she coached thousands of executives, managers and employees.
Kiera Van Gelder and Amanda Wang, speakers at the National Alliance for Mentally Ill Convention. They spoke on the “Courageous Women in Recovery” panel.
A few months ago, I wrote about Amanda Wang’s courageous and brilliant project The Fight Within Us, a documentary she is producing to raise awareness about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a condition [...]
Robert Plant, Photo Credit Rounder Records
I read a fantastic interview with Led Zeppelin member Robert Plant, conducted by Larry Rogers in the Arizona Republic on July 16. The full interview is here.
Plant, who is coming to Arizona to play with Patty Griffin in advance of a new album dropping in September, described his current musical [...]
Joel on Software is Joel Spolsky's blog, where he has been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet (ack) since 2000.
Since announcing the new plans for Stack Exchange, there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of new Q&A sites will work best on this platform.
So far there are 32 informal proposals on meta.stackexchange.com. We’re weeks away from opening a site where these proposals can become real.
Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing. Our original idea of making the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your programming questions suddenly seemed too small. Programming questions? We asked. Why just programming questions? Why not every question under the sun? And who says we can’t run for Vice President of the United States of America?
My name is Patrick McKenzie. By day, I work at a Japanese computer consultancy. By night, I am the founder and chief bottle washer of Bingo Card Creator, a product aimed at making elementary school teachers’ lives easier. These are my stories. (Sorry, I’m a die-hard Law & Order fan.)
If for some reason you need to get in touch with me, my email address is my-first-name@bingocardcreator.com (alternatively, my-first-name@kalzumeus.com ) . Obviously, you’ll want to replace my-first-name with my actual first name.
Yesterday about a hundred thousand people visited this blog due to my post on names, and the server it was on died several fiery deaths. This has been a persistent issue for me in dealing with Apache (the site dies nearly every time I get Reddited — with only about 10,000 visitors each time, which shouldn’t be [...]
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John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters. It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them. John was understandably vexed about this situation, and he has every right to be, because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.
I have lived in Japan for several years, programming in a professional capacity, and I have broken many systems by the simple expedient of being introduced into them.
Hopefully, like me, you're here because you're interested in startups -- more specifically, software startups.
Imagine you’re having some big, high falutin’ meeting. Perhaps it’s a board meeting. Or, if you don’t have a board, perhaps it’s a management team meeting.
Or, if you don’t have a team, perhaps it’s just you talking to yourself at 3:00 a.m. in the morning. Whatever mechanism it is you have to talk about important issues and make decisions, imagine that meeting. Are you imagining it? Good.
Now, imagine that same meeting with one important change: One of your smart, savvy, customers is at the table.
I’m a big fan of Eric Ries and the lean startup movement that he’s championing at Startup Lessons Learned. I think many of the fundamentals behind the lean startup are things you likely have been practicing for a while. But, seeing it articulated so well and establishing a common vocabularly for us to talk about it is immensely valuable.
One of the key parts of the lean startup is the concept of a “minimally viable product”. The MVP is a product that has the minimum set of features needed to learn what the market wants. The idea behind the MVP is to spend as little energy is possible figuring out whether what you’re building is something people want.
In this article, I’d like to look at what happens after you’ve built the minimally viable product for your market.
When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I
now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before:
how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor.
April 2010The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the
question: what do you wish someone would make for you?There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically
out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are
going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple
was the first type.
My personal weblog. No, Rands is not my real name. I use my real name as a full time engineering manager in the Silicon Valley. Yeah, that's me in the logo. I hadn't shaved in some time. My hair is longer now.
I'm going to jump right to the punch line. I'm going to start by telling you exactly what you need to do in order to finally write that book you've been promising yourself for the past three years. Are you...
Original postIn my teens, I got migraines. Maybe it was growing pains, but all I knew is that randomly and without warning, I'd get a splitting, seeing spots, curled up in a dark room headache. Painkillers didn't help. Meditation merely distracted,...
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The Rapid E-Learning Blog shares practical tips and tricks to help you become a rapid elearning pro.
It is hosted by Tom Kuhlmann who has over 15 years of hands-on experience in the training industry and currently runs the community at Articulate.
I love all of the web apps and cool sites that pop up on the Internet. Many of them are cool in a gadgety way but not always practical; but they are fun to play with. And then there are some that are practical. For example, I use the social bookmarking tool, Diigo, quite a [...]
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I was moving some files around the other day and found a tabbed PowerPoint template I started working on about a year ago. So I finished it up and am giving it away today. Feel free to use it as you wish.
I like making these PowerPoint templates because it’s a good way to practice production [...]
