If I Started A Company Today | Andrew Hyde - Humble Yet Bold
http://andrewhyde.net/if-i-started-a-company-today/

Down economy?  Perfect time to start it up. Chris Brogan posted a great post on if he started in social media today, what he would do. It got me

Andrew Hyde's tips for starting a company today.

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco.

Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.

L'histoire du projet twttr qui est devenu ce que l'on sait. Je me souviens l'avoir découvert via Tara Hunt & Factory Joe lors d'un SxSW festival en 2007.

companies world map

More excellent insight from Fred Wilson about Internet startups, online business models, and revenue vs. cash. Important insight for anyone in business that needs to understand how next-generation economics are not what Wall Street was doing, but what the Web is doing today.

o a business is worth the sum of all of its future profits, discounted back to a net present value (buffet thinks this is the intrinsic value). its a lot easier to decrease costs than increase revenues. forget that ROE is so high for companies like craigslist. have a 1B company on 30 employees. any need to get big and grow.

Good article on Web based business profits, costs and revenues

In November 2007, we listed 10 Semantic apps to watch and yesterday we published an update on what each had achieved over the past year. All of them ...

Now we're going to list 10 more Semantic apps to watch. These are all apps that have gotten onto our radar over 2008. We've reviewed all but one of them, so click through to the individual reviews for more detail. It should go without saying, but this is by no means an exhaustive list - so if we haven't mentioned your favorite, please add it in the comments.

999 free business ideas for possible brainstorming, journaling, etc. Possible crew activities?

Ideas are a dime a dozen. The money is in the execution. Need proof? For Seth Godin's Alternative MBA program, this week the nine of us came up with 111 business ideas each. But ideas are only valuable when someone (like you) makes something happen. What follows are our 999 business ideas, free for the taking. 1. Prepackaged school supplies based on the lists from the school districts 2. Incubator site providing office space, hosting, etc. for startups that are seed funded. 3. In-grocery store prep service (buy vegetables first and drop them off to be chopped to your specs - pick them up on the way to checkout) 4. A website that you can submit your design and work with vendors to manufacture your own clothes line. 5. Online discount brokerage that has no closing hours and provides access to all exchanges throughout the world and handles currency and legal issues automatically.

website

Stuck for ideas? Here's 999 new ones: http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html

One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be?

Raising money is never easy, but in a recession it gets even harder. Here's a quick guide to raising money in a down economy.

Start a business

Lean startups - a lesson in bootstrapping.

Amazing javascript work. It's sure a heck lot of work unless there is a tool to make it really easily. Anyway here is an awesome javascript timing example.

watch Paul Graham type an essay

「Startups in 13 Sentences」の作成過程。文章の作成と推敲過程がよくわかる

great article here! Google, twitter, social networking, and of course my favorite topic- entrepreneurship

1. Launch a scaled-back version 2. Notice sluggish competitors 3. You don’t need virality if your product is good 4. Follow your passion 5. Sometimes you have to go off on your own

Looks an interesting way to read news, but whats with the categories. No 'science' section, but a 'Ron Paul' one?

Personalized News Source

A web 2.0 based social aggregator

Several weeks ago, we took a look at the founders’ pie. I noted that frequently the founding team divides 100% by the number of founders. I also cautioned that this is the WRONG WAY! I then went on to identify the factors that should be considered when making these decisions. Since then, I have had several people tell me that while what I wrote certainly made sense, it wasn’t very helpful. They said that when it came to “rug cutting time,” absent an alternative method, equal shares was the only method that seemed to be “fair.” As a public service, I have “invented” a Founders’ Pie Calculator. As you will soon see, this calculator is not particularly profound. In fact, I’m sure I haven’t “invented” it, but, at the same time, I have never seen it before. [Caution: perhaps there’s a fatal flaw that I haven’t considered.] Its primary benefits are that it provides a way to quantify the elements of the decision making process, and that it appears to be logical and fair.

Equity Calculation between founders

The problem is that trying to copy one company's model is a fool's errand. It's hard to figure out which part of the Starbucks formula made the business a smash hit while so many of its rivals failed. Starbucks's success is the product of a combination of factors that came together in precisely the right way at precisely the right time. It's nearly impossible to isolate which one was the most important. You would probably have to look at the hundreds of small coffee chains that didn't make it big before you stood a chance of seeing what really distinguished Starbucks.

probably

A start-up requires patience: As in tuning a shortwave radio, you have to make a number of adjustments to get it just right.

save

"It seems like a fool-proof plan: start up with a close friend. You’ll get along (obviously), and you’ll get to share the exciting, fantastic, scary experience of starting up with someone you care about. It’s not a bad idea, but there are a few caveats that you should be aware of before you proceed..."

Good advice on the early stages. This is targeted at friends starting up but also good for anybody starting with somebody else.

Interesting article about how to found a startup with friends.

lmost cost us our friendship. We got through this thanks to the help and mediation of anot

When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. Seven years later I still hadn't started. I put it off because it seemed mysterious and complicated. It turns out to be easier than I expected, and also more interesting. The part I thought was hard, the mechanics of investing, really isn't. You give a startup money and they give you stock. You'll probably get either preferred stock, which means stock with extra rights like getting your money back first in a sale, or convertible debt, which means (on paper) you're lending the company money, and the debt converts to stock at the next sufficiently big funding round.

nor tactical advantages to using one or the other. The paperwork for convertible debt is simpler. But really it doesn't matter much which you use. Don't spend much time worrying about the details of deal terms, especially when you first start angel investing. That's not how you win at this game. When you hear people talking about a successful angel investor, they're not saying "He got a 4x liquidation preference." They're saying "He invested in Google."

How to Be an Angel Investor

Notes from Paul Graham on angel investing. Actually pretty interesting. The key, as he describes it, is to pick the right companies... the terms you get when investing don't matter much and can even hurt your chances of success if you're strict enough.

Here's a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? My answer is almost always the same: don't. First off, what does it mean to launch? Generally, we conflate two unrelated concepts into the term, which is important to clarify right up front. 1. Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. (Marketing launch) 2. Make a new product available to customers in the general public. (Product launch) In today's world, there is no reason you have to do these two things at the same time. In fact, in most situations it's a bad idea for startups to synchronize these events.

From Box UK, a survey of business models used by the top Web apps, most of them variations of ad-supported Free and Freemium. In the chart below, the largest segment (ITA) is ad-supported, the second largest (ISV) is Freemium. After that is referral (ITR) and then the sale of virtual goods (IPV), such as the gifts in Facebook.

A public diary on themes around my books

check out link to top 100 web apps

Terrific survey of free business models online

So, my best advice is to say, "Today, right now, your contribution is worth 5% of the company and my creation of the company is worth 5%. The other 90% is based on what each of us does over the next 18 months. Here's a list of what has to get done, and what we agree it's worth..."

my best advice is to say, "Today, right now, your contribution is worth 5% of the company and my creation of the company is worth 5%. The other 90% is based on what each of us does over the next 18 months. Here's a list of what has to get done, and what we agree it's worth..."

Viral Marketing Guru

Mashable is exclusively announcing the 19 finalists in a European startup competition, selected by a panel including Amazon CTO Werner Vogels.

Silicon Valley isn't the only place that's a hotbed for social media and web entrepreneurship: Europe is filled with skilled entrepreneurs and successful

Mashable is exclusively announcing the 19 finalists in a European startup competition, selected by a panel including Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. It’s all part of the 2009 Next Web Conference in Amsterdam this month, which gathers together Europe’s tech community and brings it some well-deserved international attention.

I read all of these blogs. They all have incredibly useful archives. And they’re all written by people who teach and practice, so the advice is practical.

1. How will you reach a massive audience? - Every Net entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to one million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users. 2. What is your unique value proposition? 3. Will your business be capital efficient?

ages. How does a company rise above the noise to attract massive discovery and adoption? YouTube did it through existing channels like MySpace, which already reached millions. Yelp had strong SEO, which found them a mass audience searching for restaurants and nightlife. Facebook’s University-centric approach landed them 80% adoption across a campus within 60 days of launch. Every Net entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to one million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users.

You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

The Entrepreneurs Handbook – 54 Resources For First Time Entrepreneurs

"tagged startup business tips"

Great video & slides from Davie McClure's talk at 'Presentation Camp SF' -

No time for pri-twos. In project parlance, a "pri-one" is a work item that is essential to the success of the project. Bootstrapped companies don't have any pri-twos. Once you determine that a task is a pri-two, forget about it forever. Sadly, this is why Urbanspoon still doesn't have "hours of operation" for our restaurants.

Profitable boot strap Mock Up application

Regator.com

Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq Studio by Peldi Guilizzoni. August 5th, 2008 under Branding / Marketing, Company / Business — 12 Comments First off, the title of this post is a bit pretentious for my taste, but I wanted to pay homage to Mike Speiser’s excellent post on A/B testing using AdWords, and take advantage of his $10.87 investment while I was at it! ;). Mike is one of the brightest people I have ever met, and I highly encourage everyone to read his Laserlike blog. I say that the post is pretentious for my taste because I hardly feel like I am a marketing expert, in fact I consider myself a beginner at most things. Still, I can’t deny that Balsamiq has received a very good amount of coverage in the blogosphere: I am timing this post to coincide with the 100th review of Balsamiq Mockups (the full list is here), the website has received over 32,000 unique visitors and sales are exceeding all my expectations. For 6 weeks of operation, I can’t complain. ;)

Good advice and links for marketing a startup such as Balsamiq

) is Wired's editor in chief.

Get in-depth tech news coverage from Wired and read about how it is shaping culture, education, entertainment, communications and technology.

Article de Wired sur l'économie du 21ème sicèle

Learn how to construct a lean startup that focuses on customers, markets, and speed of iteration. Through case studies, exercises, and discussions, instructor Eric Ries guides entrepreneurs of all stripes through the key areas of startup success: product, engineering, QA, marketing, and business strategy. You'll emerge with a clear plan to bring lean-startup thinking back to your company. Multiple Events: San Francisco, CA

Thirteen key characteristics of a great startup culture

Thirteen key characteristics of a great startup culture - TechFlash: Seattle's Technology News Source

The place to find the hottest entrepreneurial work experience and full time roles.

"The place to find the hottest entrepreneurial work experience and full time roles."

could be a great place for Mindbox to find talent and cheap labor

"Startup 101" is a serialized book about the thrills and spills of starting a Web technology venture. It will be a regular feature in our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. Startup 101 is for first-time entrepreneurs who want to go through the whole startup life cycle - including raising money, building a valuable business, and making a lot of money by selling the venture or taking it public.

The best blog post ever

Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. I see startups who are on the road to implementing an idea, but haven’t figured out what problem it solves – the business plan waxes on about how great the product/tech is, but never gets around to defining the problem (investors call it the “solution looking for a problem” syndrome). A related red flag in a business plan is a missing competitive analysis section or “this product has no competition.” My reaction is, if there is no competition, then there is no market demand for your product, so why are you building it? Luckily, many startups are smart enough to keep morphing their idea until it finally fits a real-world problem, and they can move forward in the marketplace. Unfortunately they could have saved themselves much lost time, money, and heartache if they had just focused on identifying the problem before they built a solution.

article on managing a startup and growing rapidly adapting to what users want

Many founders believe that early stage startups are endeavors of execution. The customer is known, the product is known, and all we have to do is act. Eric takes a different approach. He believes that many early stage startups are labors of learning. The customer is unknown, the product is unknown, and startups must be built to learn.

Luknąć

risk management in business

Good reading material

The most common question entrepreneurs ask me, is “how can I improve my marketing with no or little money?” With this in mind, I asked for help from the TPE community and here is what I got… 115 ideas. Skim them or read them in detail, but whatever you do make sure you go through the list. Just one of these ideas may trigger a marketing opportunity that you never considered before. Just one of these ideas may take your business to a whole new level!

Most advice to entrepreneurs focuses on what they should do: build a great product, assemble a great team, provide great service. All are “duhisms.” Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs don’t realize that there are things they should specifically avoid doing too. These are also duhisms, but somehow no one ever talks about them. Here is my list of the twelve most important things that entrepreneurs should not do.

HT: Chuck Smith

VC blogs

top venture capitalist blogs. One of which is Guy Kawasaki

Before you launch your startup, you should be thinking about how you're going to make money. Here are 5 ways social media startups can bring in some cash.

Sigh. I think the mindless bookmarking of little lists masking at blog posts is pretty annoying, but I can't help doing it myself. Damnit. Here's one such article that contains some obvious, but practical advice for both start-ups and those seeking to work for them.

Good questions

Please do not take the term literally. Living on instant ramen would be very unhealthy. Rice and beans are a better source of food. Start by investing in a rice cooker, if you don't have one.

Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. This is a different form of profitability than startups have traditionally aimed for. Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it buys you time.

37 comments about having a business/startup

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good article on basic terms of a first round investment

My last 2 posts were about things to avoid, so I thought it might be helpful to follow up with something more positive. Having been part of or observed about 50 early stage deals, I have come to believe there is a clearly dominant set of deal terms. Here they are:

Interesting points about demos, pricing infrastructure, release schedules etc

here are some terms included below that are needed in larger deals and which aren’t absurd for VCs to ask for. So both documents are highly relevant. Start with the Y Combinator docs for your first early angel round, an

If you're an entrepreneur thinking about getting funding, this is a must-read. It outlines very fair guidelines for a first-round term sheet. Often, first-time entrepreneurs only concentrate on the big terms of a term sheet (e.g. round size, valuation) and neglect the "smaller" but often equally important things like stock preferences and triggers.

Now, a lot of people, including prominent angel investors and venture capitalists, are starting to listen to him. Tomorrow Ressi will announce a new, basic term sheet for use by investors and founders. The goal is to protect founders and reduce legal fees, which average $50,000 or more per venture round. (This is an excellent idea. "Free" at work.)

In doing so we discovered Customer Development, a product development methodology formulated by veteran entrepreneur Steve Blank. Based on the premise that start-ups tend to fail through lack of customers rather than lack of technology or product features, customer development is a systematic way of identifying who the customer is, what it is they need and whether that need is sufficient to build a business on. One of my co-founders describes it as ‘an algorithm for building products users want and are willing to pay for’.

The crucial question in the survey is “How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?” Sean has benchmarked the results of that survey and found that if less than 40% of respondents say “Very disappointed” then your product doesn’t yet have sufficient traction to scale.

A few months ago I was tipped off to world of Steve Blank and customer development. Simply put, if you’re an entrepreneur understanding these concepts will likely mean the difference between success and failure. Steve personally has taken five companies through this process to IPO. Not a bad track record. While there’s a ton of great stuff about customer development on the Web I wanted to gather up all of the resources and put them together in one place. I’ll update this post over time as I come across stuff (please add any additional resources you find in the comments so I can add them to the post) so bookmark it and check back from time to time (or just subscribe to the RSS feed).

Customer Development: The Definitive Resource w/tons of links

Good reading, follow up on it!

"This pattern — “success” based on forecasted future success instead of current success — shows up all over the tech-business press. Instead of metrics like “they make more money than they spend” we see stuff like “user count growth” and “followers” and “impressions” and “friends” and “visits” qualify success. Whenever you see someone piling big numbers into made up metrics, it’s a diversion."

This pattern — “success” based on forecasted future success instead of current success — shows up all over the tech-business press. Instead of metrics like “they make more money than they spend” we see stuff like “user count growth” and “followers” and “impressions” and “friends” and “visits” qualify success. Whenever you see someone piling big numbers into made up metrics, it’s a diversion.

This pattern — “success” based on forecasted future success instead of current success — shows up all over the tech-business press. Instead of metrics like “they make more money than they spend” we see stuff like “user count growth” and “followers” and “impressions” and “friends” and “visits” qualify success.

Comparar estadisticas de Hosting

Dyn

Includes details on web host, email, dns, registrar

Orrick's Start-Up Tool Kit is a comprehensive set of resources designed to aid start-ups and their founders on the journey from the "garage" to the global marketplace. Use our Start-Up Tool Kit to memorialize agreements with co-founders or potential investors, understand the terms and terminology of key legal documents, and network and learn business strategy and the latest industry news.

We want this wiki to reflect the collective wisdom of you, the start-up community, regarding business resources you found useful. As such we want to avoid companies promoting their own resources (albeit free ones) because it wouldn't be in line with the purpose of this wiki. However, if you have a few startups who have happily used your resources then encourage them to contribute to the wiki!

Business Resources for Startups As startups are notoriously short on time we thought what better way to maximise their productivity than by providing them with the most relevant business resources all in one place! Even better, why not ask the teams involved in the startups themselves to share their good experiences with resources they ACTUALLY used? Us folks at Seedcamp have included each resource with a list of start-ups that have found them useful. If a startup cannot back-up a resource it should not be included here. Companies that have contributed to this wiki include: Atomico Ventures, Entrip, HyperNumbers, Speedsell, Stupelix, TAG, Toksta, TV Pixie, uberVU, Yoose, Wasabi Ventures, Zoombu

This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. It is the first in a series of posts he's writing about the ...

From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.

experience Entrepreneurship from Meebo founder

Focus on your immediate resources to make something plausible working as fast as you can rather than waiting for something allegedly genial to grow by itself. It never happened and it will never happen.

Hilarious!

37 signals smartly mocks the new Twitter valuation and the hoopla surrounding it by valuing itself at $100 billion: http://j.mp/2yfvs [from http://twitter.com/JMaultasch/statuses/4367035641]

"you should see the spreadsheet models we’re making up. Really breakthrough stuff"

In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”

nice one

CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

Excellent article chock full of down-to-earth advice.

Despite the fact that the year isn't over yet, I have learned some valuable lessons that have helped me grow ...

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do.

"Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on"

When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard. We worked all waking hours, we didn't stop. My Hunch cofounder Chris Dixon and I were talking about how hard we worked on our first startups, his being Site Advisor, acquired by McAfee -- 14-18 hours a day. We agreed that a lot of what we then considered "working hard" was actually "freaking out". Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn't have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn't -- and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.

"Edison, of the "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" quote, tried thousands of materials looking for the right filament for the electric bulb. That might have been hard work, and the fact that he persisted through many failures is key to making something work, but he was also working on the right problem. So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard."

"So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard."

So true. I can think of a few people I think need to read this.

Some invaluable resources for anyone preparing to start their own business.

Is there such a thing as too founder friendly?

TheFunded.com: Complete Set of Founder Friendly Legal Docs

How much money to raise and what to do with it: using mint as a case study

In order to get that seed round, you'll need to understand your competition, and come up with projections. Everyone knows this will change...but you need to show your thinking around it anyway. As an example, MINT originally projected $30/user/year for lead-gen and CPA. (Aaron noted that the company is pretty close to this today. But this is the exception rather than the rule.) Know how the business model works. People do X behavior and it turns into $Y income, add up those $Ys and it's a $Z business. If you can walk people through these assumptions convincingly, you'll get that seed round.

The straight shot: Why should you raise money, and how much? * Step 1: When you're ready with an Idea: Raise $100K from friends and family, and use it to build a prototype. * Step 2: Once the prototype is done: Raise < $1M in seed capital, and get into market with an alpha launch. * Step 3: After that initial launch has traction: Raise $5-10M, and use it to prove/scale the model.

business

Last night I posted the video of Mint CEO Aaron Patzer’s 45 minute presentation on building startups from the ground up. If you are an aspiring startup entrepreneur, you’ll want to watch that more than a few times. The candid disclosures and advice he gives is rarely seen in Silicon Valley. Some readers requested to see the presentation deck as well, so here it is. Patzer shows how he raised and spent money, and generated revenue, throughout the lifecycle of Mint, from the very beginning to the $170 million acquisition. He also showed historical slides from early presentations to investors and compares those to the actual results.

Startups 101: The Complete Mint Presentation

Last night I posted the video of Mint CEO Aaron Patzer's 45 minute presentation on building startups from the ground up. If you ...

@newsycombinator: "Chile Wants Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses, Your Tech Entrepreneurs http://bit.ly/Jcm2n" (from http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/4762877839)

Looks like an awesome deal!

The world is rife with business opportunity, and nowhere more so than online. I often think of the web as something of a wild west frontier, awaiting anyone

shopping cart

The world is rife with business opportunity, and nowhere more so than online. I often think of the web as something of a wild west frontier, awaiting anyone intrepid enough to stake out a claim. But to start an online venture you first need to have an idea of what you want to do. For many would-be entrepreneurs ideas are many and easy to come by, but not everyone feels this way.

So let’s say I was setting out to start a new business tomorrow. I would sit down and think about what sorts of problems I have, both offline and on, and how I wish they could be fixed with an online solution. When thinking of solutions, I always ask myself whether I, myself would really use the solution if some other company magically brought it to market right now. It’s important to be honest and realistic with yourself because if you wouldn’t use the thing, chances are neither will others.

Founder diagnoses why his startup failed. Good comments on traffic business models

Who are your users and are they really useful/real users?

.

An article on the difficulties and surprises in starting a startup.

Really good ideas and facts about starting a startup.

What I can do!

As I was looking for bloggers to contact, I found some posts/articles that were extremely relevant to what I was doing. In other words, these are posts that people looking for a tool like mine would find and read.

Some useful stuff about blogger outreach

take it for what it is, a description of what I have done so far. Implement at your own risk! ;)

Startup Marketing Advice from Balsamiq Studio

Great marketing tips from Balsamiq, made much greater by the fact that his micro-startup has been awesomely successful.

Interesting

Stop wasting your time trying to find the right answer for your business questions. You’re not alone. We know you have business questions that need to be answered right now. That’s why we’ve put together a great team of Hosts composed of successful entrepreneurs, seasoned businesspeople, academics, advisors, and many more willing to give you a hand. Not only that, our community of users will be available to give you their best answer to any question you might have. With all these people ready to answer all your questions, it would be difficult to not find the answer to the business question that’s eating your brain. Don’t forget to give those that need help an answer, there’re plenty to go around, and more than likely you know the answer to a couple. At Startups.com you’ll find your business question answered within minutes. Useful answers, fast and free.

Advanced game theory is exceptionally useful. Basic game theory is dangerous — because it assumes that you’re dealing with a bunch of rational “players”. It’s like trying to design a real car that’s going to be driven on a theoretically frictionless surface, with no air resistance and no idiots on the road.

ory is exceptionally useful. Basic game theory is dangerous — because it assumes that you’re dealing with a bunch of rational “players”. It’s like trying to design a real car that’s going to be driven on a theoretically frictionless surface, with no air resistance and no idiots on the road.

"No amount of strategic planning will ever substitute for managing your cash flow" - "There are always more things to do than there is time to do them" - "It helps not to call people “human resources”. They’re people. And, as it turns out, people like to be treated like people. Go figure" - "There’s a lot of value to being likable" - "Advanced game theory is exceptionally useful. Basic game theory is dangerous — because it assumes that you’re dealing with a bunch of rational “players”.

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10 Essential Online Tools for Your Startup - http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/11/23/essential-online-tools-for-your-startup/

Tools interessanti per lavorare

We’ve gathered up 10 of what we feel are the most essential tools for your business to use when you’re first getting started online.

Listening to Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon, is like going to startup school where you learn that failure is part of entrepreneurial growth. Whenever I have talked to Bezos in the past, the things that have stuck in my head have been his willingness to be wrong and his unflinching abhorrence of the status quo. At the Wired Business Conference in New York City, Bezos reiterated some of those points in a conversation with writer Steven Levy.

Innovation is hard for large companies because you need to be long-term oriented. And since the innovative projects are such a tiny part of a large company, there is tendency to be dismissive of the innovation. “You need a culture that high-fives small and innovative ideas and senior executives [that] encourage ideas,” he said. In order for innovative ideas to bear fruit, companies need to be willing to “wait for 5-7 years, and most companies don’t take that time horizon.”

So here's my rule: The rule of 80%. For anyone selling on an incremental basis, set your break points that the per-unit costs of the new tier are 80% of the per-unit cost for the previous tier.

In just the last week, two different people have come to me to get feedback on their pricing. One was a startup selling a very sophisticated product to corporate enterprises. The other was selling consulting services to individuals, small businesses, and trade associations. In both cases, however, the questions were the same: how should I price this on a per-head basis? When should I charge a flat fee? How do I make sure I'm not leaving money on the table? How do I make sure I'm not losing customers?

Most advice to entrepreneurs focuses on what they should do: build a great product, assemble a great team, provide great service. All are “duhis

A wealth of resources for business owners — videos, articles, blogs, and expert advice to boost your business, sponsored by American Express OPEN.

Good article!

California

As part of the lead-up to our inaugural event this Thursday 15th October, The ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit, we're pleased to announce our list of the top 100 ...

The number one question you all asked after reading my last blog post about starting a business from scratch was how do I ...

Therapists don't tell you what to do. Rather, they ask probing questions that get you to discover for yourself what is true for you, your situation, and what you want. Similarly, these ten questions will force you to make the important decisions about your business. Ask them of yourself every month instead of writing a useless business plan.

The 100 companies below have been picked for their innovation and creativity over the past year in areas as diverse as mobile applications, racing games and music recognition. We list the top 10 and then&

In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key

e lead

Despite a worsening economy, some bootstrapped startups are witnessing tremendous growth, both in user participation and back-end development. Case in point, Tip'd, a four month old financial news ...

Despite a worsening economy, some bootstrapped startups are witnessing tremendous growth, both in user participation and back-end development. Case in point, Tip'd, a four month old financial news site which has seen its monthly traffic double, submissions almost triple, and its user base increase by an average of 60 new members every day. But what is it about this niche vertical site that has in such a short period of time grown to become one of the leading financial news sites on the Web? According to Muhammad Saleem, Tip'd's community director, there is no secret ingredient to success. Instead, it's about maintaining focus on community and continuously delivering tools to help them sort through the noise that has become an unfortunate side effect of today's information age.

Community Building 101 for the Bootstrapped Startup - ReadWriteWeb

Aggression and innovation wins. Period.

Why Yahoo gave up the ship and how Microsoft values different product lines

"The lesson for all startups–and BDC’s (big dumb companies)–is that innovation is all you have. Once you stop innovating you lose your talent and you lose the race. Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never. Never."

i wish i knew ;) - added by harper reed's google reader

Defer renting space

The use of social media as a business tool is a relatively new concept, but it is one that is allowing Gen-Y entrepreneurs to challenge established norms and leave their mark on the business world.

With 22.7% of 16-19 year olds unemployed and the financial and corporate landscape contracting right in front of them, the so-called Y Generation (Gen-Y) currently has the opportunity to take a strong hold on today’s business landscape. And it seems that they intend to. Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job and 70% of today’s high schoolers plan on starting their own companies.

8 Excellent Web Resources for Startups - Stepcase Lifehack - http://www.lifehack.org/articles/management/8-excellent-web-resources-for-startups.html

This guy works for aaron wall >>>>> One way I’ve found to cut down on support requests is to make sure I write publicly about any issue that keeps coming up for my customers. Other small companies contact me for advice fairly frequently, and that also tends to retread the same issues, so I’m going to blog it in depth once rather than giving fifteen people 30% of my thoughts on the same issue. One common issue is “How do I improve our SEO?”

Lots of good tips on marketing ISV and other stuff.

marketing internet

An utterly enthralling rant about the economics of the web, written 40,000 feet up in the air. "Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet."

password friction paypal login

ASSERTION #2: The default startup business model for 2010 & beyond will be subscriptions and transactions (e-commerce, digital goods). Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet.

(+ why Facebook, Google, & Apple will own your wallet by 2015)

I completely agree here with Steve's comments on what matters when measuring startups, and it's not balance sheets and income statements

Startups that are searching for a business model need to keep score differently than large companies that are executing a known business model. Yet most entrepreneurs and their VC’s make startups use financial models and spreadsheets that actually hinder their success.

to read

Inc: How Hard Could It Be? By Joel Spolsky

Good article on using blogs for marketing

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.inc.com%2Fmagazine%2F20100301%2Flets-take-this-offline.html

Joel on Software explains what makes a good blog (and why he's quitting)

Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail. This believe in your own inherent ability is what will kill your startup. Success comes from the work and ability you put in becoming better than the others, and not from some brilliance you feel you may have within you.

These are an even better idea than the Common Application for college.

open source term sheet templates and share contracts created by Marc Andreessen's company.

Open Source legal documents for startups from Andreesen Horowitz

Free templated – but flexible – legal documents for entrepreneurs to use for seed-stage deals.

Good advice.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1206649

Conversation and Empowerment, No one cares about your company. They’re into their journey. .....the most powerful way to do marketing in this day and age is to build ’social capital’. It’s a lot like Karma: do good and help others and it will come back to you.

Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp

great read RT @nickdemey @lizgannes - Case Studies in Freemium: Pandora, Dropbox, Evernote, Automattic and MailChimp - http://bit.ly/9w7ofE

Brainstorming / Mindmaps, Checking Domain Names, Prototyping user interfaces, Screen sharing, conferencing, feedback, Project Planning and Story/Task tracking, Usability testing, Cross-browser,email testing, Build and keep in contact with your following, Price-scalable hosting, Gathering feedback / market research.

for my non-profit idea...

using technoloyg

RT @davewiner: Twitter VC :there will be "sudden" changes and then we'll know what Twitter's business model is. :-) http://bit.ly/15lTiK [from http://twitter.com/rohitharsh/statuses/1267090367]

RT - Twitter VC Laughs at Idea that Twitter Has No Bus Model - ReadWriteWeb http://ff.im/-1hDCY. +++Some said that about Google early on. [from http://twitter.com/paulwalker/statuses/1266876050]

Todd Dagres, founder of Spark Capital and one of the VCs that poured an additional $35 million into Twitter recently, finds it amusing when people talk about Twitter's lack of a business model.

$ frm twttr VC says: "All of a sudden...some changes...won't undermine...but...pretty obvious how we...monetize it." http://is.gd/llEp [from http://twitter.com/DrIanFenwick/statuses/1292447685]

is it obvious? will those first to react to it be in a position to leverage it?

Dagres, who claims that Sparks and Union Square Ventures are the two biggest shareholders in Twitter, said that there is a business model - it just hasn't been implemented yet. But he did provide one clue. "All of a sudden there will be some changes that won't undermine the experience or the vitality -- but it will be pretty obvious how we're going to monetize it."

Reality Check #1: Do one thing well If your startup tries to do too much, you’ll lose. Guy told me, “I meet companies every day who say, ‘well we’re software services, and we’re also consulting. And we are a social networking site, but we also do white labeling in case you want to use our technology to do your own social network.’ And you know what, it’s hard to do any one of those things, try doing four.”

失敗する時

Last night, I attended an inspiring talk by Nick Hanauer of Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners. The venue was Seattle University, and the topic was

—If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks. —If people understand it, you’re too late. —If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks.

How to spot breakthrough ideas

As for social disruption, Hanauer gave a quick summary of what he meant: —If everyone thinks it’s a great idea, it probably sucks. —If people understand it, you’re too late. —If people don’t like it and don’t understand it, it probably still sucks. So entrepreneurship is a dangerous field, he said. “The difference between being an idiot and being a genius is very, very thin.” And keep in mind, he pointed out, “you can be very successful without being socially disruptive. Great fortunes have been made doing incremental things. Burger King, which came after McDonald’s, was not transformational, despite what they tell you…But they made a great fortune.”

Notes from a great presentation by Nick Hanauer, early investor in founder of aQuantitve, Amazon, Insitu (AUV) ... lots of insightful thoughts on quantifying disruptive technology, entrepreneurship, etc.

The key elements of a breakthrough idea, Hanauer said, are value creation and social disruption. “Value is difficult but possible to quantify—it’s the ratio of benefits to cost, divided by those of the alternatives,” he said. Benefits are things like a product’s durability, speed, and appeal

A collection of high-level tips for startup investor pitches, including Guy Kawasaki's 10 slides / in 20 minutes / with 30pt font rule.

How to Pitch to a VC or Angel

If people use it, it’s valuable

it was fascinating to be in the building during Twitter’s conception and then to read all of the ways that people misunderstood those early days.

"In 2006, [Tony Stubblebine] was the director of engineering at Odeo, a podcasting startup notable for birthing a side project now known as Twitter."

Why startup pitches fail

the stage of your business—for example, some businesses are just getting started with an idea, while others are printing money. Focus your pit

Pitches usually fail because they answer the wrong questions. The right questions depend on the stage of your business. post by Eric Ries, a founder of IMVU and an advisor to Kleiner Perkins.

f you move into a new space, the market normally takes as long as you do to mature enough to become really profitable. Keep your team focused, be patient, create value, test, test, test, and you'll get there. If your instincts are as good as you think they are, then it will come... if you can stick around long enough. Invest today.

"There is a fallacy that startups need to be super-secretive and then, when they launch, move very fast to capture the market. This is rarely true. Most startups would do well to study compound interest rather than market share."

Compound interest is about gains that are reinvested back into the asset base so that the next gain will be higher. The interest earns interest. The table below shows a new Web business at the very beginning, with only 100 wisdom points (a made-up term). The business is learning at a reasonable rate, with 10% growth in its useful knowledge each month. And, as you can see, its monthly growth in real units is growing; this is the compound interest. You get the idea.

First-Mover Advantage Is About Compound Interest, Not Market Share

Interesting: Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned; http://bit.ly/9mh00x

Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned http://slidesha.re/cToICU

Viewing: Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned http://bit.ly/duFZXu - a great presentation by founder/CEO @drewhouston

fun stuff

In this new landscape, people who would never think to call themselves “entrepreneurs” are out there starting businesses, selling products, and turning profits.

It’s time to get over the idea that risk and reward are so intertwined in business. And maybe we need to come up with a better term than entrepreneur to describe this new group of people out there building businesses. Any suggestions?

I just finished a talk at Web 2.0 Expo titled From Zero to a Million Users with Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox. It's about what we wish we had known years ago when it comes to growing your user base from 1 to 1M users. We had a lot of fun with it. The slides are below! From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned View more presentations from Adam Smith.

Great stuff RT @SeanEllis @drewhouston & @asmith share keys to the kingdom for getting 1st 1m users for Dropbox & Xobni http://bit.ly/aPjMRi

scaling lessons?

web 2.0 start up challenges, dropbox and xobni

The lower the CEO salary, the more likely it is to succeed. The CEO’s salary sets a cap for everyone else. If it is set at a high level, you end up burning a whole lot more money. It aligns his interest with the equity holders. But [beyond that], it goes to whether the mission of the company is to build something new or just collect paychecks. In practice we have found that if you only ask one question, ask that.

In a long-ranging discussion today at TechCrunch50, investor Peter Thiel (PayPal, Facebook, Slide) gave his thoughts on what is the best predictor of startup success. At the Founder’s Fund, one of the most important factors he likes to look at before deciding to invest in a startup is how much the CEO is paying himself. (This is also a factor that one of his investments, YouNoodle, looks at to value private startups). Says Thiel: The lower the CEO salary, the more likely it is to succeed. The CEO’s salary sets a cap for everyone else. If it is set at a high level, you end up burning a whole lot more money. It aligns his interest with the equity holders. But [beyond that], it goes to whether the mission of the company is to build something new or just collect paychecks. In practice we have found that if you only ask one question, ask that.

see title

Tweet Tweet Boom Boom A new generation of tech entrepreneurs in the city is trying to overthrow old media and build a better New York—with the help of their iPhones. Are they dreaming? Definitely. But in a good way

Dina Kaplan '93 mentioned in later part of the article

Mentions Dina Kaplan '93

looks like it's worth a skim

Go to a party for an “old” media company, and there can often seem to be a cloud of doom hanging over the proceedings. It can seem like half the guests have been laid off and the other half fear they still could be. The talk is of cutbacks and making do with less and paradigm shifts whose conclusions are, inevitably, the death of the industry.

Advice on why you should launch softly.

Too bad. You don’t need a big bang – slow evolution is what you want. Unless you absolutely must “open wide,” abandon the mass introduction strategy. Instead, launch softly.

Description des étapes du lancement de Mahalo Answers

Terrific post by Jason Calacanis on launching product

20090327 Online streaming music startups are in one very sorry place. On demand streaming rates range from .4 cents to 1 cent per stream - this is what the startups pay to the labels every time they play a song for a user. Add bandwidth and storage costs on top of that, which aren’t trivial for services that want to stream music quickly on demand. The result is hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from venture funds to startups to labels. Little of it makes its way to artists, and advertising revenues only cover a tiny portion of the fees.

"Online streaming music startups are in one very sorry place. On demand streaming rates range from .4 cents to 1 cent per stream - this is what the startups pay to the labels every time they play a song for a user. Add bandwidth and storage costs on top of that, which aren’t trivial for services that want to stream music quickly on demand. The result is hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from venture funds to startups to labels."

Online streaming music startups are in one very sorry place

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here. Google the phrase

Do you have a unique service or product? Most entrepreneurs have a pocketful of ideas, many of them viable. But they suffer from the "kid in a candy store" dilemma, not knowing which to choose. The trick is choosing the one that really is a winner and having the discipline (see item #9) to ignore all the others.

good bullet points on the common challenges facing the freemium model.

YouSendIt

RT @igrigorik great read on freemium models / patterns for startups: http://tinyurl.com/d5a5xs [from http://twitter.com/nealrichter/statuses/1575106507]

Starting a business isn't as crazy and risky as they say - Blog -

Startups, small business, marketing, and useful geekery from someone who's been there: Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software

Almost immediately following Twitter coming back from a planned downtime this afternoon, co-founder and current Chairman Jack Dorsey sent out a tweet letting ...

May 8, 2009 | TechCrunch | by MG Siegler

What's Next: Twitter Inventor Launching His Next Project, Squirrel. http://bit.ly/d7DxX [from http://twitter.com/shawnroos/statuses/1761502136]

It’s a service that allows anyone with an iPhone to become a merchant. Just like the wireless credit card swipers you see at certain shops and restaurants, you can carry around your iPhone and take payments. Apparently, the idea is that this will allow any individual to take credit card payments on a mobile device, kind of like what PayPal does for the web.

Transaction function tied to iPhone - gets power from the swipe!

RT @TLW3: Nuts: Twitter Inventor About To Launch His Next Project, Code ... http://tinyurl.com/qnkfgs [from http://twitter.com/KeithDriscoll/statuses/1743053678]

Schmidt says "Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man's email systems". Has he missed something?

Sergey Brin: "In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don't have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?

ツンデレ >Schmidt also plugged Google's new Twitter account

This is a subject near and dear to entrepreneurs, maybe the dearest subject of them all. Founders start out with 100% of the company and every time they raise capital and/or issue stock and options to their management team, that number goes down.

A common refrain for people thinking up business ideas is that all the good ideas have already been done. Finding an established competitor is not necessarily cause to quit on the spot. Here are six potential strategies on how you might go about taking on an entrenched competitor.

"As the cost of starting a Web company decreases, thanks to cloud computing services and technology that entrepreneurs can rent instead of buy, many founders can finance a new company without the help of venture capitalists, using their savings, money from family and friends and credit card debt, Mr. Hendershott writes. More often, they are choosing to sell small, immature companies instead of taking the longer, riskier path of developing a business that could one day go public. That makes venture capital less relevant."

Interesting read for startups

Do Web Entrepreneurs Still Need Venture Capitalists? - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com http://bit.ly/cvc1i [from http://twitter.com/robinklein/statuses/1825392377]

ＷＥＢで入力していくと起業アイデアを絞りこめるサービス

Visual worksheet for startups. Document and communicate your business model #startdo

zappos culture

"social experiments"

Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?

Why I Sold Zappos Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?

1. Does the CEO know what to do? One should interpret this question as broadly as possible. Does the CEO know what to do in all matters all of the time? This includes matters of personnel, matters of financing, matters of product strategy, matters of goal sizing, matters of marketing. At a macro level, does the CEO set the right strategy for the company and know its implications in every detail of the company? I evaluate two distinct facets of knowing what to do: Strategy—At Andreessen Horowitz, we like to say that in good companies, the story and the strategy are the same thing. As a result, the proper output of all the strategic work is the story. Decision making—At the detailed level, the output of knowing what to do is the speed and quality of the CEO’s decisions.

The folks at Behance and Cool Hunting asked me to talk at their 99% Conference a couple months ago. The 99% conference is aimed at creative professionals and is focused on Edison's "99% perspiration." And in the spirit of how...

You probably should watch @avc talk about 10 ways to be your own boss: http://bit.ly/aEz2jV and follow him.

2) Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you don’t actually control.

product

Earlier this year, I had a chance to attend SxSW. One of the highlights of my trip was a startup dinner which included Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of 37signals. At the time, they had just come out with their new book "Rework". I had downloaded a copy to my Kindle, but hadn't had a chance to read it yet. Now I have. Twice. It's a great book. Lots of practical advice for entrepreneurs. I highly recommend it. My second time through, I decided to pull out some of my favorite parts. onstartups rework You're encouraged to share your favorite insight by using the convenient "tweet" links next to each one. 37 "Signals" From 37 Signals

Very, very smart way to get retweets back to a particular page. He excerpted chunks from "Rework" and added pre-made "Tweet" links next to it. Need to add some CTA on the page and you have a winner

RT @openofficespace: RT @JasonSpector: Why did so many successful entrepreneurs & start-ups come out of PayPal? Answered by Insiders - h ...

RT @hackernewsbot: Why did so many successful startups come out of PayPal? Answered by Insiders... http://bit.ly/9uRk73

First comment is the best.

Job interviews are meant to be conversations. The interviewer asks some questions and the interviewee does the same. It’s never a good sign when an interviewee doesn’t have any questions. It shows a lack of interest. This is particularly true when interviewing for a startup job because there tend to be so many more unknowns at startups compared to more established, bigger organizations.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1442546

«What are the startup’s plans for the next 6-12 months? What are the key metrics for success in the next 6-12 months? What’s the competition like?»

This post was originally part of my “Ask the Attorney” series which I am writing for VentureBeat (one of the most popular websites for entrepreneurs). Below is a longer, more comprehensive version — with ten mistakes, instead of six. Question My buddy and I are coding up a new site and we will be ready to launch the beta in about a month. We have a couple of angel investors who are interested, and we don’t want to screw anything up. What are the biggest mistakes that you’ve seen guys like us make? Answer

This post was originally part of my “Ask the Attorney” series which I am writing for VentureBeat (one of the most popular websites for entrepreneurs).  Below is a longer, more comprehensive version — with ten mistakes, instead of six.

A simpler bank that is easy to use. A bank that treats you with respect. No extraneous features. No hidden fees.

Neue Bank ???

via: http://ma.tt/2010/05/banksimple/

Un excelente conjunto de consejos para los emprendedores

"10 Inspiring TED Talks for Startups" ( http://bit.ly/bdCLet )

10 Inspiring TED Talks for Startups @ http://bit.ly/9nFvgo | via @karmona – zohar urian (zoharu) http://twitter.com/zoharu/statuses/18522921522

I've written up the following directions to help you get there efficiently. Don't do it all in one sitting because you want your mind to digest the concepts over time. I suggest doing it over the course one week, setting aside a half an hour each day to go through this stuff.

Great walk-through of term sheets for startups

Great resource page for all founders interested in dealterms

I've written up the following directions to help you get there efficiently. Don't do it all in one sitting because you want your mind to digest the concepts over time. I suggest doing it over the course one week, setting aside a half an hour each day to go through this stuff.

Great walk-through of term sheets for startups

Great resource page for all founders interested in dealterms

vc suster