From the category archives:

Startups

Study Shows Self-Employed Most Happy in Their Occupation

September 18, 2009

Two recent articles report that business owners and the self-employed are the most happy in their occupations. The results are from a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index poll data.
The findings, psychologists say, reflect the importance of being free to choose the work you do and how you do it, the way you manage your time, and the [...]

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Lean Startup Dinner with Eric Ries

August 20, 2009

Last night I attended the Lean Startup Dinner with Eric Ries hosted by TechStars. If you’re not familiar, Eric writes the Lessons Learned blog and actively promotes ideas for running lean startups based on his experiences.
I’m particularly fond of the minimum viable product (MVP) concept and have been using that from the beginning with my [...]

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Lessons Learned from a Screencast Business

August 20, 2009

Geoffrey Grosenbach runs a company called PeepCode Screencasts that produces outstanding screencasts for learning a variety of programming topics mainly around Ruby on Rails. I’ve purchased a bunch of them and they’ve all been fantastic learning tools.
Recently he posted a transcript of a presentation he gave on the lessons learned from three years of running [...]

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How Do You Prefer Web Startups Communicate?

July 13, 2009

I’m in the process of launching a new product and with a clean slate I’ve started to re-examine all my processes.
One communication aspect I feel the need to visit is how users of a service prefer to stay informed about developments and news. Specifically, I’m talking about new features and updates.
While there are many options, [...]

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Boxed Ice on Running a Successful Beta

April 24, 2009

Boxed Ice, creators of Server Density, wrote up a nicely detailed post on how to run a successful beta program for a web application.
Knowing when to release a product is difficult. The maxim “release early, release often” certainly applies but that has to be balanced against making sure you have a minimum viable product and [...]

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How Social Media Really Works

April 5, 2009

Great thoughts on building your products from A Whole Lotta Nothing:
So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the [...]

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Startup Revival Plans to Archive Failed Companies

January 30, 2009

Startup Revival is a recently launched site that is attempting to catalogue failed startup companies so all entrepreneurs can learn from their mistakes. I love the concept and they recently added my story of EvolvePoint’s failure.
Do you have a company with a great foundation, but it just didn’t work? Or do you have an idea [...]

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More ways to kill your business

August 28, 2008

I’ve been trying to write about the lessons learned from the failure of my last company (albeit quite slowly) and I read a post this morning from Mike McDerment of FreshBooks that covers some similar topics.
His post is titled 7 ways I’ve almost killed FreshBooks and I can second every single point he makes. Luckily for FreshBooks, [...]

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Lessons From a Failed Startup: Create Administration Tools Early

July 3, 2008

The lessons learned from the failure of my company are going to be in no particular order, so I decided to start with one that I’m already applying to my next project – creating admin tools as early as possible.
With FeedCraft, we took the approach of getting the application launched as quickly as possible with [...]

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The formula for building web applications

June 30, 2008

I read this article on Mashable (via Fred Wilson’s tweet) and had to post this quote on building web applications:
Determine a basic need -> Create a service that satisfies it in the simplest way possible -> Open it up.
It sounds simple, but it’s not; determining a basic human need, like the need to share photos [...]

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