Startups

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Lessons From a Failed Startup: The Overview

June 1, 2008

Many say you learn more from your failures than your successes. I believe this to be absolutely true in business as well as most other aspects of life. And you can also learn quite a bit from the stories of failures from others. So, as promised when I announced that my company was shutting down, [...]

The advantages of being a student entrepreneur

April 18, 2008

The other day I had the opportunity to have coffee with a student entrepreneur from Virginia Tech. This is the second such meeting in a month and I hope it’s a sign of future trends. Over the past two semesters, I’ve met with three entrepreneurs, all at the end stages of their undergraduate education, and [...]

Colorado trip and the startup community in Boulder

March 31, 2008

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently spent ten days in Colorado both looking for a place to live and attending a few events. It was an exhausting trip, but we made a lot of progress on all fronts. Unfortunately, I was sick immediately following my return and have been playing catch up [...]

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