Steve Jobs on Marketing the iPod Touch

September 14, 2009

It makes me feel better about my own marketing efforts to read that Steve Jobs and Apple had trouble with the initial marketing of the iPod Touch: “Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Gruber on Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline

August 19, 2009

There are quite a few arguments (in each direction) in the Mac vs PC debate, but I think this quote from John Gruber sums it up perfectly: People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think [...]

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 [...]

Entrepreneurs Can Change The World

May 15, 2009

I saw this video on Frank Gruber’s blog and had to re-post it here. Definitely worth watching and thinking about.

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 [...]

How to Resolve a MobileMe Sync Issue

December 29, 2008

I’ve had my iPhone for about 5 months now, but only recently I decided to subscribe to MobileMe and try over the air syncing of my contacts and calendar data. Unfortunately, after following Apple’s instructions, I could not get it to work. My Mac would sync with MobileMe and vice versa, but MobileMe would not [...]