Entrepreneurship

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Identifying your passions for success

June 4, 2008

I woke up on my birthday this past Saturday morning and thought about the day ahead. What did I want to do today? I think it says a lot about where your passions lie, when on a day you can legitimately do most anything you want (a birthday and a Saturday), on how you plan [...]

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 [...]

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