Startups

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 [...]

Closing EvolvePoint and FeedCraft

February 22, 2008

Last month I announced to all our FeedCraft customers that EvolvePoint would be shutting down the service. I’ll be writing more about why I think the product did not become as successful as planned; but regardless of the reasons, the economic realities made the decision inevitable. I founded EvolvePoint in 2004 initially performing management and [...]

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