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by on March 15, 2012 in Opinion, Wisdom

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“A lot of folks just like you build these great offices, lure people like me in, and then wind up getting jobs as architects working for someone else. Sometimes, what we thought were office buildings ended up being exhibits in someone’s portfolio, whether deliberately or by happenstance.”

Translation: don’t build up websites, lure users, and then let them linger in limbo when you get bought out by a bigger competitor.

Applies to: Posterous, Oink, FriendFeed, and any startup that milked free users for all their worth before departing to greener pastures.

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‘Pain is Everywhere’

by on January 4, 2012 in Wisdom

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Here’s Seth Godin, once again hitting the nail on the head:

The truth is that pain is everywhere, in every project and in every relationship and in every job. Wandering from one to another merely wastes your energy.

Embrace pain. Accept that you’ll never be too big, too rich, too famous or too powerful to escape it.

"If I just get a little bigger, a little more famous, a little richer–then the pain will go away."

This notion creates a cycle of dissatisfaction, an unwillingness to stick it out. There’s always a pain-free gig right around the corner, so screw this, let’s go try that.

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‘Imagination and Practicality’

by on January 4, 2012 in Wisdom

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Ben Yoskovitz on the necessity of imagination, and its counterbalance, practicality:

It seems to me that startup founders need a healthy dose and mixture of both imagination and practicality. One without the other makes you an incomplete founder and leader.

This is a reiteration of something every startup founder knows: you either need to have two contradictory skillsets in order to succeed, or you need to find a partner who posses skills diametrically opposite to yours. Two engineers with little experience with design or marketing is a bad combination, as is two business majors or one founder donning the hats of the designer, business guy, and programmer. Imagination needs to be counterbalanced by reality; hardcore engineering skills need the counterweight of practical marketing and/or an eye for good design.

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‘Incubators are a Ghetto’

by on January 4, 2012 in Wisdom

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Andrew Clay on startup incubators:

There has been an explosion of incubators in the last few years. Most of them suck. Some suck so bad that the net value created by the program is probably negative.

And some advice to founders

If you are a founder looking at a program that hasn’t had at least 50% of the previous companies funded, you might reconsider the options. If you can go to YC, Techstars or 500 startups, you should. I would. You’ll learn things and get a tiny bit of money, but the connections you make to the network of founders and mentors is what will make all the difference

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How to Build a Twitter App That Makes $500/Month

by on January 2, 2012 in Wisdom

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I love refreshingly honest posts like these. Tom Buck is a British programmer living in Poland, and he’s taken the time out to open the kimono and walk through the process of creating, failing, and re-creating a *successful* Twitter app that pulls in $500/month ($1000/month, as per a new post). It’s not a lot of money, but for many part-time programmers with not too ambitious ideas, it can translate into an extra $10k per year.

The post is split into two parts, where Part I deals with the genesis of the idea, the execution, the failure and the subsequent resentment, and the eventual resurrection of the project. Part II has more dozes of happiness as Tom figures out the marketing puzzle and revs up the revenues into top gear.

This isn’t the kind of story that will make you sit up in bed at night with adrenaline surging through your veins, but it is true and not clouded with the braggadocio most startup founders are used to. A worthy read.

Part I | Part II

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TIL: Most Startups Are Actually Multiple Businesses

by on December 20, 2011 in Wisdom

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When startups are really multiple businesses

So many times I’ve encountered fresh startup ideas from entrepreneurial types that incorporate multiple businesses in their pitch.  Most people don’t even realize that that’s what they’re trying to do. They just combine ideas, trying to find something that will be unique, or will save them money, but it ends up being more than can be reasonably handled.

Not a revolutionary thought, but something most non-MBAs might not be familiar with (I certainly wasn’t). And it further strengthens the case for getting at least another co-founder on board with a different set of skills than yours. Write code? Wonderful. Get a designer to complement you. And if you can get someone with hardcore marketing chops, you’ll do awesome.

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“Nothing Works Better Than Just Improving Your Product” – Joel Spollsky

by on December 19, 2011 in Wisdom

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tumblr_lveeyh1bRO1qz6pqio1_500 Via: StartupQuote.com

Context:

Joel Spollsky Interview at “Founders at Work”

The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. Every minute, every developer hour we spent on any one of these crazy things—although they had some marginal return on the work that we put into them—was nothing compared to just making a better version of the product and releasing it. If we had taken all the effort we put into these crazy schemes and put it into moving our software development schedule ahead by the equivalent amount, it would have paid off much more.

An in-depth, very education interview with Joel Spollsky who ran his company, Fog Creek Software, through the dark and turbulent post-bubble days in 2000 to profitability without taking a penny in outside investment. That Fog Creek has been a massive hit would be an understatement; besides its core products such as Trello, WebPutty, FogBugz, etc., it is also the publisher behind the perennially popular StackExchange.

There are more than a few things you can learn from Joel. Treating programmers like rockstars isn’t the only one of them.

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One More Reason to Not Be a Dominating CEO: Mike Suster Will Hate Your Guts

by on December 19, 2011 in Wisdom

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donald_trump Ah, the dominating, arrogant, self-obsessed aholes of the world, you get no respite, do you?

Your self-entitled, pompous, domineering self was unfit for a 9 to 5 job, so you hitched a ride on the startup train, seeing how it was apparently overrun by the egotists of the world.

And now you hear from 2x entrepreneur, prominent VC, and largely a Person-Who-is-Right, Mark Suster, that you probably should let your team talk a little too. What a bummer.

What occasionally happens is the CEO introduces his team giving a brief overview of who everybody is. I hate this. I want to hear everybody speak – to get to know the team. What purpose could there be to having the CEO talk on behalf of everybody?

Another thought you can put squarely in the ‘makes sense’ category. There is no other reason why you would want lug around a bunch of team members to a VC meeting if you didn’t intend for them to speak at all. And “Straight from the horse’s mouth” always sounds better than “Shot from the Jockey’s lips” (whatever that might mean).

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“Write the Site You Want to Read”– Dan Frommer on Being a Better Blogger

by on December 17, 2011 in Opinion, Wisdom

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dan-looking-like-zach-galifinakis

Dan Frommer just about sums up the kind of tech blogger I would like to eventually evolve into (and I’m still evolving, by the way). Perhaps I was living under a rock (I wasn’t), but I wasn’t aware of SplatF’s existence until two weeks ago. I have no excuses to offer other than my own ignorance.

I’ve been digging through the SplatF archives over the past two weeks, and while there are more than a few gems I would like to link to and talk about here, this one – on being a better blogger – stands out, mostly because I’m slow and it’s in list form, and because it contains my quote of the week: “Write the site you want to read”.

Frommer’s list doesn’t offer anything you didn’t already know about being a good blogger, but it doesn’t offer anything you should not know about being a better blogger either.

1. Above all else, factual accuracy and attention to detail. That’s the easiest and best way to build and maintain trust over the long-term. If a fact is wrong, fix it and don’t be shy about it. If an opinion or prediction is wrong, learn from it and consider explaining how you got it wrong.

This is probably the right approach, lest the neckbeard trolls desecrate your 2,000 word blog post with links to Wikipedia and ‘learn to read, asshole’ in the comments.

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Simple Gamification Through Badges: Here’s How Scirra.com Did It

by on December 16, 2011 in Wisdom

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gamification

Gamification is an easy (read: cheap) way to get people to visit your site more than once. It’s cheesy and won’t win you any new friends, but it will also ensure that the few people who actually do visit your site will come back for more. And when you are competing with 1 billion other startups, that extra bit of traction can go a long way.

Scirra.com went through a gamification makeover recently, largely through the use of badges and reputation counters – the standard gamification mechanism on the interwebs popularized by FourSquare and the likes of Badgeville and Bunchball. Considering that Scirra makes a downloadable software – Construct 2 – for making games, it was apt that it went through a gamification exercise itself. In this post, Scirra developer Tom Gullen shares how they did it.

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