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Building a business April 12, 2007

I am constantly forming and revising my list of business fundamentals. I consider it part of my continuing education to become a better team member and leader. Many of my ideas are formed from observing what works and what does not work in my current job, but there is asignificant portion of my learning that comes from everday events and reading.

Today I was reflecting with a coworker about business models. We both agreed that the bootstrap method is by far our preferred method to start a business. You eliminate so much risk by building your business on a small scale and proving the validity of your idea before you expand.

If you plan to build a big company out of the gate that may have to survive for several years with no profits, you really better the perfect planner and leader. Any little mistake can be fatal if your are not bringing in enough revenue to sustain the business. If you have to go back to investors again and again for capital before your business is profitable, it sure is a long road. Not my style. I am not risk adverse, I just prefer the easy road.

2007 Shamrock Shuffle March 25, 2007

I ran the Shamrock Shuffle today. I knew going in that this was not going to be like the last two years. I had improved my time both of the previous years but this run was slower. A lot slower. About 5 minutes slower in a 5 mile race. I played my first game of ultimate for the season yesterday and I was pretty sore from it. I cant give it up though. All in all, a fun day out and I kind of took it easy to prevent injury. In the end, I ran under 40 minutes and that is all I really wanted.

Turning Projects into Businesses March 17, 2007

Turning Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses

Ted Rheingold Top Dog, Dogster Inc
Tara Hunt CoFounder & CMO, Citizen Agency
Gabe Rivera CEO, Techmeme
Shanalyn Victor Owner/Designer, Pixelgirl Shop
Ryan Carson Dir, Carson Systems

Ted chose slow growth, to a 14 person
* look up techmeme.com by Gabe Rivera *
it is more like a restaurant or dentist than a new media thing
Dogster more like a magazine
all about visitors else not worth it
direct ad sales on sites like vampiregirls.com, is hard to do. must be established

selling sponsorship is a lump sum anual thing that saves a lot of work, is less about impressions and more about branding and feel.

Selling goods

look up jonathan coulton, songs

deviant art.com sells prints of anyones photos

Selling services

laughing squid web hosting
find your purpose
organize conferences

Subscriptions

get rid of adds on a site, like a feature
seling flowers as virtual gifts, like flowers, or dog treats
or asking for tips or micro payments
sell virtual gifts for sites at high values, $1, 5, 10, 50, 250 and lets those be reflected in the content to show the consumers

many of the speakers started free sites and had to pay for hosting bills
good accounting is essential
invest a lot of money in marketing

Spend 50% of your time selling yourself or you will fail!

getting your name out there is really important when you are small
Be part of the community you serve, like Izzy is doing. Can we interact with kids differently?

How do you determine the pricing?
What is it worth to you and your business? Value of your time and fixed costs
What will the market bear? What do your competitors sell for? Alternative products.

Failing hard and fast is cheap. Fail hard, fast, and often.
Don’t spend more than you can afford to lose

No exit strategies
Read E-myth why a lot of small businesses fail

Carson’s staff work 4 days a week, paid full salary

Q: “What were the strategies you used to polularize your site in the early days”
“Dogster is so silly, it is almost really hard talking ’seriously’ about it”

People love free stuff (loss leader)
*research “the well”

Everyone wants their own social network, why recreate the wheel? Go to the community
(this includes businesses)

Dont forget to trademark. Do your patent

Intellectual property theft. how do you protect yourself? make your site better than anyone else and they will come to you
Send fake cease and desist and they will usually stop

Payroll is one of the most expensive things you can do. dont do it until you have to. Dont get VC money unless you ahve to. Use contractors until you have to.

Ten Ways to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan March 16, 2007

Kevin Hale Co-Founder, Infinity Box Inc.

Kahn was a horrible person, bad-ass. Here are the lessons applied to business:
1. Be as nomadic as possible. Do not be sedentary

Nomad

mobile
efficient
offensive
hunters
protein

Sedentary

carbohydrates
defensive
gatherers

2. Long cold winters, short summers
subsist on very little, able to deal with harsh conditions
able to fight in conditions that played to their advantage. Movement on frozen ground, low food for their enemies

to translate: create difficult environments for competitors
be prepared for hard times in advance,

3. Loot efficiently
What is the profit per X? For Mongols the formula was what is the quantity of loot per mongol?
THis was done by stripping away complexity. First, evacuate each new city, then loot without resistance, then have accountants quantify and divide evenly between mongols

strip away complexity from your business. Measure carefully what you make, so that you know what works and what to improve

4. Say no to infantry
Europeans had lots of different classes of soldiers, cavalry, infantry, archers, etc.

Mongols used much smaller, faster horses that ate less and could go further. Had backup horses for each person to keep trading off rides and they never got tired. English used large thoroughbreds

5. Propaganda: scribes wrote parchment proclaiming the greatness of Kahn, in war, they chanted and drummed to scare opposition in advance. Then used flag (silent) signals to initiate attacks. Scary.
At some points, mongols would seem to flee. THey would turn and run. Often opposition would break ranks and chase mongols for hours. Then Mongols would turn and regroup and pick the strung out opposition off.

Get the propaganda on your side in advance. Blog, sneak peaks, translate the break rank strategy to your competitors.

6. Do not fight by the oppositions rules.
Mongols would try hard to avoid fighting in accepted ways
Built walls around castles. Out-waited people inside castles

Google changed the rules
Southwest airlines, changed the hierarchy of air travel

7. Separate people with skills and take them. Appropriate the best people for your war machine. Not technologies, but people who can improve technologies. Resourceful people can overcome lack of resources

8. Build bridges
No arts, no culture, but they did build bridges to connect the continent and their strategic partners

The speaker put a everything he came across on his blog and formed a lot of resources based on it.

10. When you are small and fragile, stay focused, do not spread too thin. Remember, what is your profit per X? Do not stray to far.

Business requirements for modern web apps.

The 3 minimum levels of complexity for modern web apps.

Requirements
1. Base level, no frills
the minimum, stripped down, just the content.
For: mobile, non compliant browsers

2. Dress it up
simple branding
simple interactivity
cross browser compatible
some flash
straight forward css

3. Fancy
responsive interface
predictive data delivery (ajax)
customizable interfaces
to hide data on a page, position absolute -999 left, rather than display = none because screen readers will ignore display = none.
Clicking on a button can change the position to relative or static

3 levels of service, only coded once.

You can do this with DOM models
getElementByID
getElementByTagName
innerHTML (only if required, last choice)

What detracts from user experience?
Auto-scrolling can distract users
interaction on one part of a page affects another part of a page (confuses users)
expanding lists can get too long, try to solve with better logic