StartupCamp5
StartupCamp5 will be taking place at ITExpo Feb 1-3 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. I’ve attended the past four ITExpo’s and StartupCamps, but won’t be at this one. Feeling a bit wistful as so many people I know are heading that way. ITExpo is a good show – particularly strong for hosted service providers [...]
Startup Business Growing Pains | Staying Focused
There are a few good things in life that you can never have too much of, and at a startup business that good thing is growth. However, we all know there is always a price to pay for overindulgence. To my way of thinking, the key to being a glutton is to balance your consumption [...]
Don’t Confuse Signifiers and Substance
When it comes to startups, its easy to confuse signifiers and substance. The truth is hard to know, especially with early stage companies. If you don’t have a product or customers, it’s hard to have substance. Yet whether you’re a startup or investor, you’d be wise to focus on substance rather than signifiers. Not because [...]
10 Marketing Lessons for Early-Stage Tech Startups
I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. I have adopted the motto “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.“ We need to learn from doing, by trial-and-error. If I can help you avoid some [...]
Holy Sh@#! Did You See What That Program Does!!!!!!
Have you ever worked for a startup? A successful startup? Have you ever seen the excitement in a startup meeting, hackathon, or other event were an idea starts to come to fruition! When the users of the startup’s application finally see it and start getting excited? Have you seen when people get so excited because [...]
Nothing Matters But Traction
Nothing matters but traction. It makes everything easy, but it is the hardest to accomplish.Too many entrepreneurs focus on working around a lack of traction when they would be better off using that energy to get traction.A common occurrence is that an…
If you don’t have time to explain, you’re not decisive, you’re unfocused
One of my pet peeves when it comes to management is when someone tells me, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to explain.” When that happens, I think that person has been watching too many action movies. If you’re on the run from a secret government conspiracy, you probably don’t have time to explain [...]
Sell Used Music on Redigi: A Threat to Apple’s iTunes?
I remember a time when the only way to buy music was to drive down to the local music store and purchase a cassette tape. You had to buy the whole album then. Yes, I’m serious. When the tape got old or the music fell out of favor I threw it away, listed in the [...]
InnoPrise – Call for Startups
Two words you don’t see so often together are innovation and enterprise. Innovation is often associated with young upstarts that intend to disrupt the established order – better, faster, cheaper. Enterprise conjures images of large organizations that were, at one time, innovative upstarts. But we know that is not true. Large enterprise organizations can be [...]
Impatience Kills Startups
We live today in am impatient world. In many ways, that’s good. We’re unwilling to wait for the world to change; instead we go out and change it. But this impatience has a cost. People tend to view startups these days as overnight successes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most successful startups had [...]
What Internet Startups Can Learn From Comics And Porn Stars
It’s no secret that media businesses have struggled with monetization in the Internet era. Journalism, for example, is famously in free-fall. But all the hand-wringing conceals a simple fact: There is a very successful model that has been around for decades, and it still works today. All we have to do is learn from porn [...]
SaaS Startup Strategy – Three SaaS Sales Models
Choosing the right go-to-market sales model for your SaaS startup can be a make it or break it decision. Choose right and you grow smoothly from seed funding to A round to B round and beyond. Choose wrong and you spend precious cycles chasing your tail as cash runs out. While most B2B SaaS startups [...]
The Real Seed Of A Startup Is A Need
With all due respect to the genius that is Jessica Hagy and Indexed, the seed of a startup is *NOT* cheap technology, disgruntled workers, and an anemic economy. While that portion of the Venn diagram represents the ideal soil for starting a company, the real seed of a startup is a need. Every successful startup [...]
Observations on my own Startup
Starting a company is a hard thing to do, you will make mistakes, you will have wins, and you will have your good days and your bad days. Over the last year I have been working on my startup to take it to the next level, crossing the 40,000 a year gross line might seem [...]
