Sat.Mar 20, 2010 - Fri.Mar 26, 2010

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Viral Marketing Costs Real Money These Days

Startup Professionals Musings

Every time I see a business plan with little or no budget for marketing, I get the answer that they will be using “viral” marketing, which costs nothing. The founder explains that the product is so “buzz-worthy” that usage will spread rapidly through word-of-mouth only, meaning people loving it and recommending it to their friends. First of all, Seth Godin pointed out a couple of years ago that viral marketing does not equal word-of-mouth.

Viral 141
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Speed up or slow down? (for Harvard Business Review)

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, March 25, 2010 Speed up or slow down? (for Harvard Business Review) Over at Harvard Business Review, Ive been building up a series designed to introduce the Lean Startup methodology to a business-focused audience. This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development.

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5 thoughts for small business on delivering efficiency

crowdSPRING Blog

In his book “ The Goal ,&# Eliyahu Goldratt tells the story of a Boy Scout troop out for a hike. The goal of the hike is to cover 10 miles in 5 hours, in other words to keep the troop moving at an average speed of 2 miles per hour. As the troop works its way up the trail, gaps begin to appear between the scouts, and the slower hikers find that periodically they must go double-time to shrink the gaps.

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What SXSWi Attendees Can Learn From SXSW Music

Austin Startup

Last week, as the technorati returned home from their working spring breaks in Austin for SXSW Interactive, the backlash began almost immediately. It started with Jolie O’Dell’s post , smartly entitled “Why SXSW Sucks.” It quickly followed with the predictable back and forth , and many reporters and attendees said that this year’s SXSWi was too big, too crowded, and too overtly sponsored.

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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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Don’t Let Founder’s Syndrome Kill Your Startup

Startup Professionals Musings

A few years ago I was intimately involved with a promising startup that ultimately failed, in my opinion due to a clear case of Founder’s Syndrome. I’ll be short on specifics here, to protect the guilty, but I hope you get the idea. It’s not a disease, but it can kill your startup You can find a more complete discussion of Founder’s Syndrome on Wikipedia , but here are a few of the “symptoms” I observed in the Founder and CEO in this case: Reacts defensively and talks constantly.

Startup 131
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Fog Creek Compensation

www.joelonsoftware.com

File a CV and let the great jobs come to you! Wanted: High Frequency Performance Operations Specialist at Two Sigma Investments (New York, New York United States). See this and other great job listings on the jobs page. Joel on Software Fog Creek Compensation by Joel Spolsky Wednesday, August 30, 2000 At Fog Creek Software, the way we make sure that people are paid fairly and rewarded for excellent work is based on a professional ladder.

More Trending

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I Will Review Your Website for Free

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Recent Podcast Appearances Startup Website Reviews – Episode 1: Reviewing CrmInnovation.com → I Will Review Your Website for Free Micropreneurship , Startups If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

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How Much Should You Pay For a Great Domain Name?

Startup Professionals Musings

I’m sure you have all been frustrated at least once at not being able to get the Internet domain name you want for your company. Who owns all of these names, and should you ever buy one for a premium? The simple answer is that if you want to be found and remembered on the Web, a great domain name will be well worth several thousand dollars. Snagging an unclaimed great one is almost impossible these days because domain "squatters" gobbled up a lot of the catchy real estate years ago.

Naming 122
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Should Your Startup Give Performance-Based Warrants?

Both Sides of the Table

This is part of my ongoing series on Startup Advice. Large companies can be strange sometimes. As startup entrepreneurs we all want to work with them because having their name as reference clients makes it so much easier for marketing, PR, selling to other customers, fund raising and even recruiting. Plus, we’re all allured by the false sense that our contract with BigCo is going to “make us&# because once they start using us it will spread like wildfire and the revenue will flow i

Warrant 298
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The (ongoing) evolution of an industry

crowdSPRING Blog

Everyone knows that the music industry is struggling, right? Pirating, reduced concert ticket sales, and fair use issues have combined to send record company execs scurrying for solutions and scrambling to figure out new revenue streams. NPR’s On The Media (with our friend Bob Garfield) recently devoted an entire episode to a great discussion of the issues and challenges swirling around our beloved music biz.

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Startup Website Reviews – Episode 1: Reviewing CrmInnovation.com

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← I Will Review Your Website for Free Startup Website Reviews – Episode 2: HowsThe.com → Startup Website Reviews – Episode 1: Reviewing CrmInnovation.com Website Reviews If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place.

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Update on America’s Slipping Global Competitiveness– Implications for Intellectual Property Development of Senate Bill 515

Pascal's View

This morning I gave the keynote speech at the ICAP Ocean Tomo IP auction in San Francisco. My remarks explained the relationship between the long-term decline in America’s global competitiveness, the impact of the capital markets crisis on new investment in research and development, and specifically addressed Senate Bill 515 , the pending U.S. legislation that will transform the U.S. patent system and broadly impact intellectual property rights in our country.

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Next-gen BPO

deal architect

I was part of a panel at the Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON) conference in Orlando this week, moderated by Prof. Anthony Hesketh from Lancaster University Management School. Tiger Tyagarajan, COO of Genpact, George A. Price Jr. sell-side analyst. Tags: Outsourcing (Business Process - BPO).

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A butterfly flaps its wings and you make a sale

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It's easy to be taken in by the idea of the Butterfly Effect : That a butterfly gently flapping its wings in the jungles of Madagascar can indirectly cause a Typhoon off the coast of Jakarta. Or, updating for modern-day relevancy, Naomi Dunford pounds a curse word into a Wordpress and Brian Clark makes $172. Or Dave McClure releases a silent-but-deadly outside a Menlo Park Starbucks and a social media company gets funded in Boston.

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Recent Podcast Appearances

Software By Rob

Software by Rob Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs Lessons Learned by a Serial Entrepreneur home about press micropreneurs archives ← Paying the Price of Success I Will Review Your Website for Free → Recent Podcast Appearances Micropreneurship If youre trying grow your startup youve come to the right place. Join nearly 6,000 startup entrepreneurs by subscribing to my RSS feed.

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6 Tips for Building Relationships with Journalists

Both Sides of the Table

File this under both Startup Adivce and Sales & Marketing Advice. I was over at Robert Scoble’s blog Sunday night reading about the “ Death of the Great Startup Launch.&# I’m not 100% sure that I understood his core thesis but I *think* it was that startup events such as Demo force such a zone of secrecy about what you’re working on (with a threat of being kicked out of the event for leaking your story) that they kill the ability for most companies to dazzle people

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The new normal in telecom

deal architect

I led a lively session at the Cognizant Community in Phoenix with Deb Lucas of Comcast and Thomas Knight of AT&T. I used 2 slides (extract below) to summarize all the innovation and challenges around telecomms showcased in my upcoming. Tags: Telecommunications.

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Find the Business Model for Your Aspiration

Startup Professionals Musings

You are an aspiring entrepreneur, eager to dump the corporate grind, and work to the beat of your own drummer, but you can’t come up with that killer idea to save the world. What are the alternatives that will give you the independence you crave, and challenge your business acumen? Technically, I believe an entrepreneur is anyone who manages his own profit and loss, and doesn’t meet the government tax definition of an employee.

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The Problem with Talking to VCs

Genuine VC

I had coffee with an entrepreneur friend the other day who is in the early stages of putting a company together, and he recounted how his informal conversations with a venture capitalist had quickly escalated into a full partner pitch in just a few weeks. That situation sounds very positive in theory, but the problem is that this founder wasn’t ready for this interest and is trying to play catch up in other capital raising discussions (with both angels and VCs).

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Hint To Startups – Use Your Domain In Your Email Address

Feld Thoughts

On a daily basis, I get an email from someone at a seed-stage startup where their email address does not include their website URL. For example, I just got an email from joesmith@gmail.com for his company CoolThing. I wouldn’t have thought of this except for I’m deep in the proofreading of a book that David Cohen and I are editing called “The Tao of TechStars.

Email 131
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How to make the best out of an investor meeting (and how to see my free times with Tungle.me)

This is going to be BIG.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting with a ton of early stage startups. Most times, the entrepreneurs are great, the ideas are sometimes hit and miss, but the biggest variance is their ability to effectively run a meeting. I’m not talking about having a great pitch—because sometimes a pitch isn’t what a particular style of meeting really calls for.

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What if Microsoft Created The iPod?

crowdSPRING Blog

Most people agree that great design more easily captures attention than poor design. For example, when Apple originally released the iPod – the iPod didn’t have the features of the Creative Labs MP3 players, or even the Microsoft Zune. In fact, many MP3 players today have more features than the iPod – but only a tiny fraction of the iPod’s market share.

Design 109
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The Problem with Talking to VCs

Genuine VC

I had coffee with an entrepreneur friend the other day who is in the early stages of putting a company together, and he recounted how his informal conversations with a venture capitalist had quickly escalated into a full partner pitch in just a few weeks. That situation sounds very positive in theory, but the problem is that this founder wasn’t ready for this interest and is trying to play catch up in other capital raising discussions (with both angels and VCs).

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Rework is Brilliant

Feld Thoughts

I just read Rework , the new book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals. It’s fantastic. If you are starting a business, or thinking about starting a business, or running a business, or breathing air, this is a book you should read. There are an endless array of “startup books” to choose from. Most suck. Many are ego trips for successful entrepreneurs.

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The new era of venture capital

VC Adventure

You already know the about the state of the venture capital industry in 2009: venture investing down (32%), exits down (14%; slowest exit year for VC backed companies since 1995), fundraising down (56%), IPO’s almost non-existent (8 venture backed IPOs in 2009). It’s a bleak picture for the industry overall, even if there’s a group of us that continue to believe this is a great market in which to be investing (and it clearly is).

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What if Microsoft Created The iPod?

crowdSPRING Blog

Most people agree that great design more easily captures attention than poor design. For example, when Apple originally released the iPod – the iPod didn’t have the features of the Creative Labs MP3 players, or even the Microsoft Zune. In fact, many MP3 players today have more features than the iPod – but only a tiny fraction of the iPod’s market share.

Design 109
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Can Your Blog Explain Its Purpose In One Second?

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

This is potentially one of the most important questions you need to ask yourself as a blogger, and yet is where I see pretty much every blogger go wrong. I’ve even had trouble with this myself over the years each time I redesign my blog. The challenge, when coming up with a blog design, is to ensure your blog conveys a message about why it exists.

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Boulder Fiber Forever Flash Mob Sunday at 3pm

Feld Thoughts

The Boulder Fiber Forever project to bring Google’s 1 Gbps fiber network to Boulder is having a flash mob at the Walnut Brewery (1123 Walnut Street) today (Sunday) from 3pm – 6pm. Come join us, but first go to Boulderfiber.com and add your support for the effort. Then, head over the the Walnut Brewery between 3pm and 6pm, mention Boulderfiber, and get pints of some of the best beer in Boulder for $2.25.

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Expertise is hands on

Start Up Blog

The word expert gets thrown around lot. Everyone’s an expert these days, especially in the technology and media arena. My view on expertise: Without implementation expertise is just an idea, and ideas are omnipresent. Tags: entrepreneurship action Advertising entrepreneurs expertise experts implementation internet media social media startups strategy tactics.

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Social Media ROI Is Meaningless If Your Product Or Service Isn’t Relevant

crowdSPRING Blog

Many are obsessed with trying to develop effective ways to measure ROI (return on investment) from social media marketing. For some background, you can read Brian Solis’s recent article about measuring social media ROI. ROI from social media is important, but if your product or service isn’t relevant – ROI is meaningless. Here’s why: Do you believe that relevancy is as important as ROI?

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Why some smart people don’t help other people?

Life Beyond Code

Most smart people are capable of helping other people. Some of them do and some of them don’t. People are happy with those people that help and people resent those that don’t help. I have had many people share their frustration from people who have not gotten a response to their request for someone smart. They complain that it would have just taken “five minutes&# for this expert to help them but the expert “chose&# to not help.

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Boulder Startup Week – May 4 – 8, 2010

Feld Thoughts

Andrew Hyde has decided to organize another Boulder Startup Week on May 4 – 8, 2010. Tons of folks are already committed to host events including Trada , Pivotal Labs , Everlater , QuickLeft , TechStars , Napkin Labs , and SurveyGizmo. The Boulder New Tech Meetup and Ignite Boulder is also happening that week. It’s free – register now and mark it on Plancast.

Boston 117
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A Good Book for Integrating Business with Life

Up and Running

The only thing that bothers me about this book at all is that it shouldn’t be so unusual that a book combines business with life, suggesting that we ought not to pull those two forces apart. Amazon.com: Life Entrepreneurs. ISBN : 0787988626. ISBN-13 : 9780787988623. One of the co-authors, Christopher Gergen, gave me this book after I visited his class at Duke in January.

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Social Media ROI Is Meaningless If Your Product Or Service Isn’t Relevant

crowdSPRING Blog

Many are obsessed with trying to develop effective ways to measure ROI (return on investment) from social media marketing. For some background, you can read Brian Solis’s recent article about measuring social media ROI. ROI from social media is important, but if your product or service isn’t relevant – ROI is meaningless. Here’s why: Do you believe that relevancy is as important as ROI?

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Resting on Your Laurels?

Life Beyond Code

When you were first learning to walk, it was a treat for all the members in your family. Your took one step, tripped, fell down but you didn’t give up. You fell down many many times but nobody ever screamed at you for falling down. One day, you stood again, took one step, wobbled and somehow you had the courage to take another step and soon voila – you were taking one step after the other.

Restful 66
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TechStars Seattle Applications Are Now Open

Feld Thoughts

Last night we had the TechStars Boulder selection meeting where we chose the TechStars Boulder finalists. We’ll be notifying folks shortly. In the mean time, we’ve opened applications for TechStars Seattle. Andy Sack, who runs the TechStars Seattle program, has several great blog posts up including How TechStars came to Seattle? and Help me spread the word on TechStars Seattle applications.

Seattle 113