A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 11, 2010

Q: You’ve stated that the goal of both your new book ( Web Startup Success Guide ) and your new tool for entrepreneurs ( StartupToDo ) is to double an entrepreneur's chance at success: Increase from 10% to 20%. Here’s the third: Few startups (let alone Digital Entrepreneurs) have more money than time. Zappos) matter far more.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2011

For example, I talked to an entrepreneur with years of experience selling a standard medical device to doctors. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Another way your experience can hamper you is that selling different products into the same industry is different.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 12, 2011

Five quick pointers on startup hiring and Disagreeing with Entrepreneur Magazine by Dharmesh Shah — Assorted tips, all important. You already live by this Code of Turmoil because you’re the entrepreneur; you have no choice. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Tweet. -->.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2013

But this also produces a natural weakness , and when I look at what made me a successful entrepreneur — not just a great coder — it’s that I acknowledged and overcame that weakness. The weakness is your love of creation. You love to write clean, tested, scalable, extensible, beautiful code.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 4, 2018

It’s the heroin-hit that hooks the entrepreneur. (The And now, with Silver Lake’s investment and support, we can accelerate our growth investing even more into our strategic roadmap, and placing some new bets on ideas we’ve had but haven’t been able to find the space to explore. The next sale isn’t quite as sweet.).

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Get your butt in the field, and you won’t have to ask those two questions. Add your advice to the discussion section !

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 27, 2012

This is a guest post by Sacha Greif – a designer and entrepreneur who recently sold thousands of copies of a self-published eBook that shows how to design a user interface step by step. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Let’s widen the perspective: add your ideas and questions on value-pricing and value-selling to the comments.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders. Jake Lodwick wrote an article on PandoDaily entitled “An acquisition is always a failure.”

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 12, 2010

Listening to first-time entrepreneurs talk about their competitive advantages is as predictably invalid as the local weatherman's 10-day forecast. This is part 1 of the series: 5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches. Between this blog and reviewing applications to Capital Factory I see hundreds of pitches a year.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 13, 2011

she also authors a terrific blog aimed at the solo entrepreneur.). Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Don’t you realize I’m just sore from losing the Pecha Kucha competition to him?)). Many people credit Mint’s smash success with their terrific design.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 29, 2011

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Let’s continue giving ideas and stories in the comments about saving (or not saving) problematic customers, how you identify them, and when this advice is applicable. Tweet. -->. If you liked that, you'll probably like these too: Tech Support *is* sales.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 4, 2011

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Are you still exposing a number of emails not equal to one? What are you waiting for? Let’s continue the discussion in the comments.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 5, 2011

The goal of the entrepreneur is not to be “right.” Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. But that doesn't mean as an entrepreneur you're allowed to just ignore critics either. You’ll be right much more often than wrong. Congratulations.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 25, 2012

Oh and absolutely don’t talk to other entrepreneurs or advisors who can and surely will copy your idea. Help out your fellow entrepreneurs an add more wisdom in the comments. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Their meager feedback isn’t worth the risk!

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 9, 2011

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. All I’ve done is send a not-very-clever email to some affiliate marketer who has heard far worse a hundred times. It’s nothing. Nothing to them, but a lot to me.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 26, 2013

A long-winded but high-quality study from Columbia Business School ( Life after Exit ) interviewed 22 entrepreneurs and every one of them experienced this effect. This is not only a normal feeling, it’s by far the majority case.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 18, 2011

This is the dark side of free market capitalism , and something I hope you as a thoughtful entrepreneur will eschew. With all this opportunity to make boatloads of money while also improving the world — even if just a little bit — we entrepreneurs shouldn’t allow ourselves to dip into this meaningless, useless behavior.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 21, 2012

2011: Naked Business – How Honesty makes Money 2010: From Geek to Entrepreneur – Sifting through the B t I’ll be staying from the previous night to the last day, so if you come, be sure to find me and we’ll talk! Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 28, 2011

On the other side of this radio interview are Adelaide Lancaster and Amy Abrams , both founders of their own startups, both coaches and mentors to dozens of other startups over the years, and who together created and still run the In Good Company co-working space for women entrepreneurs in New York City.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 15, 2011

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. I wish I had spent more time reading and weighing the pros and cons of various philosophies instead of just jumping in and doing what I thought was morally and financially sensible. Let’s collect more in the comments !

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 18, 2010

Ah yes, the awe-inspiring words of confidence from the seasoned entrepreneur. I'm just waiting for the day they see through the façade, but they keep coming back every year." -- Jason Young. My friend Jason intended this as soothing words of solace during (one of my) periods of personal freak-out while Smart Bear was in its infancy.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

6 Simple Selling Tips For Software Entrepreneurs [link] (from OnStartups). 6 Simple Selling Tips For Software Entrepreneurs. US Economic Risks (Sept 2010): Impact on Investors & Entrepreneurs [link]. US Economic Risks (Sept 2010): Impact on Investors & Entrepreneurs | Both Sides of the Table.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 11, 2010

Does 37signals have over three million users because their software is "better" than the competition, or is it because they motivate designers and entrepreneurs through their writing and philosophy? Does Apple win the hearts (yes, hearts ) of millions because of their obsession with design or because of their development APIs?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 16, 2010

Michael Arrington wrote an interesting piece today at TechCrunch about how VCs are pissed that great entrepreneurs are taking under $500k of angel money instead of $2m their money. He believes that angel investors are pushing entrepreneurs to think small, and avoid the home run swings. Champion of the dipshits.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 23, 2011

This guest-post was written by Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo of AppSumo.com , the daily deals site for web entrepreneurs. In fact the more entrepreneurs I talk to the more I’ve found that this is not just common but practically required. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 1, 2012

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. I knew you could do it. At least, after you built it today, I then had known you would do it tomorrow.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 21, 2009

Related posts: Sacrifice your health for your startup Put down the compiler until you learn why they're not buying Rude Q&A Underbelly: What haughty startup bloggers don't tell you Uncommon Interview: Bob Walsh, Digital Entrepreneur.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 29, 2013

An entrepreneur confided in me recently that he didn’t like Lean Startup; did I think that was OK? Or is he not cut out to build a startup?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 9, 2012

It’s why an entrepreneur is often a serial entrepreneur. Back to work… Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. What could DHH do that would surpass the thrill of creating Rails or hitting the New York Times best-seller list? What if there isn’t a next thing?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

DECEMBER 14, 2009

But later she quotes a successful entrepreneur who admits "We operated with no real plan for years" and "Things don't generally go as planned.". What do other entrepreneurs say? From Venture Hacks , a great blog written by entrepreneurs-turned-VCs: "Don't send a business plan to investors. But enough from me.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 1, 2011

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. If you noticed that Bob didn’t get enough chance to speak last time — and when he did it was insightful and useful — we’ve got that fixed this time with Patrick and I physically separated and an internal chat session between us.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 4, 2012

But it is difficult to ask, and that’s one of the things that, as an entrepreneur, you have to sort of get over the hurdle that you have to get over. You just find other local entrepreneurs that you can just meet with once a month. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

For the entrepreneur, there’s no secret. Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Even so, venture capital has a horrible record in the past ten years — most funds don’t make good money. Still, enough do, and a small subset are able to do it consistently.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 15, 2012

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Be sure to visit Jason’s blog at asmartbear.com for more episodes, and if you would like to ask a question of Jason in a future Smart Bear Live, please register at smartbearlive.com.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 26, 2011

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Wednesday, Sept. 28th at 7PM in San Francisco. 55% off general admission with code “55OFF.” ” (Powered by LaunchBit ). Tweet. -->. Startup Weekend pep talk: It ain’t the code.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

SEPTEMBER 12, 2011

Sign up for AppSumo 's daily deals specifically for web geeks & entrepreneurs. Plus, if you have feedback and advice for the companies on the call, or feedback for me about the show itself, please leave a note in the comments ! Tweet. -->. If you liked that, you'll probably like these too: Special Edition: Smart Bear Live!

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