Startup Life

Five areas have been getting me thinking about startup opportunities lately:

Creating value from public content.

Stocktwits is aggregating and providing analytics on tweets about stocks. Major brands have dozens of tools for measuring sentiment, mindshare, and more from brand mentions in almost any online context. With thousands of posts per second to twitter alone talking about products, media, events, websites, politicians, and more… what other opportunities are there to index, analyze, and create value from publicly-posted content?

Life improvement.

Whether the goal is making more money, finding new friends, or just feeling good about your self, everyone has personal … [Read the rest »]

Two years ago, when I wrote a post-mortem for News Armada, I was an overly-ambitious first-time entrepreneur, chasing dreams of venture funding and changing the world on my first time up to bat. I learned two important lessons from that experience:

1. Momentum is everything. Lost momentum isn’t just missed opportunity, it’s a weight that slows your startup down.
2. Value before revenue. Don’t spend all your time working on a plan to generate revenue from a community / product before you’ve proven that it provides enough value to people that they’re willing to use / pay for it. Market traction first,

One of the realities of working on a startup part-time (boot-strapping with consulting & other work to pay the bills) is that you must chip away at things. The caffeine-fueled all-night development sprints you read about are the rare exceptions, that come at a heavy cost to your health and productivity over the next couple of days.

Be As Smart With Time as You Are With Money

One of the best time-management strategies I’ve learned is to divide projects into two categories: those I need long-term focus on, and those I can work on on-and-off. A free 6-hour chunk of … [Read the rest »]

One of the maxims of startup life is “Eat your own dog food,” meaning use your products / services yourself, so you know what it’s like for the customer. I’d like to add to that: Before your start eating your own dog food, make sure you’ve eaten a lot of your competitors’. We all start with the idea that we’re going to build something better than what our competitors are offering, but too often we miss out that there are at least some reasons why people continue to gobble down that disgusting gruel, and it might not be just because … [Read the rest »]