For entrepreneurs, the "team" is of utmost importance. As uber-tweeter Dave McClure has pointed out out in his many presentations, including the not-so-tasteful ones, the team is the secret sauce.
The product might be killer, the market might be huge, the timing might be perfect, but without the "team" it will be an uphill battle for cash, customers and cachet.
And while attending the FutureM Bootcamp Marketing last week, I heard one of the best presentations on design I have ever heard. Leslie Bradshaw of Jess3 gave a slide presentation that simply blew me away. Now I'll admit that I cried at the end of E.T. so maybe making me emotional isn't so difficult, but if anyone could have shown me that slide presentation in 2001 when LandAndFarm.com was a free listing service maybe I would have bought Loopnet.com instead of selling to them, er, probably not, but who knows?
And her point, which I asked her about from the audience was my own naive question, "Are you serious that you should have a designer as a co-founder of your start-up?" And her answer was an emphatic yes.
And so I was having lunch with a developer/friend who builds mobile apps for brands like Tribe Hummus and we got to talking about our next startups. I pitched my two ideas for local cash-register-based loyalty systems for the smallest stores and car-based social networking and he pitched back his idea for an enterprise level location-based content platform for enterprises.
And we both agreed that the missing 3rd person was a designer. And then the realization struck that even though I've got some street cred from selling my company and I have a pretty strong understanding of UX and he has some major mojo/guru tech skills because he can whip up mobile apps like I can scramble eggs, a real designer (and I mean a UI/UX whiz with artistic talents) who has some tech knowledge would be a goldmine for our team.
And how much would that person be worth? Answer: a lot.
And how much would that person charge? Not enough.
So this is my prediction: soon we are going to see some status inflation among the best designers. Like Michael Lewis so correctly described in the Blind Side, the left tackle evolved when it's value protecting the quarterback emerged. The designer is the left tackle of start-ups. And maybe the analogy isn't perfect. The designer isn't really in the background, the designer isn't hidden, her work is right on the front page. But it seems the designer is still regarded as something you outsource, something you can "do later." But in our visually active world, where "engagement" and "interaction" are so important, the dedicated designer who doesn't write code, doesn't market, doesn't sell and doesn't deal with the numbers, but can talk with all those folks, is like a keystone for a team.
And there are some superstar designers. Those who are "in the know" already agree with this and have already stopped reading my blog post and are probably giggling that I'm just now figuring this out, but what can I do?
In terms of value, the designer is now where the left tackle was when Bill Walsh and the 49ers were coming into their own. There was a blog post by Ryan Junee that valued engineers in a start at between $1 million and $2 million. There will be a time and it may be soon when the designers and the UI gurus and the UX whizzes will be valued similarly and perhaps even more.
Because isn't design as important as anything else? Hasn't Apple proven that design is elemental in importance?
I remember buying my first iPod nano and thinking how beautiful it was, forgetting that it was just a device to suck my cash out through itunes. It really fit in my hand beautifully. It was sleek and easy to dial, even easier than my phone at the time. I was impressed. And then looking at competing MP3 players that had nearly the same look and feel as theWalkman from 20 years early, only smaller, well, we know who bought what.
So my next startup I hope to have a designer on board and I will be lucky to have one. Until then, my presentations will still be sucky and be in powerpoint. I deserve what I get.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Waking up in the new world order of entrepreneurship
Skip,
I know by now you are thinking I'm a bit crazy as a loon, but it's all part of my learning curve as I try to get a grip on everything that's happened on the web in the last four years. I feel like I've been asleep and when I went to sleep it was "The web" and all you had to do was build a great site and drive traffic and put advertising on it and have great customer service and you'd make money. And that was the case and that's what I did with landandfarm.com and I sold it and made a little money and gave most of that away to my ex-wife, the government and my brother, in that order.
Everything was changed when I "woke up" 6 weeks ago when I realized that I had to get a job or start a company and it was not "the web". I don't know what "the web" is anymore. There is the "social network". There is the "web of physical things". There is the "mobile web". Al Gore's joke about inventing the internet is ancient history. Like, REALLY. ANCIENT. HISTORY. This is a world where your local doctor doesn't even have a smart phone, but the drop-out punk on the street corner panhandling is the Foursquare Mayor of the most expensive eatery in Davis Square. There is the world where rural Realtors(tm) whom I taught how to use AOL email now have automated twitter spam-bots that send out property listings to 100 different social networks automatically every night. I sometimes wonder if some of those brokers are dead and their web services continue to operate automatically, forever spewing out discounted lot deals onto the free social web services, blocked and filtered at every end-point and thus never being traced back to their origin to discover that Elber Potts, connected-Realtor(tm), died of a coronary in his garage in 2009 while fixing his riding lawnmower.
Everything changed. The local dog groomer no longer needs to buy Adwords because Yelp is all she needs for marketing. The local coffee shop owner has 15,000 followers on Twitter (and doesn't have even 500 real customers) while the local convenience store sells flash drives at the counter. The wine store has a SCVNGR QR code on the front door and an automated Group-on, Twilio-enabled phone messaging system so that you can pre-order Kazakh brandy before it shows up in product marketing on Entourage and watch it on your mobile device as it leaves Astana, tracked by an RFID chip and heads to you, arriving in 3 months (estimated) and the bottle of brandy has it's own fan-page on Facebook with 3,000 "likes" and if the brandy doesn't arrive before the new season of Entourage starts the case will be automatically auctioned on eBay and the funds converted to Farmville currency which the liquor store will buy from you and give you back two cases of your favorite beer.
I have had so many ideas, a new one every few minutes it seems as I've been doing a crash course on the "new web" that I feel like my brain will explode, spewing bits of meta tags and html anchor links around my home-office. and these ideas are so revolutionary that I am high like I've had cough syrup in a cup of espresso for hours after as I furiously research each one. And each idea I have, when googled, reveals a University professor in the UK who has a free version running that he and his class built in 1989 that's still running on the university mainframe and has it's own Facebook page with 100,000 "likes". And there's a venture back seed fund around the technology and everyone not only knows all about it, they are all onto the next big thing. And the new services I think of and the new ideas I have aren't really so new. They are old. Old, like more than 12 months old. Old, like more than 5 months old. The phrase "that's so last year" fits well and the tween version "that's so 5 seconds ago" isn't so ironic; it's actually quite unnerving.
For years, I was ignoring folks who were trying to tell me about twitter and facebook and social networking and I was asleep and arrogant, thinking that I knew what was what. I knew how to make money on the web. My customers paid me REAL. CASH. MONEY. And it flowed in like a broken ATM machine. I was well-off, I traveled to Asia, to Europe. People returned my calls. But I had nothing really to stay since I was being deaf to the changing world. And so I stopped calling and so nobody called back. I was basking in the glory of my successfully exited 8 year old startup. Hah. EIGHT. YEARS. OLD. It's like a bad joke. My startup was built in VBScript, using my knowledge of Applesoft basic, which I learned in 1981 on an Apple ][+ computer in my parents basement. My sell-by date is so in the past, it's rubbed completely off and is unreadable. Now startups aren't startups past 6 months. Twitter is 4 years old. FOUR. That's younger than my kid. My child is out of date. My future children will be born out of date. Who the fuck can keep up with what's going on? AND. I. THINK. ALL. CAPS. WITH. A. PERIOD. IS. GOING. TO. DRIVE. ME. INSANE. AND. I CANT. STOP. DOING. IT.
Web design, as well, has changed. It used to be all tables and easy shit. Now it's CSS and XHTML and object-oriented, DOM model AJAX enabled bullshit that I can't understand. And by the time you read this there will be some new, awesome standard that allows more connectivity, probably with time travel so it will be out of date before it's developed.
I built one of the first blogging sites (diarypro - failure) and one of the first rent payment systems (electricrent - failure) and bought and dis-improved an early social network (bloty.com - failure) and bought and fucked up an early photo sharing site (xaqa.com - failure) finally hit it small with a property listing service. But now I can barely hack out how to link my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts in a way that won't make me look like a noob. I spent 20 minutes recently trying to undo a style change I made to my Twitter page that made the links the same color as the background so I couldn't actually see them. And I have a blogging site or rather I have about twenty because I keep registering at various sites like blogger and tumblr and myspace and I can't remember which is which and if I should have a personal blog and a business blog so that the content doesn't get mixed up or two personal ones, one for my friends and one for my family or maybe three personal ones so I can separate my friends who knew me when I was young and carefree and those that know me now or four personal sites so I can be friends with all my ex-girlfriends and keep them from my awesome current girlfriend who doesn't want my exes sending me flowers on facebook and who may or may not still have a thing for me even though I'm pretty sure they all are married and have kids and have 5,000 followers on Twitter and have crowd-sourced their own blog page design so it looks totally awesome and feels all web 3.0.
I feel like I'm so late to the party that the hosts cleaned up, got older, had kids, left town and sold the house to a developer who tore it down and put up a condo development that's half-built, half-sold and sitting abandoned at the end of a cul-de-sac in a gated community and when I come by with my bottle of wine to give to the host, I'm greeted with a QR Code that I can scan for loyalty points that can be redeemed when I visit the next open house and after I download the real estate developer QR code reader app I have to register and while I'm trying to enter the same password i use for EVERY. SINGLE. SITE. I drop the bottle of wine and then drop my phone into the puddle of broken glass an wine and cut my hand trying to fish it out.
And holy shit there are SO. MANY. STARTUPS. It used to take balls and gumption and a fearless desire to work for yourself to start your own company. Now it's a required course at the local community college. And to make my brain sizzle and burn at the edges just a little more some much-more-successful-than-me entrepreneur started 500startups.com which is jammed packed full of awesomely design hot hot hot super api-enabled, networked sites with twit/face-linkage a-go-go and seed-round funding and A and B round funding and Omega/Zeta/Tau round funding and a board full of people who sold their first web startups in 1965 and repeated that feat every year until last week when they won the "80 under 80" lifetime achievement award for entrepreneurial achievement from the Never Heard of It Foundation Of Super Successful Folks in Warm Weather Climates. And I should know who these people are. And I don't.
Starting-up is now a viral phenomenon. Everyone has a startup. Because every blog is essentially a publishing startup. Every twitter account is a mobile startup. Everything is a startup. You can get seed round funding for choosing the right hashtag and going viral with a video-enabled tweet.
In 2006, Twitter launched. 2006! Can you believe it? My youngest son is older than that!
And this entire rant was supposed to be the pre-amble to describe what I want to do with hyper-local marketing and propose a new start-up using some of the new technology that's out there, but I'm a bit fried....
I know by now you are thinking I'm a bit crazy as a loon, but it's all part of my learning curve as I try to get a grip on everything that's happened on the web in the last four years. I feel like I've been asleep and when I went to sleep it was "The web" and all you had to do was build a great site and drive traffic and put advertising on it and have great customer service and you'd make money. And that was the case and that's what I did with landandfarm.com and I sold it and made a little money and gave most of that away to my ex-wife, the government and my brother, in that order.
Everything was changed when I "woke up" 6 weeks ago when I realized that I had to get a job or start a company and it was not "the web". I don't know what "the web" is anymore. There is the "social network". There is the "web of physical things". There is the "mobile web". Al Gore's joke about inventing the internet is ancient history. Like, REALLY. ANCIENT. HISTORY. This is a world where your local doctor doesn't even have a smart phone, but the drop-out punk on the street corner panhandling is the Foursquare Mayor of the most expensive eatery in Davis Square. There is the world where rural Realtors(tm) whom I taught how to use AOL email now have automated twitter spam-bots that send out property listings to 100 different social networks automatically every night. I sometimes wonder if some of those brokers are dead and their web services continue to operate automatically, forever spewing out discounted lot deals onto the free social web services, blocked and filtered at every end-point and thus never being traced back to their origin to discover that Elber Potts, connected-Realtor(tm), died of a coronary in his garage in 2009 while fixing his riding lawnmower.
Everything changed. The local dog groomer no longer needs to buy Adwords because Yelp is all she needs for marketing. The local coffee shop owner has 15,000 followers on Twitter (and doesn't have even 500 real customers) while the local convenience store sells flash drives at the counter. The wine store has a SCVNGR QR code on the front door and an automated Group-on, Twilio-enabled phone messaging system so that you can pre-order Kazakh brandy before it shows up in product marketing on Entourage and watch it on your mobile device as it leaves Astana, tracked by an RFID chip and heads to you, arriving in 3 months (estimated) and the bottle of brandy has it's own fan-page on Facebook with 3,000 "likes" and if the brandy doesn't arrive before the new season of Entourage starts the case will be automatically auctioned on eBay and the funds converted to Farmville currency which the liquor store will buy from you and give you back two cases of your favorite beer.
I have had so many ideas, a new one every few minutes it seems as I've been doing a crash course on the "new web" that I feel like my brain will explode, spewing bits of meta tags and html anchor links around my home-office. and these ideas are so revolutionary that I am high like I've had cough syrup in a cup of espresso for hours after as I furiously research each one. And each idea I have, when googled, reveals a University professor in the UK who has a free version running that he and his class built in 1989 that's still running on the university mainframe and has it's own Facebook page with 100,000 "likes". And there's a venture back seed fund around the technology and everyone not only knows all about it, they are all onto the next big thing. And the new services I think of and the new ideas I have aren't really so new. They are old. Old, like more than 12 months old. Old, like more than 5 months old. The phrase "that's so last year" fits well and the tween version "that's so 5 seconds ago" isn't so ironic; it's actually quite unnerving.
For years, I was ignoring folks who were trying to tell me about twitter and facebook and social networking and I was asleep and arrogant, thinking that I knew what was what. I knew how to make money on the web. My customers paid me REAL. CASH. MONEY. And it flowed in like a broken ATM machine. I was well-off, I traveled to Asia, to Europe. People returned my calls. But I had nothing really to stay since I was being deaf to the changing world. And so I stopped calling and so nobody called back. I was basking in the glory of my successfully exited 8 year old startup. Hah. EIGHT. YEARS. OLD. It's like a bad joke. My startup was built in VBScript, using my knowledge of Applesoft basic, which I learned in 1981 on an Apple ][+ computer in my parents basement. My sell-by date is so in the past, it's rubbed completely off and is unreadable. Now startups aren't startups past 6 months. Twitter is 4 years old. FOUR. That's younger than my kid. My child is out of date. My future children will be born out of date. Who the fuck can keep up with what's going on? AND. I. THINK. ALL. CAPS. WITH. A. PERIOD. IS. GOING. TO. DRIVE. ME. INSANE. AND. I CANT. STOP. DOING. IT.
Web design, as well, has changed. It used to be all tables and easy shit. Now it's CSS and XHTML and object-oriented, DOM model AJAX enabled bullshit that I can't understand. And by the time you read this there will be some new, awesome standard that allows more connectivity, probably with time travel so it will be out of date before it's developed.
I built one of the first blogging sites (diarypro - failure) and one of the first rent payment systems (electricrent - failure) and bought and dis-improved an early social network (bloty.com - failure) and bought and fucked up an early photo sharing site (xaqa.com - failure) finally hit it small with a property listing service. But now I can barely hack out how to link my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts in a way that won't make me look like a noob. I spent 20 minutes recently trying to undo a style change I made to my Twitter page that made the links the same color as the background so I couldn't actually see them. And I have a blogging site or rather I have about twenty because I keep registering at various sites like blogger and tumblr and myspace and I can't remember which is which and if I should have a personal blog and a business blog so that the content doesn't get mixed up or two personal ones, one for my friends and one for my family or maybe three personal ones so I can separate my friends who knew me when I was young and carefree and those that know me now or four personal sites so I can be friends with all my ex-girlfriends and keep them from my awesome current girlfriend who doesn't want my exes sending me flowers on facebook and who may or may not still have a thing for me even though I'm pretty sure they all are married and have kids and have 5,000 followers on Twitter and have crowd-sourced their own blog page design so it looks totally awesome and feels all web 3.0.
I feel like I'm so late to the party that the hosts cleaned up, got older, had kids, left town and sold the house to a developer who tore it down and put up a condo development that's half-built, half-sold and sitting abandoned at the end of a cul-de-sac in a gated community and when I come by with my bottle of wine to give to the host, I'm greeted with a QR Code that I can scan for loyalty points that can be redeemed when I visit the next open house and after I download the real estate developer QR code reader app I have to register and while I'm trying to enter the same password i use for EVERY. SINGLE. SITE. I drop the bottle of wine and then drop my phone into the puddle of broken glass an wine and cut my hand trying to fish it out.
And holy shit there are SO. MANY. STARTUPS. It used to take balls and gumption and a fearless desire to work for yourself to start your own company. Now it's a required course at the local community college. And to make my brain sizzle and burn at the edges just a little more some much-more-successful-than-me entrepreneur started 500startups.com which is jammed packed full of awesomely design hot hot hot super api-enabled, networked sites with twit/face-linkage a-go-go and seed-round funding and A and B round funding and Omega/Zeta/Tau round funding and a board full of people who sold their first web startups in 1965 and repeated that feat every year until last week when they won the "80 under 80" lifetime achievement award for entrepreneurial achievement from the Never Heard of It Foundation Of Super Successful Folks in Warm Weather Climates. And I should know who these people are. And I don't.
Starting-up is now a viral phenomenon. Everyone has a startup. Because every blog is essentially a publishing startup. Every twitter account is a mobile startup. Everything is a startup. You can get seed round funding for choosing the right hashtag and going viral with a video-enabled tweet.
In 2006, Twitter launched. 2006! Can you believe it? My youngest son is older than that!
And this entire rant was supposed to be the pre-amble to describe what I want to do with hyper-local marketing and propose a new start-up using some of the new technology that's out there, but I'm a bit fried....
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Bloty.com launched - QR code fun
I recently launched Version 1 of http://www.bloty.com. This is a QR code generator that shortens urls and creates a QR code for the url.
When scan a QR code (using your smart phone - download a QR Code reader like Shop Savvy for Android), Bloty will store the time of the scan and send you an email if you want.
You can create unlimited QR codes.
I'll be posting some videos of how to use QR codes in the next few weeks, plus launching some more features.
When scan a QR code (using your smart phone - download a QR Code reader like Shop Savvy for Android), Bloty will store the time of the scan and send you an email if you want.
You can create unlimited QR codes.
I'll be posting some videos of how to use QR codes in the next few weeks, plus launching some more features.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Financial Modeling Tutorial
After ignoring my financial modeling tutorial for nearly a decade, I have done a spit-shine and moved the spreadsheets to Google Docs.
It's actually pretty good at explaining the basic differences between an income statement, a cashflow statement and a balance sheet and even delves a little bit into depreciation.
I may start another site called "WTF is a bond?" but still mulling the idea.
Steve's Financial Modeling Tutorial
It's actually pretty good at explaining the basic differences between an income statement, a cashflow statement and a balance sheet and even delves a little bit into depreciation.
I may start another site called "WTF is a bond?" but still mulling the idea.
Steve's Financial Modeling Tutorial
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
When did google start revealing it's adsense share?
I just had to sign up for a new adsense account because my old company took mine (thanks!) and whatever.
So on my new account I saw this:
AdSense for Content: ca-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxx64268 68 % publisher revenue share
Well, what do you know? Google is not taking 50% or 66% of the revenue, they are sharing 2/3 with me!
Woot!
So on my new account I saw this:
AdSense for Content: ca-pub-xxxxxxxxxxxx64268 68 % publisher revenue share
Well, what do you know? Google is not taking 50% or 66% of the revenue, they are sharing 2/3 with me!
Woot!
I am the home page on LinkedIn
I have been asked why my LinkedIn profile is http://www.linkedin.com/in/index - why does it have "index" at the end instead of my name?
Linkedin offers users the option of creating a unique landing page url. The user chooses a word, which is suppended to "http://www.linkedin.com/in/".
Well, I was a very early linkedin user and when LinkedIn offered me the opportunity to enter any word as my profile page url, I decided to be cute and use "index" thinking it would be reserved or blocked. But lo and behold it was not and now it's what it is.
However, I now realize that when someone sees that url they think I've mistyped my profile page. Typical me-move, eh? Trying to be cute, I hosed myself. Doh!
Linkedin offers users the option of creating a unique landing page url. The user chooses a word, which is suppended to "http://www.linkedin.com/in/".
Well, I was a very early linkedin user and when LinkedIn offered me the opportunity to enter any word as my profile page url, I decided to be cute and use "index" thinking it would be reserved or blocked. But lo and behold it was not and now it's what it is.
However, I now realize that when someone sees that url they think I've mistyped my profile page. Typical me-move, eh? Trying to be cute, I hosed myself. Doh!
Will Facebook Go The Way of AOL?
There was a time when AOL was the internet. I remember when AOL could sell keywords for content. So Bank of America had to pay AOL bucoup bucks to own the keyword for "home banking" (I don't know if they did or not, it's just an example). Then the internet arrived and mozilla and Netscape and all the aol users had to browse the internet with a crappy browser inside AOL and then everyone dropped AOL.
Will someone develop an application that mimics Facebook outside of the Facebook website? Wouldn't it be great to be able to right-click (or for Mac users just click) on the screen and your friends would be in a drop-down? Networking right from the operating system, no browser needed? Or is this no longer necessary since the browser itself will one day go away and the internet will be the operating system?
Will someone develop an application that mimics Facebook outside of the Facebook website? Wouldn't it be great to be able to right-click (or for Mac users just click) on the screen and your friends would be in a drop-down? Networking right from the operating system, no browser needed? Or is this no longer necessary since the browser itself will one day go away and the internet will be the operating system?
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