A Great Startup Business Resource

Many of us have some to be a “startup” purely from an idea that we had and have acted to make it come to fruition. But along the way, we are bombarded with so many intricacies of being a business, much less a startup business.
I know personally I often have many question about everything from finances, to legal issues, to patents and trademarks.  The list seems endless.

I cam across a great resource today that I wanted to pass along to anyone who is interested and is also in need of much of this info.

It is an aggregate of some Y Combinator posts and looks to be a pretty extensive list.

You can check it out HERE.

SocialDevCamp East Video Collage

I will have a more complete wrapup of a really great event, but wanted to put up this video collage of the pics I snapped during the day.

Photos in the collage courtesy of:
Jeff Kubina
Shashi Bellamkonda
Jared Goralnick
Jimmy Gardner

SocialDevCamp East

Made it to Baltimore for the SocialDevCamp East.  We are getting into the voting on the sessions and about to break out into the sessions.

Make sure to follow the hashtag #socialdevcamp, or look to flickr for the socialdevcamp tag.

Also we will try to get up some Utterz for your listening pleasures.

Technosailor Birthday Bash !

I wanted to take a moment to give a “shout out” to our good friend Aaron Brazell, the Lead Editor of Technosailor, whose blog is about to turn 4 years old.

In theses days where blogs come and go, it is a true testament of Aaron’s staying power and his continued growth and influence in our space.  I have come to know Aaron more and more recently as we both mingle around the local DC tech scene and it has been a pleasure to come to know him and learn from him at the same time.

So in honor of his blog’s b’day Aaron is having a little bash at Austin Grill downtown.  All the details can be found here at the eventbrite page.

The event is limited to the first 50 peep’s so make sure you get over there to sign up as soon as you can, it is sure to be a sell out !

Congrats Aaron, looking forward to celebrating with you.

Twitter Use #298: Interview Questions

No I don’t really know of 297 twitter uses, but it seems like there is a lot.  At SXSW, we saw Twitter used by the crowd to start a mini-twitter riot during the Zuckerberg interview.  Well at the Web 2.0 Expo the other day, Tim O’Reilly used it in another fashion during an interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz , well at least he tried.

Apparently at the last minute they found that they were not set up to take questions from the audience via a microphone.  So Tim had a great idea, have the audience Twitter in their questions to his twitter account.  Genious.  As it turns out, he had his Twitter account set only to view @ replies from his followers, but nonetheless it was a great idea.

It was later through Tweescan that Tim actually saw the questions that were twitter’d in.  He compiled them and sent them over via email to Jonathon who then took the time to answer them, which is pretty cool in and of itself.

These social media tools make everyone so relevant.  They allow many of us unprecedented access to others we would have otherwise never had the opportunity to contact in the not so distant past.  The playing field has evened out for everyone.  Take full advantage of it.

Coporate Social Media Done Right

Okay, I guess I cannot uphold the Twitter writing ban that Allen Stern of CenterNetworks proposed for this week ..

As many of us know, more and more companies are using Twitter as a means to reaach out to their customers.  We have seen JetBlue, Soutwest Airlines, and Comcast.  Comcast has gotten a lot of good press lately in helping out some complaining customers, to include one Michael Arrington.  I even saw this tweet earlier today form a customer fed up with their dsl and asking @comcastcares what they had to offer.

But I was not aware just how entrenched Zappos was into Twitter and using it to their advantge until I read a great post over at ReadWriteWeb.  Zappos has developed a great reputation in their customer service making some fanatical fans.  And obviously they get the fact that they can use tools like Twitter to make their service and customer outreach even better.

According to the post, Twitter has 198 of their employees on Twiiter anc very active.  Zappos has even gone so far as to dedicate an entire section of their website to Twitter.  They have one page that shows all the tweets with mentions of Zappos, a Zappos exmployee tweets page, a leaderboard of Zappos employees and how many twitter followers they have, and even a Twitter Quick Start Guide out up by their CEO, Tony Hsieh !

Other companies would do well to follow the lead of Zappos.  I am convinced it is the way of the future.  It seems the “flattening” of the world is removing some of the insulating layers between these corporations and its comsumers.  They are being forced to listen as the widespread use of tools like Twitter and blogs give the average consumer a voice that must make the old guard of these companies shutter in their corner offices.

Yet Another Cool Twitter Tool: Twitter Timer

Okay okay, I know, enough with the Twitter crap …

But this one I found pretty cool.  It is your very own Twitter timer.  Simply follow timer and your all set.

Send timer a direct message with a message something like :

d timer 30 Doctors appnt

and in 30 minutes you will get a message back to remind you.  Its that easy.  Try it out and let us know what you think.

Don’t Miss My Visit to Jonny’s Par Tay

http://www.mogulus.com/jonnyspartay

Just wanted to give everyone a friendly reminder to stop by and check out my first visit to Jonny’s Par-Tay on Wed night, May 7th from 9-10PM.  I am totally excited to join these guys, they put on such a great show and tune in often.

I will be there to chat with the guys’s about my work on the blog here, the local DC tech scene, and also my upcoming full release of the product I have been working on for a little over a year now, MyDropBin.

I will be joined on the show by Andrew Feinberg who writes the blog CapitolValley.net.  I am looking forward meeting him and talking tech.

So I am counting on all of you to be in the chatroom for all your questions and banter.  I know Rana had like 158 people watch her appearance, so lets try to get up there !

Chronicles of the Entrepeneur: The Beginning

What was the spark ?  You know, that moment when it hit you ?  The moment you said, “I am going to make this idea into reality”. Maybe it wasnt a split second “ah ha” moment for you, but I am sure you can recall it.

Mine came as I stood in the local Bonefish Grill waiting for a carry out order.  I am always thinking tech stuff, maybe a little too much :).  In any case, my idea initially wasn’t meant to be a product that I necessarily I thought other people would use.  Rather I thought, “I need this, I would love this”, and that is how I set out on this journey I have found myself on over this last year or so.  So I started scratching ideas on a pocket Moleskin as I traveled around the world.  Scribbled designs and thoughts as they came to me.  Eventually working it into a design and requirements.

Nothing epic, but its a moment that I will always remember.
How about you, what is your moment ?

Is the Valley Really The Place to Be ?

Obviously many of us debate continually the ins and outs of startups and how we wish this area were a bit more “valley like”.  Did any of us ever think that folks on the west coast thought “I wish the valley was more like .. (fill in the blank)?”  I didn’t, never did, and I still haven’t but I did see a great piece on the topic over at the 37Signals blog.  It was a post titled “Are You Sure You Want to be in San Francisco ?”

The post’s author, David, made some great points bout why the valley just might not be the place to be if your a startup. He says

If you’re looking to build the next web 2.0 social media eyeball-collecting application, don’t want to worry about boring details like revenues, and hope to either flip to Google for an early $20 million or get that Facebook billion-dollar valuation, the Bay area is exactly where you want to be.

but he also does well to make the counter point that

The flush availability of other people’s money is simply too tempting. When you’re not spending your own money, it’s easy to splash on a big open office on day one, a staff of 10+ in no time, and have few worries about paying the bills on the 1st of the month. It takes away much of the urgency to make money that I think is critical to build sustainable businesses. It gives you too many resources to be satisfied building simple tools for niche markets. Everything becomes about catching that huge wave.

He also shows that hiring and retaining talent is next to impossible.  The programmers and designers and more about jumping from company to company every 6-18 months in search of the BIG payoff.
I think this is where in these uncertain times, areas like ours in DC have an advantage.  First of all, the area is well insulated by numerous government jobs and contracts and second as we spoke in our previous post the area’s startups perhaps have better business models based upon more fundamental economic principles.  It may not be “exciting” but they do say the slow and steady wins the race.  So maybe we should not look to make this like the valley, rather build the example that in the future that valley will want to emulate.

So in conclusion, I could not say it better than David did, so I will end in his words

So stop worrying to much about where you are and start worrying about how you’re going to make your business succeed the old fashion way: Through having a better product than the competition that people are willing to pay for.

« Previous Page