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Goovite
August 30, 2005 in 4 out of 5 stars, Hosted softwareGoovite: Goovite is a fast, easy way to send invites and track responses, with no registration required. Mark Hurst No registration is required. It does one thing and does it well, and is very simple to use. If you need to send an invitation for anything, Goovite hooks you up. Free Reviewed by Brian SweetingWhat is it?
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Why is it the killerest?
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Reader Question: Best Blogs for Entrepreneurs?
August 29, 2005 in Reader QuestionSo, as an entrepreneur (or an aspiring entrepreneur)...
If a rabid donkey were guarding your computer and you were only allowed to ever view three business-oriented blogs again, without getting bitten or kicked, what would they be?
My three would be:
- Creating Passionate Users This blog is brimming with brilliant business wisdom, commentary and well-developed (if a bit long winded) ideas.
- Duct Tape Marketing I like how he regularly dispatches great marketing ideas.
- Signal vs Noise Love him or hate him, (love him!) Jason and crew have something figured out. And they share. A lot. I dig.
(I wish Bnoopy would update more often, he'd be on the list. But if I'm restricted to just three, I don't want one that only updates quarterly.)
What three would you pick?
Feedburner
August 26, 2005 in 5 out of 5 stars, A service, FreeFeedburner: A free, super spiffy service that make sure everyone can read your RSS feed, and then gives you great stats on how many folks are subscribed to your blog/podcast/whatever. Burning Door Syndication Services, Inc. If you've got something with an RSS feed -- a blog, a podcast, a news feed, whatever -- you probably want to know how many folks are subscribed to it. As an entrepreneur, knowing this helps you gauge success.
The chaps (and chapettes) at Feedburner have done a sweet job of creating a service that takes over the job of managing your RSS feed and gives you killer, if simple, stats (charts, graphs tables) on your subscribers, click throughs, browsers, bots and more. If you pay for the premium service there are even more bells and whistles.
It also makes doing podcasts a snap, auto-links your Amazon links with your Amazon Assoc Id, serves up your Google AdSense feed ads and more.
It also makes sure that your feed can be read by the widest range of readers and aggregates.
Here's how it works: You show Feedburner where your RSS feed is. They consume it and generate a slick "let's all get along"' agnostic feed that any aggregater can latch onto. (Here's mine for WorkHappy.net). You then offer the Feedburner mediated feed to your visitors and the rest is magic. Performance monitoring on feed ads, but that's coming. Free for just about anything you really want. $4-16/mo for extra bells and whistles. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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The Little Red Book of Selling : 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
August 25, 2005 in 4 out of 5 stars, A bookThe Little Red Book of Selling : 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness Jeffrey Gitomer I go to the bookstore as someone going to church, in search of some revelation that will save me. In search of a miracle I stroll around my local B&N and from time to time a book from the corner of my eye just seems to jump out at me and say "pick me up and read a page, this is what you need." Sometimes what happens next is a bit amazing, I flip the pages to get the gist of the contents and stop for a read. Almost always it speaks directly to me at that moment in my life.
Today was the day, I was in a slump, I had exhausted my personal contacts and needed to expand my horizons and hone my sales skills.
Mr. Jeffery Gitomer is my new hero. His book was what my slump needed. In his words, I need to "kick my own ass" to succeed. No excuses, you make the destiny and that "to make a sale is to make a commission, to make a relationship is to make fortune."
The book makes great use of humor, and layout to convey all the lessons and content in a memorable way. The book makes great use of typography and design.
I loved the book so much that I bought 5 to give to my clients in order to further my "relationship" building. I changed my voicemail to a more creative source of sales opportunities and found that my perspective in sales was completely off.
I have read many books 10x bigger, but it truly is refreshing to pick up a concise fun read in which each sentence has deep and meaningful impact. Why don't more authors cut out all the crap and give us a book that just works, in this regard. Size really did not matter.
Some repetition in concepts but seemed to be used in order to reinforce. $12.57 at Amazon. Reviewed by Gianni D'AlertaWhat is it?
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Reveries Magazine: Cool News of the Day
August 24, 2005 in 5 out of 5 stars, A website, FreeReveries Magazine: Cool News of the Day: A brilliant daily email delivery of well written marketing insights and ideas. Tim Manners What's amazing about Reveries is that almost every single day, it's
a home run of ideas, thoughts and writing. If you aren't getting and
reading this every morning, you're really missing out. This is one bulk
email I can't live without. (Note they also have an RSS feed if you
prefer).
It has been recognized by Dow Jones, USA Today, Fast Company and The Harvard Business School,
among others. It is ranked #1 by Google on the search term "marketing
people," #3 for "marketing insights" and #6 for "marketing ideas." Free like samples at Costco Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Happy Links
August 19, 2005 in Happy Links- Stanford offers free video snippets from uber-entrepreneurs Larry Page (Google), Guy Kawasaki (Art of the Start), and Fern Mandelbaum (Monitor Venture) on high-technology entrepreneurship. (Click the links at the bottom of each for more videos by each presenter).
- How I learned to stop worrying and love my schedule. This is a surprisingly easy concept, but doing this very thing is what I've found to be my path to greatest productivity. In short: schedule everything! It'll keep you from wondering what to do next, which is usually followed by checking blog feeds, deleting old email, reading news sites, playing games, IM chatting, etc.
- 37Signals offers an ecommerce search report, previously $79 now free because it has grown dated. Still loaded with great information.
- U.S. online marketing forecast: $26 billion by 2010. Forrester is famous for being full of crap, but this report (summary only here with links to other media coverage) makes a thought-provoking case for the growth and effectiveness of online marketing, something every entrepreneur ought to be thinking seriously about, it seems to me.
- 6 Don'ts for the End of Your Presentation. I'm not sure how much public speaking you do but these were some great tips and something I thought would be useful for anyone presenting anything (sales pitch, client presentation, etc).
- What would the implications be of free Wi-Fi for every American? Wow, Google = spooky.
My Protopage
August 18, 2005 in 4 out of 5 stars, Free, Hosted softwareProtopage.com: Customizable, AJAX driven webpage where you can add "sticky notes", web link lists, to-do lists, etc. Kind of like a 1-page, edit on the fly version of BackPack (although quite different from backpack). Great to use as a home page where you can leave yourself reminders, lists, important links, etc. You create the page when you first arrive, set it as your browser's home page and use it for whatever. Protopage With it's AJAX driven editing and clean interface, it makes for a great one-page organizer, and it's free. Amazing technology at work here. Perhaps more customization and pre-built "modules". Although, the current version is described as "Pre-release." It's somewhat confusing as to what it does when you first arrive. It's kind of busy looking. Unclear revenue model. Free, Nada Reviewed by Russ ThorntonWhat is it?
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XDrive
August 16, 2005 in 0 out of 5 stars, A service, Hosted softwareXDrive: An online hard-drive that you can use for file sharing, backups, and other goodness. XDrive, Inc. Because it allows me to backup my critical files online through an easy to use backup program, but it also just acts as a 'folder' that I can access from anywhere with an internet connection.
Even better, I can send out invitations to people and they can access my files, and even be given permissions to administer files/folders, etc and even invite other people.
The price is also great. $10/month for 5GB of space (and 2 months free if you sign up for a year). They've also done a great job of documenting how to use it. It took me about 2 minutes to set it up and get it going. The only thing that could make this cooler would be the ability (for a fee, obviously) to CNAME, or alias part of my domain over to them, so that I could do something like send clients to : http://clientfiles.mysite.com/clientx/ etc. That would make this thing unparalled. As it is, I can still send clients out to a folder created specifically for them (and them only), but the url is for a resource on xdrive.com $10/month or less for 5GB of space (unlimited transfer) Reviewed by Michael K. Campbell Editors note: See also StongSpace.What is it?
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Mobile Scribe
August 16, 2005 in 3 out of 5 stars, A service, ProductivityMobile Scribe: Mobile dictation to email. You set up an account and dial into a phone number, dictate a message up to 4 minutes long, and it will be transcribed and either emailed to you and up to 4 additional contacts or posted on secure website for you to download. Copytalk, LLC Most people have become pretty adept at talking on a phone/cell phone in almost any situation, whereas pulling out a pen & paper is a little more cumbersome. Also, this reduces amount of paper you have to keep up with, and better leverages your time by outsourcing transcription services to a 3rd party. In my case, I meet with a client or get off a mobile phone call, dial up Copytalk, dictate important notes, reminders, etc. and receive an email of the dictation within a few hours. I can then copy & paste into my CRM client records or print out hard copy, etc. Very efficient Cost and formatting. Cost is arguably a little steep although it offers an unlimited number of dictations up to 4 minutes each. You have to "adjust" to spelling out uncommon words and lack of formatting to paragraphs, etc. This, however, can easily be adapted to $60/month unlimited use Reviewed by Russ ThorntonWhat is it?
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Happy Links
August 12, 2005 in Happy Links- An interview by Adaptive Path with Flickr's Eric Costello. More technical that business-y, but still filled with great ideas "...because we’re quick to develop and deploy new things, and because we have a talkative bunch of users and a lot of places for them to talk to us, we can quickly assimilate suggestions from the community. We can build a feature and deploy it sometimes within a week of hearing a feature request."
- Garret Dimon offers some advise on going solo. Aimed at web developers it still offers solid if brief general advise and links on various aspects from pricing to business development.
- A great article over at Capital Hacks on bootstrapping a viral startup with case studies of Stewart Butterfield (Flickr), Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us) and Jason Fried (37 Signals/Basecamp). This is really quite well done.
- Paul Graham teaches How to Start a Startup "You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible."
- Inc. Magazine has online webinars on starting up a business. Great stuff here too with compiled advice from some seriously successful entrepreneurs.
- Business Name & Tag Line Generator. If you can get past the blindingly bad design on this site (and that's no small task), it's got good info. "19 steps to create a company name or tag line that sparkles with distinction."
- The Donald launches a blog! The Trump Blog. "My career is a model of tough, fair dealing and fantastic success--without shortcuts, without breaking the law." (good for a laugh anyway.)