Happy Quote
November 9, 2006 in Happy Quotes"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
- Theodore Roosevelt
"Citizenship in a Republic"
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
Happy Links
November 7, 2006 in Happy LinksStartup Edition:
- The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups
His honor, Paul Graham gives us the download. Superb stuff, as usual. As founder of Y Combinator - an early stage venture firm helping startups - Paul has cred. In fact, last week one of his projects, Reddit, was acquired by Wired Digital. - Of course, part of being an entrepreneur is ignoring the advice of anyone who might dampen our enthusiasm, and checking in this time with his own excellent rebuttal to Paul's list, is Mike Taber with Startups for the rest of us where he responds to Paul's advice, pulls off its legs and burns it with a magnifying glass. He really does have some interesting insight into how Paul's Y Combinator funding works. Mike delivers the final push-pin through the exoskeleton with his thoughtful The Single Founder Myth.
- 10 Tips for Moving From Programmer to Entrepreneur
"Code is 5% of your business...the best code in the world is meaningless if nobody knows about your product." - 50+ Ways a Manager can get Employees to Quit
So often as entrepreneurs we're so wrapped up in getting started, we miss the basics. Having been on both sides of this equation, here's a list that chilled me to the bone.
Note, this blog is good for all manner of tasty goodness. e.g. 40+ Ways to Make Money on the Internet, Why Top Employees Quit, 50 Tools that can Increase your Writing Skills.
Happy Quote
October 26, 2006 in Happy Quotes"From excitement and bold moves, great things often happen"
- Evan Williams, founder of Pyra Labs who created Blogger which was bought out by Google. He later launched Odeo - the full assets of which he just bought back so he could start something exciting. (Go Ev!)
MediaFire
October 26, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, File uploading services, FreeMediaFire: Another service offering simple file uploading/downloading through a web site as an alternative to emailing large files (as well as essentially offering free bandwidth for file downloads). MediaFire There are several players in this space, these guys are the first to hit a home-run. The service is ad supported, so it's free but should still survive. The interface is near-perfect. No signups required, no maximum file size to worry about, and a host of simple delivery options when you're done uploading. It has a sexy upload meter showing you your progress. If you'd like an account to manage your uploaded files, it offers that too. All that, and it's free. These guys are a testament to the power of doing something right. They're getting oodles of press, attention, and business. I'd like them to do a slightly better job of selling the benefits of their service and facilitating their use for novices (e.g. the "don't email large files, use us" approach that DropSend has taken). This would make it easier to unceremoniously refer clients, family members, etc. without having to help them understand why or how. I must admit some slight nervousness about how they'll handle crushing bandwidth bills when this starts being used widely as free hosting/bandwidth for popular files. Will AdSense revenues be enough? Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Happy Quote
October 18, 2006 in Happy Quotes"Make something happen today, before you go home, before the end of the week. Launch that idea, post that post, run that ad, call that customer. Go the edge, that edge you've been holding back from... and do it today. Without waiting for the committee or your boss or the market. Just go."
Relenta CRM
October 16, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, CRM, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareRelenta CRM: A new CRM tool (customer relationship management). Includes email, contact manager, shared calendar, email newsletter marketing/autoresponders. Relenta They claim, and employ a (now familiar) "Less is more" approach. They call it the "90/10 rule" "Designed for usability and efficiency, Relenta CRM achieves 90 percent of the functionality commonly required by small business users with only ten percent of the application weight." They integrate email, contact management, calendar, and email newsletter marketing software into one application. The free plan offers quite a bit for the starting-out entrepreneur trying to determine if this software is right for them. They've obviously put a great deal of effort into this offering. The interface is attractive and fairly well conceived and it includes many of the features you'd expect from a CRM. It will be interesting to see how it evolves (it needs some maturing still) and how it stands up to the imminent Sunrise (CRM product) from 37signals. A detailed user guide/help/knowledge base is really needed (they are working on it). The support is decent in the meantime (although the support form is cumbersome to fill out). They do have a PDF "user's manual" you'll find in your Relenta inbox after you create an account, which is helpful. They need spell check. HTML email templates would be nice (right now offers only plain-text email) They require 3 credentials for login, not just the normal 2 (i.e. username/password). The initial starting experience still needs some polish. I had that bewildering "what do I do now" moment when I started. The free account allows only one user, but you are offered the form to create another user. Only after you attempt it does the application tell you can't add one ("user limit exceeded"). Then the statistics on my dashboard reported 2 out of 1 user, but I still only had the one. The application response feels a bit sluggish (and no AJAX in sight, which could alleviate some of that feeling). It feels like they may have rushed to launch it. It's certainly usable as it is and (I have reports from a very happy user), and it's an impressive application, but we've come to expect more from web applications in the last couple years, and this one isn't quite there yet. From FREE to $50 per user per month Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Google Docs and Spreadsheets
October 11, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Hosted "Office", Hosted software, ProductivityGoogle Docs and Spreadsheets: From Google's acquisition of Writely coupled with Google Spreadsheet comes Google Docs and Spreadsheets. A hosted, Gmail-like service which provides (you guessed it) a hosted document and spreadsheet editor. Just login with your Google/Gmail account to get started. Google Google is hit and miss on interface design (or maybe we just need to get used to their approach). This one is done quite well. The options are simple - and happen to be the only ones I think most of us care about anyway. The upside? No bloated confusing morass of menu options. All your documents are in a nice, clean, hosted centralized location allowing you, or colleagues to access them from anywhere. You can even upload existing doc(Word)/rtf/xls(Excel)/csv etc documents to the repository. The collaboration stuff really is nice. Send invites, track revisions, chat (IM-like, right in the window) while you work together on a doc, etc. (It's similar to Writeboard only with richer collaboration tools). You can also invite folks to view, but not edit. You can also export your creations to common formats (doc/rtf/xls/csv/pdf/html/open office). PDF export is a pretty darn cool feature. Has a very nice spell check. The spreadsheet (doc too?) allows you to autosave periodically to keep you from losing work (nice touch). You can also post word docs to your blog (nice clean drop-down+click setup for Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, SquareSpace, BlogHarbor, Blogware). And you can manually set up other services, including TypePad and Moveable Type, but it takes a bit more finessing. Works in IE and FireFox (haven't tested others, although I suspect all modern browsers work.) I'm not sure how comfortable we'll be having our documents hosted such that without a connection (read: airplane, vacation, etc.) we don't have access to them. Do rich collaboration tools and a hard-drive-crash-resistant hosted repository outweigh the annoyance of that? They are quite simple in functionality - probably 90% of what we all need, that last 10% may be a deal breaker for power users, especially the spreadsheet side. It's not as eerily omniscient as Excel, if you rely on that. Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Interview with Michael McDerment, President and CEO of Freshbooks
October 2, 2006 in An interview
Freshbooks (an online billing service company) recently announced that they have more than 80,000 users. Not a shabby accomplishment for a "web 2.0" company with an active and working revenue model. CEO Mike McDermont agreed to share some insights with us about their success.
1. So Mike - tell us a little about how you got started. What prompted you to start Freshbooks?
Carson, I think my story is not unlike many other web 2.0 start-ups in that it all started with my web design and internet marketing consulting business called Anicon. One big difference from many others is that we were around before this whole Web 2.0 phenomenon started (our service was released to the public in early 2004, around the same time as Basecamp, but that’s a little known fact).
I started doing consulting gigs in 1999, and after a few years struggling to keep up with my invoicing I desperately needed something better to manage my receivables. I hacked something up online for myself and to show my clients that this could be done online and that we were "eating our own cookie". After showing it to my co-founder (Joe Sawada), he asked it he “could play with it”. Shortly thereafter Joe started coding and the two of us working part-time managed to get the first edition of FreshBooks up and available to the public as a web based online invoicing service. The rest shall we say, is history...
2. You recently announced that FreshBooks crossed the 80,000 subscriber line. Congratulations! You're facing more and more competition as the web 2.0 mania gains steam, what do you feel has been the strongest factor in helping you achieve your growth?
Continue reading "Interview with Michael McDerment, President and CEO of Freshbooks"
eTickets.to
September 29, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Event managementeTickets.to: A self-service eTicketing system for events, lets promoters sell their own tickets online without the need for a ticketing agent. Sign-Up Technologies Event promoters get the money and the customer data directly (so you own your own data). - no extortionate booking fees or third party agents getting in the way. No minimum fees, no percentages, just a flat charge per ticket sold. Great for any kind of event -- a workshop, seminar or conference, or (as one of their customers, Exit Festival did) a monster event with thousands of participants. (Or even a school play or LAN party). Here's what an Exit Festival representative had to say: "its clear to see the benefit to our business in terms of additional revenue by eliminating booking fees and being able to control and tailor our customer service; we now have a far more direct and efficient way of communicating with our customers and offering them value for money." Well done, simple interface. You can be selling tickets in just a few minutes. You can set up your own additional fees per ticket (if you wish). You can control number of tickets to be sold, types of tickets to be sold, dates to start/stop selling. You have some moderate control over the feel of the ticket selling page (logo and content). You can sell your tickets in GBP, Euros or Dollars. Full featured without being bogged down by complexity. They're working on a mobile version to deliver tickets by SMS and introducing a wider range of payment gateways (only PayPal is supported at the moment). $19.99 account activation, then $1 per ticket sold. (Although you can set up an account and try out the process without making a payment). Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Happy Quote
September 21, 2006 in Happy Quotes"My new favorite word is 'awkward.'...The reason we need to be in search of awkward is that awkward is the
barrier between us and excellence, between where we are and the
remarkable. If it were easy, everyone would have done it already, and
it wouldn't be worth the effort."
- Seth Godin