Happy Links
September 20, 2006 in Happy LinksBusiness Model Advice:
- Jason Fried of 37signals on the 3 ways to make money with your software - including his opinion of each. It's no surprise he gives his highest marks to the subscription-supported model.
- Business Model Roundup is a post by the Particle Tree dudes pointing us to 5 possibilities.
- Don't settle for Google AdSense
is a thought-provoking look at the possibility of doing much better
than AdSense with your next brilliant ad-revenue based wunderproject.
Summary: try Shopping.com Ads. (This all depends on your content/audience of course, but interesting stuff.)
Happy Links
September 19, 2006 in Happy LinksGoing solo:
- 17 tips for freelancers marks the 17th anniversary of Megan Jeffery's jump to becoming a freelance artist. There's wisdom in these here tips.
- Going Solo: A Few Words Of Advice from Stowe Boyd offers good tips on marketing, and balance.
- How Odeo Screwed Up. Ok, these are more "anti-tips" for going solo - but just as valuable, if not more. (If anyone has even more details on Evan's talk please let me know).
- Interview with Dan Cederholm of Cork'd.
Cork'd is such an inspiring little startup/side project done right. I quite enjoyed this interview. Dan has been solo for sometime with SimpleBits, but this is his most entrepreneurial (and enviable) venture yet.
Happy Links
September 18, 2006 in Happy Links- A great article from CCE on how Modo & Modo revived their (boring!) Moleskine brand - and boy did they. The key? They embraced customers, particularly passionate online ones and focused on product quality.
- Paul Graham: How to Present to Investors. Actually this is a collection of tips from all 4 Y Combinator partners. 14 great points from folks who ought to know.
- Trizle is becoming one of my new favorite blogs for quality pith. This post on how to pay your contractors offers some tips on squeezing out maximum quality.
- Excel Tip: Instant in-cell graphs. This is just such a cool tip I couldn't resist archiving here for posterity.
Amigo
September 11, 2006 in 4 out of 5 stars, A service, Email newsletter managementAmigo: Amigo is a service that matches advertisers with online newsletters, and vice versa. Carson Systems For every person fully converted to RSS land, there are a bazillion folks still reaching their audience with good old fashion email newsletters. Carson Systems cleverly found this blind spot in the market and have applied many of the modern design, functionality and simplicity principles that have gained traction on the web in the last 18 months. In so doing, they've created an elegant service that can benefit owners of those email lists (large or small), and those of us who may wish to communicate with those audiences. Part of the challenge in the "techcrunch" industry is reaching markets beyond our own echo-chamber. If Amigo can effectively gain newsletter owners beyond our borders - this can be a very effective tool for both sides (newsletter owners and advertisers). It's still very early yet so there's a slight chicken-and-egg problem with reaching a critical mass. But the application is strong enough - with time I do believe it'll happen. I'd be slightly nervous about click fraud and I'm curious to see how they plan to handle it. Amigo takes 30% of click revenue. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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nPost
September 6, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, A person, An interviewnPost: Another great resource for entrepreneurs, a collection of interviews with CEOs and Founders of small and startup businesses. Nathan Kaiser Kaiser has collected almost 150 intelligently conducted interviews, including some favorites of mine like Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia (how awesome is he?) and Joe Kraus of Jot Spot.
Clean site, searchable, or list them all. It appears that he records these, might be nice to have the audio versions as well. The search is a bit iffy. Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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MailUp
August 31, 2006 in 3 out of 5 stars, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareMailUp: MailUp is a web based tool for managing email newsletters. It can be integrated with web sites or CRM applications. It manages subscribes (single or double opt-in), unsubscribes, bounces and provides statistics. NWeb Pricing: MailUp does not have a "pay per message" or "pay per contact" pricing model, you pay only a flat monthly fee and you can send whatever you like plus and you can have any number of subscribers in your DB. However, there are different pricing plans. Lower plans offer less features (lowest plan doesn't have bounce management for example) plus the lower the plan, the slower the send rate, ranging from 720/hr to 103,500/hr. Nice features: attachments, embedded images, international charsets support. Their sales site is terrible (they tell me they're in the process up an update), getting started requires a human-mediated sales cycle (yuck). Polls/survey module not yet completed, SMS Module available only for Europe recipients, admin tools are slightly cumbersome to use. Admin tool doesn't work in FireFox. The parent company is Italian and you'll occasionally run into poor translations to English, or fully Italian language portions of the service. I had to email them to get this, but they claim it will be on the site once they redesign. They are responsive on email. $59/mo - $120/mo - $450/mo - $3,300/mo Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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Happy Quote
August 24, 2006 in Happy Quotes"Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
-Steve Jobs
Google Analytics
August 22, 2006 in 5 out of 5 stars, Analytics, Free, Hosted software, SEO/SEMGoogle Analytics: Web analytics (statistics + analysis) software that anyone with a website can use. After Google initially launched this service, they were crushed with interest and they shut down new sign ups. However, after several months, the gates are open again. Google (although they bought and tweaked Urchin's product to create this). The information it provides is super-rich without being unwieldy (unwieldiness is a common ailment afflicting analytics software). It has great visual representations of your information, making it easily digestible. This includes graphs, charts, and a very nifty site-overlay showing you where and how people click through your site on their way to conversion Also, Geo-targeting map representations, date-range comparisons, and more. It's simple and quick (just a few minutes) to integrate into your site, just drop a snippet of code on each page you wish to track. Some of the more common data feels buried. The data is always about a day old. Potential for some tin-foil hat anxiety about Google's increasingly Sauron-like all-seeing-eye. Astonishingly Free Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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You can use it to track simple traffic statistics, but you can also you use it (and here's the real power) to track conversions and associated behavior (this is the heart of Seth's point number 5). It integrates closely with your AdWords campaigns but can also track any marketing initiative you run, Google-based or not. It's hard to overstate the power and importance of that. If you do commerce online, you're insane not to be using this to measure.
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Happy Links
August 21, 2006Kiko Demise Edition (because this is brutally instructive):
Quick summary. Kiko is an online calendar application, and a darn fine one at that. It was funded by Paul Graham's Y Combinator. Only something happened along the way, and now it's for sale up on eBay, bids start at $50K.
- The last Kiko blog post
"To our users, thanks for sticking with us through this whole journey.
The horse's mouth:
- Paul Graham - Funder.
Says Google Calendar killed them.
"Google may be even more dangerous than Microsoft, because unlike Microsoft it's the favorite of technically minded users... The best solution for most startup founders would probably be to stay out of Google's way." - Richard White - member of the Kiko team (UI designer).
Says Google Calendar didn't kill them, they killed themselves by (a) getting distracted, (b) releasing a sub-par product too soon, (c) having too many features, (d) no plan to escape the "technospehere" i.e. you (and me).
This is a great read. - Justin Kan - member of the Kiko team (founder/programmer)
Says it's demise stemmed from (a) getting distracted, (b) Hiring wrong, (c) "cute hacks" "Take the time to do things right from the beginning" (d) Working from home, (e) Not getting investors involved, (f) trying to do it all at once.
Ouch. Fantastic lessons.
The Peanut Gallery:
- Dharmesh Shah - Blogger at OnStartups "Google is the new Microsoft"
- Stowe Boyd - Web 2.0 dude extraordinaire. Says they didn't release too early, they released "with too little of the social dimension in place."
- David Heinemeier Hansson - of 37signals, creator of Ruby on Rails. "Google does not win by default in any territory it enters."
- Don Dodge - of Microsoft's Emerging Business Team. "Calendars are a feature, not a company."
MailBuild
August 18, 2006 in 5 out of 5 stars, Email newsletter management, Hosted softwareMailBuild: MailBuild is an email newsletter tool built just for web designers. You design a template for each client and they log in to their own account to manage their subscribers, create and send their own emails and view reports on the results. Freshview (formerly Switch I.T.) I've been using Freshview's other product, Campaign Monitor, for over a year to manage my email campaigns. It's still the best software out there to send email campaigns for yourself and your clients. But I've had several clients for whom Campaign Monitor wasn't a fit because they wanted to create and send their own (good looking) email newsletters. To meet that need, Dave Greiner and company now bring us MailBuild. It's a great tool for your clients that want to take control of their own email marketing. The idea is a simple one. You design an email template for each of your clients using the simple MailBuild template
system. Your clients can then log into their own account, add their own content to each newsletter using a very cool and easy to use AJAX-based editor, and send it to their own subscribers. As with Campaign Monitor, they can also see great looking reports on the results of their campaign and easily add and remove subscribers to their account. The entire interface is so polished and can be re-branded to look like your own product. Your clients can even log into their account from your own web site. Freshview have a knack for polishing their interfaces so that they
hold your hand, and read your mind, and this is no exception. These guys really are an inspiration for how to properly do a web app. In an effort to keep things simple, they don't yet allow custom fields. This might be a nice addition, and Dave has indicated that if the demand is there, he'll add it. Like Campaign Monitor, you pay $5 + 1 cent per email. You pay on behalf of your clients so there's plenty of room to charge each client a marked-up fee for your management of it. Reviewed by Carson McComasWhat is it?
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