How to Startup! (not being a programmer)
May 5, 2009 | 1 Comment
I gave this presentation last night at our third BarCampBuffalo. Sorry there’s no audio (or some examples of my pencil mockups, or RFP spreadsheet):
Start-up Roadmap?
May 4, 2009 | 1 Comment
I received a question from someone that I thought was a good one:
After doing some research and a lot of googling I´ve a lot of resources in
different areas (customer development, project managment, agile development,
business plans, etc). I feel frustrated trying to glue all this together in
a practical order so that I can feel I have a horizon (a road map) to start
with. Is there such a thing ?
I sent this out to a few people to see what recommendations they’d give. Brad Feld said “If there is, it’s useless. There’s not a roadmap for starting a company – just a zillion little pieces to put together in unique ways each time.”
I agree with that, but having some kind of outline to help you consider those zillion little pieces, would be good — even though not every start-up will have to consider the parts.
Dave McClure said, “I agree with Brad that every journey is unique, but there are probably a few places that can help speed you along the path. You might try http://startupcompanylawyer.com as one resource, http://venturehacks.com as another.
Fred & Brad’s blogs are also great places to start. Don’t know how much of the old Garage site is still around, but Guy Kawasaki’s blog might also have some useful refs.”
David Cohen of TechStars chimed in and recommended Guy’s book The Art of the Start, which is “one book that seems fairly timeless. This will at least give you a good list of things to think about. Obviously, it will never be comprehensive to a particular startup.”
Here’s a link to some presentations by Guy’s Garage.com for building a company.
Any other good resources? Please list them in the comments.
Thanks Brad, David, and Dave for the input.
RE: The First Ten Things the New CEO of MySpace Should Do
April 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Response to Jason’s MySpace To-Do list:
Staffing Plan for a Widget Startup Company
April 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment
I’m interested in what a staffing plan typically looks like for a widget startup company, like: MyBlogLog, Lijit, IntenseDebate, Disqus, etc.
What’s needed initially til launch? After launch, at what # of installs do you need: community manager; relationship manager (someone proactively engaging Publishers to install the widget), etc?
Anyone have any info on this? Any links to some public staffing plans? [I'd love to see what MyBlogLog had planned for, then what it really looked like]
BarCamp Buffalo #3 (May 4, 2009 @ 6:30PM)
April 7, 2009 | 1 Comment
We’re trying something a little different this time — we’re going to have a theme at this BarCamp, which this time around will be Social Media (anything related to blogging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). You can still present on anything, but hopefully it’ll be related in some respect to the theme.
We’re starting a little earlier, 6:30pm — with plans to begin presentations at 7pm. We’re going to do 10-minute presentations. We’ll do 6-8 presentations, then take a 30-minute networking break (where you can speak with those who just presented).
Then we’ll do another 6-8 presentations, then allow people to dive into further conversation with the speakers on their topics, as well as other networking.
Here are some ideas of what you might present on (or others will present on):
• Building a Twitter app
• Software/tools to help you blog, tweet, build FB/Twitter apps, etc
• How LinkedIn can help you find a job
• Everything you do on the web is there forever, don’t screw up you reputation
• How to make money from a Facebook or Twitter app
• Building a Facebook app
• Ideas for making your app viral
• Getting attention
Wish to present? Sign-up here: http://barcamp.org/BarCampBuffalo
Follow what others are saying about the event on Twitter (@BarCampBuffalo):
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=barcampbuffalo
Suggestions? Comments? Do share, we want to hear them. Just tweet a message with ‘@barcampbuffalo’ in it, and everyone will see it.
Please RSVP to event here:
http://digg.com/u1Qtn
If You Suck, You’re Dead
April 4, 2009 | 2 Comments
I recently had an awful experience with United Airlines and feel 100% unsatisfied by how they handled the situation. I made a commitment to them in January, when I paid them money for airfare from BUF->AUS roundtrip (for my annual trek to SXSW). My flight was for Thursday morning, the day before SXSW started (which cost me $400 for admission). I watched as delays due to ‘mechanical failure’ kept delaying my flight, it reached about 2.5 hours (I didn’t wait that long, they were pushing it out that long), that I knew I’d miss my connecting flight to AUS (from IAD) — so I knew that’d be a mess if I actually got to Dulles and then was stuck there.
I spoke with someone via their 800 number, who told me to call a different 800 number, who then said to speak with someone at the actual ticket counter. (What!?) So after those many minutes of my life were destroyed, they told me they “were sorry” and that they could get me out on a flight Saturday morning. “SATURDAY MORNING?! WTF!” I mean, wtf. I NEED to be in Austin. This isn’t the first time they’ve had problems with an airplane — have planes in reserve, even if only at your main hub (IAD) and fly them over. “But sir, we can give you your money back.”
Give me my money back? Are you f’ing kidding me right now? I don’t want my money back, I want to arrive in Austin Texas. Today. “Sorry sir.”
I’m sorry, but that’s not acceptable to me. My forced option was having to go on Southwest.com and drop another $384 on a one-way flight from BUF->AUS, so I could get out of Buffalo that day. Had I known I was going to drop this much additional, I wouldn’t have been such a cheapskate in the first place when I “saved” $250 by booking via United, rather than Southwest.
I let it go and decided I’d deal with it once I got back from the trip — and thus, I wanted United to reimburse me for $384. Through many emails and calls with Indians (no offense, but I want to speak to an American that I can understand), they offered me a $25 gift certificate on future United travel. “WTF?!” Then they eventually boosted it to $35 after more angry emails to them.
Wow, Thanks United. I’m done with you. I will never fly United Airlines again in my life. I have felt shafted and never want to be shafted by them again if this incident were to arise again. I purchased airfare to Belgium a couple days ago — and I paid a little extra as to not fly United Airlines.
The Internet has become a beautiful, beautiful thing. In the past year, Twitter and Facebook Status updates (aka “micro-blogging”) have really come to fruition — and in years to come, there’s only going to be more of it. It’s the new “word of mouth” marketing — only now, when I bitch about a brand, it doesn’t go out to the 1 or 2 people that I’m telling next to me — it goes out to the world; specifically though, it goes out to all of my friends/contacts, whom I have some influence with. In Twitter I have 816 followers, this blog has 1,219 readers, and in Facebook I have 334 friends. Granted, there’s overlap. But if even only 100 people see my message — heck, they may tell their friends about how Steve Poland got the shaft from United Airlines, and they might join my boycott, because they are sick of airlines treating consumers with zero respect. (Heck, I might get this post digg’d the the homepage of digg and have a legion of United Airlines Boycotters).
United Airlines — You Suck, and I hope you are one of the companies that will go belly-up BANKRUPT in the next 5 years, as word-of-mouth on the web starts to hold all companies accountable for their actions and customer service. When I look at your logo, I visualize a middle finger in it and you’re telling me to go screw myself. Well, this writing is my middle finger back to you.
The age of (near) full transparency is here. I say “near”, because we can’t see the shady stuff going on inside companies, but maybe anonymous Twitter accounts will start popping up with insider-employees at companies ratting out their own companies on shady activities.
Google’s New Competitor: 1 Geek
April 3, 2009 | 2 Comments
Aside from all the marketing problems of having the next Google and getting people to use it (not to mention the huge pool of advertisers Google has w/AdWords; nor to mention all the filtering of spam webpages that exist out there), in the past couple of days, some really neat services have released that will allow any single programmer to build their own Google at minimal cost. I’m really excited by this.
Hadoop is an open-source program that Yahoo, Wikia Search (R.I.P.), Facebook, Powerset (MSFT acquired for $100mm and likely is relaunching this technology w/$100mm of new branding, code named ‘Kumo‘ at the moment) and others use to process/index tons of webpages on the Internet. Amazon.com just announced Amazon Elastic MapReduce, basically allowing anyone to easily do web-scale data processing (Hadoop was actually inspired/based on Amazon’s MapReduce).
Next, a startup called 80legs got to strut their stuff at the Web 2.0 Expo in SF. 80legs allows anyone to easily crawl the web quickly — up to 2 billion pages a day (there’s over a trillion on the web).
No longer does one need to invest a boatload of money for a 1000 servers to handle Hadoop (only to find-out they can’t pull off the next Google competitor).
Open Letter to Airlines (United Airlines et al)
March 12, 2009 | 4 Comments
I’m disgusted. I’ve been disgusted. I can’t believe how low the bar is that your industry works towards. You suck. Every single one of you, except Southwest and JetBlue. You’re never on-time. You don’t care that you’re not on-time. When you’re not on-time, you piss everyone off that’s involved (passengers; people waiting to pickup passengers at destination; flight attendants & crew because passengers are cranky; desk clerks; etc).
Your planes are always undergoing “mechanical failures”. Why? And OK, so this isn’t news — it happens to you, how many times per day? Either get more mechanics, or get more planes that sit idle, waiting for your planes to fail, so that you can use them with your customers. You all have your main “hubs”, just keep extra planes there.
And stop booking so many flights; because you obviously can’t keep up with them.
You wonder why you’re all bankrupt and going out of business? It’s because you SUCK. The only reason I use you, is because killing 13 hours of my day in airports (today) is faster than 26 hours in a car (Buffalo -> Austin). [Ideally it was supposed to be 6 hours, but you don't care about me, so I don't know why I'm writing this]
I’m done with you. Forever. I slacked and got cheap; I started using Orbitz. I got hooked on their SMS text reminders; so nice to know when your gate changes and when flights are delayed. (BTW, why do you delay a flight 8x in 15-min intervals? Seriously, you don’t know when you do the first delay, that it’s going to be longer than 15-mins? Delay it 2 hours, and just do it. Also, why do you change the gate like 8x? Just make up your mind, this gate or the other. I was on crutches at O’Hare when you literally switched the gate 8x, I have all the SMS texts to prove it. That’s not cool for someone that’s handicapped in a wheelchair [on crutches, they give you wheelchair service, so your armpits don't bleed walking miles at O'Hare]).
I’m going to spend whatever it costs to only fly Southwest Airlines and JetBlue. That is my pledge. I have loved Southwest for years; they are on-time 95% of the time; they leave on-time; arrive on-time; don’t delay (although 20min delay currently for my flight out today); they don’t charge for your 1st checked bag; etc.
Southwest, I’m sorry I flirted with a cheaper date; I’ll never leave you again.
AngelConf - my notes from Angel Investing conference
March 5, 2009 | 11 Comments
My apologies for any typos, etc. These are some blurbs I made notes of from the AngelConf conference put on by Paul Graham of Y Combinator. It’s available apparently as a ‘clip’ at Justin.TV here.
Ron Conway
• “have to have a portfolio, to have hits”
• “it’s not fun; it’s hugely interesting to talk to entrepreneurs who literally in front of you are telling you the future”.
• “spend 25% of my time in philanthropy”
• Need to be very dedicated to angel investing.
• Don’t invest in someone you don’t really like; life is too short. Have personal chemistry.
• You have to have value to add; you won’t get into the great deals [they have allocation problems; you have to fight your way in].
• Be patient;
• I recommend investing in a bunch of companies. [he invests 50k-100k]
• 10k-25k to get your feet wet.
• 1/3 of them will go out of business. Failure is part of learning process.
• Pick a sector you like; I like sectors that are Internet and have massive growth. Invest in several companies in that sector.
• Great deal flow (respect for entrepreneurs to get the access) and due diligence = great portfolio.
• Build a referral network of entrepreneurs that you can invest in with, etc.
• Reputation is very important – screw 1 entrepreneur, you’re screwed.
• As lead angel, you need to take the entrepreneur to Sand Hill Road and you help them get funded.
Dave McClure
• 13 deals personally in 4 years.
• Plan to screw up the first 10 investments.
• If goal is making money, this isn’t your thing.
• How does an entrepreneur define success
Paul Bucheit
• No signing of an NDA; if an entrepreneur requests one, they probably don’t have a clue.
• Assume the money you invest is gone; it’s like lottery tickets.
Andrea Zurich
• SGVentures
• Do I like the product? Would I be proud to speak about it at thanksgiving or to my parents?
• Can you explain it quickly?
Page Mailliard [Page Mailliard is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she specializes in corporate, securities, and venture capital law.]
• Who are clients? Do they have contracts with them?
• Is there a provision on change of control they can terminate?
Paul Graham
• You buy either stock [shares like preferred stock] or convertible debt; either works; don’t worry about it.
• Pick the right startups. When they talk about you, it’ll be, “He invested in Google!”
• You care about valuation and amount of money you put in.
• Dilution occurs next.
• Invest 10k – 2mm; how much? If startup raising 1mm, 50k is OK – 10k isn’t worth the work for them.
• Valuation – no rational way; no answer.
• If the idea doesn’t seem a bit crazy, then you’re probably too late to the deal. It’s ok for it to be a bit crazy.
Naval Ravikant
• Need tons of deal flow
• Use time efficiently; yours, the entrepreneurs.
• Deals from social friends;
• High quality deals come from other angels [they are putting their money in it].
• Don’t forward deals to other investors unless you’re investing in it.
• What’s your brand as an angel? [I’m the VentureHacks guy; I’m of Y Combinator]
• 2-3 founders.
• Don’t take board seats – waste of time.
• Very risky business
Michael Dearing
• Orbiting the giant hairball – book.
Mike Maples Jr.
• #12 – minimum number for statistical diversification.
• Met with 100 investors in 100 days
• $25k per quarter; 1 deal per quarter.
• Lived in Austin; moved to valley 4 years ago.
• If the startup cant be one of the big billion dollar businesses, not worthy of your time. We want the big deals in the end, be apart of the excitement.
• Book by ‘talo’ – ‘fooled by randomness’
Ariel Poler
• Balance your time – might spend 1 day a week with a company at first; then every other week; now at 500 people, hardly ever.
• Once a quarter, organize a lunch for 4-5 entrepreneurs; choose a topic. Get them to help one another.
• Connecting entrepreneurs with the right people is a big piece.
Panel of Dave Hornik and Greg Mcadoo from Sequoia:
• Must tell the story efficiently as an entrepreneur
• Big business opportunity.
Aydin Senkut
• Don’t do convertibles.
• “how do you differentiate and add value to something?”, so that others can talk about you and recommend you.
• You need to be a connector; you need to meet people 1on1, and that’s how you meet really great people and companies.
• 40 investments; 4 exits.
Jeff Clavier
• 32 investments in 18 months; 250k each.
• Big weights: founders, market scale, etc. Eventually scale tips.
• Not being sure it’s a sure shot, but taking the shot anyway.
• 74 deals in one year.
• Don’t write the first check; don’t lead the investments as a new angel. [you need a syndicate of others that’ll join you]
• Be content dealing with shit 24 hours a day.
Jim Young
• Why should a good entrepreneur pick you?
• There’s more money, than possible investments.
• Takes less money now to do a startup.
• Will the company benefit from your advice? [not money] If no, it’s likely a bad deal.
• Contacts, experience, advice.
• Only invest in things you know about, otherwise you’re a spectator buying a lottery ticket.
• Find people to invest with.
• “why you want to do this?”
• You’re at bleeding edge of technologies.
• Very very high chance you’ll never see the money back.
Michael Arrington
• It’s “co-opetition” – they are all competitors in the crowd, but helping you to become another new competitor.
• “More than a hobby, than a job”
• If you enjoy doing what you do, you’ll have better access to deals, and firmer friendships with other investors.
• Have to be nice.
• As an angel, you’re shepherding the entrepreneur through a process.
Twitter Username Management Script (TUMS)
February 23, 2009 | 6 Comments
The script is no longer for sale.
Purchase of the script entitles you to one license for commercial or personal use, but not resale. Upon your purchase, the script is available via secure download link as a zip with all the files needed and an easy installation readme file (see below to see this). I even include limited support if you’re having problems or questions. The script cost me $2,000 to have coded. Below is info on the script, installation info, and screenshots.
TUMS is a script I had coded to manage multiple Twitter usernames. The script will update details on each username and it will also automate tweets to each username from RSS feeds you supply for each username. I use it to manage 250+ sports teams Twitter accounts I have — I have multiple RSS feeds for each specific team, and it then sends out tweets of new headlines for each team from the specific RSS feeds for each team.
The script easily allows you to upload a CSV file with details on each of the accounts: username, password, background image location, avatar image location, profile details (location / name / more info URL / one line bio), profile design details (bgcolor / font color / link color / sidebar fill color / sidebar border color), and then 5 RSS feeds. You could increase the # of RSS feeds with a simple change to the script.
CRON’s run on your server, polling the RSS feeds that are individually specified for each username and pulls the latest headlines. The CRON then tweets out 1 new headline every 15 minutes on each username, using the latest headline in the queue. It then keeps going through the queue for each username until it empties — if the RSS feeds supply tons of headlines for a username, then it may never get to most of the items (they remain in the queue). You can alter the script to change this — we just didn’t want to spam users.
The CRON grabs the link to the headline, it then creates a new URL for the headline, which links to a domain you specify. When the page loads, a tiny FRAME loads at the top of the page that kind of looks like the Gmail infobar. In this infobar are arrows for the user to flip amongst more headlines tied to your Twitter username, along with a link back to the Twitter account. See an example of one of my accounts here: Sabres, and an example article page that a tweet links out to.
Libraries needed are included in the zip as well. There is a config file that makes installing this very easy. In the zip is an “install.txt” file to help you install it:
## TUMS Requirements
PHP 5.2
MySQL 5
Apache 2 with mod_rewrite enabled
## How to install TUMS
1. Move the contents of the html folder in to a folder on your server that is web accessible.
2. Importing the sql file in to your database. There are a few ways this can be done. Just import via software, website, or command line to your mysql server. If using the command line, you’ll want to use ‘mysql -u <username> -p tweetrss < tweetrss.sql’
3. Edit the file html/lib/config.php. Here you will want to change anywhere that says yourdomain.com to your own domain. The same goes for /your/public_html/ and the mysql settings.
4. Next you will want to add three scripts to cron at the suggested intervals. You will want to change the locations.
/your/public_html/lib/cron/follower_track.php - Nightly
/your/public_html/lib/cron/read_rss.php - Every 30 Minutes
/your/public_html/lib/cron/twitter_post.php - Every 30 Minutes
5. Open each of the files at the top, and change the include path /your/public_html/lib/config.php to the correct one.
6. The last step requires us to set a password for the admin section. First edit /admin/.htaccess Fix the path /your/public_html/admin/.htpasswd Then edit admin/.htpasswd Go to the following site http://home.flash.net/cgi-bin/pw.pl , pick a username and password, then paste the bold line. It should look like “test:sYBAcFwKi/y..” (no quotes) You can also use htpasswd from the command line if you know how.
## TUMS Screenshots
USER LIST SCREENSHOT - this is the script’s homepage and gives an overview of your accounts.
USERNAME DETAILS PAGE - this shows specific details for a username and allows you to have that username’s info on Twitter be updated using these details (which are inputted via the main CSV upload). You may use this manual update if you update the background image on your server, then have the script run so that the background image is then updated/uploaded to Twitter.
FEED STATS - this displays each RSS feed you’re pulling from for each username and the # of items in each of those feeds that you have stored in the DB.
IMPORT CSV FILE - this allows you to upload/import your CSV file that includes all the details of your Twitter usernames. Here’s an example CSV to give you a feel of what you’ll put in it (passwords are left blank in example).
UPDATE USER INFO - after you import your CSV script, you then need to update your Twitter accounts by running this script. The ‘New Accounts’ are new accounts you added, and will just update those on Twitter. The ‘All Accounts’ will update every attribute of every account you have with Twitter.
Note: Most won’t ever have this problem, but: At the moment, if you no longer use an account, or Twitter revokes one of yours, you will need to manually remove it from the DB — but you could just leave it in there, it just won’t validate, but it won’t break anything.
UPDATE USER INFO *UPDATED* - this is what the screen looks like after you run the update script.
TWEETS SENT - this shows the latest tweets being sent from your system to your Twitter usernames, so you can ensure operations are working smoothly.
REPORTS - this shows the # of clicks per day on your articles, as well as the # of clicks to each article for the day that are posted via your usernames.
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- How to Startup! (not being a programmer)
- Start-up Roadmap?
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- Staffing Plan for a Widget Startup Company
- BarCamp Buffalo #3 (May 4, 2009 @ 6:30PM)
- If You Suck, You’re Dead
- Google’s New Competitor: 1 Geek
- Open Letter to Airlines (United Airlines et al)
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