What Makes Your Business Different?
Wanted to vector you onto a business strategy post from my other blog, CNCCookbook. It goes like this: Having founded 4 Silicon Valley startups and participated in success and failure at 3 others, I’ve learned a little bit about making a business successful. I write another blog called Smoothspan that specifically discusses business strategy for entrepreneurs, but I [...]
Turning Pro and The Lunch Pail Manifesto
Long-time readers will know that I am a serial entrepreneur and I love small businesses. I also love the way America used to be before Wall Street became a game of building bubbles from which to plunder other’s savings and manufacturing became a game of outsourcing. I still believe we can get back to those [...]
Why I’m Dropping InstantSlideup Like a Hot Potato
This is one of those minor personal rants that come up from time to time. What good is having a blog if you have to be all serious and to the point all the time? I recently had tried a little piece of software called “InstantSlideup” (not gonna link to them as I don’t want [...]
The Two Most Desirable Features of a Platform as a Service
Big Data? Multitenancy? Uber DB scaling? Mad Hadoopishness? Faster app development? Universal Social Connectivity? Not so much. Some platform or other claims all of those things, but the two most desirable features of a PaaS appear to be revenue generation and commodity pricing, not necessarily in that order. Let me first say that I’ve come [...]
There’s a New Sheriff in Town and His Name is “Content”
Just read a great top-level overview of Google’s Panda on SEOMoz. If you haven’t been following Panda, or you’re not involved with marketing much, it is Google’s latest algorithmic attempt to minimize the ability to game search results. This article is at a good level for CEO’s, Board Members, Investors, and other Interested Parties to [...]
The Bubble Has Begun With the Most Expensive Stock In America
It’s official, the current Bubble has begun with LinkedIn’s IPO. It was declared the most expensive stock in America even before doubling which means its now clearly way past Bubble territory. Exciting stuff! LinkedIn’s PE is 62 times Apple’s, 50 times Google’s, but less than 4 times Salesforce.com’s. Wow, AAPL and GOOG look like Value [...]
Pitfalls of Free Content and Inbound Marketing
Let me start this article by saying it’s not intended to be a negative article against free content or inbound marketing. Rather, I want to talk about some of the strategic considerations when you use these tactics. I believe wholeheartedly that, properly employed, there are no better tactics for building your customer base and [...]
Efficient Marketing Means Doing Something Different
Startups have to solve three problems to succeed: 1. They need a great product. 2. They need a business model that results in profitable growing revenue. 3. They need an efficient marketing model that results in a profitable growing customer base. As Om Malik’s great post on business models and Twitter points out, too many [...]
Who is Your Chief Content Officer?
Who do you see when you look around the table at your fresh young startup? The usual suspects are likely all there. A set of executives that likely includes a CEO, a VP of Engineering or Products, a VP of Marketing and / or a VP of Sales (not all startups have both, but most [...]
Bootstrappers: The New is Not for Everyone. Pass the Others By.
Seth Godin touches on one of my favorite themes today. Here is the money quote: Experienced marketers and artists and those that make change understand that the new is not for everyone. In fact, it’s not even for most people. Pass them by. They can catch up later. This is some of the best advice [...]
