Instrumenting Startup Success

My co-founder will forgive me (in time) for relaying some quality content that he gushed today on our morning call:

"There is a variance in which companies at an early stage will care about instrumenting their successes. It is certainly possible to bypass instrumentation altogether and just chase targeted traffic, but your churn problem can eat you alive, and even if you somehow power your way through the churn problem with massive piles of cash or because you rode a trend-wave to success, you'll plateau and start to suck. I've seen the inside of these two approaches, and though both of my example companies ended up being successful, I know that the company that cared more about the instrumentation had a well-oiled machine when they finally reached scale.

The company that didn't focus on instrumenting their analytics now has a nightmare scenario on their hands in trying to understand what people want as they try to move into more profitable markets. They have mountains of data, but its painful to extract and report on it."

Hold Your Nose and Go!

The divide between business professionals and engineering professionals spawns hundreds of heartfelt discussions among cliques of engineers and business types every day. Fundamentally, they are about the differences and divisions between these groups who both believe that theirs is the group that brings the most value to the business. At former employers, it could be heard from very senior engineers that engineering is where the rubber meets the road in the value creation of a business venture. Business types would argue that the products can be great, but without great vision and great marketing, the venture would be sunk.

Further, engineers see the world through meritocratic eyes, while business types seem to see things though an opportunistic lens. One side favors hustle and grit, the other favors the pursuit of quality and fairness. And ne'er the twain shall meet.

That's why its so hard to do this entrepreneur stuff.

If you're an engineer, good luck starting a company if you're not willing to hold your nose and go to networking meeting and develop business plans and work with business types who are often unsavory and materialistic (from your perspective).

If you're a business type, good luck starting a business without 1) either finding meritocratic engineering talent, or 2) holding your nose and doing the engineering stuff yourself. All the guys like you who can do the engineering stuff... they won't partner with you. They're too busy executing on their own vision. [1]

You're a product of nurture here. You were surrounded by people like yourself all this time while you worked for other people. They influenced your thinking, your attitude toward members of the opposite role, and they taught you what was all wrong with the other side's approaches. You've been sold a way of thinking, and its really hard to get past those biases.

If you're an engineer, you owe it to yourself to immerse your career into a marketing- or sales-driven company. You'll learn so much about what kinds of things you need to do to thrive in a very hostile and thick-skinned market. Hiding behind overly-technical descriptions of stuff won't help you here. It will isolate you and kill your chance to learn anything from people around you.

If you're a business guy, well, there are lots of quasi-technical roles at small companies that will give you a chance to engage with engineers. You might consider leaving your double-talking and business lingo (BS) at home.

Just hold your nose, and go!

[1] Which brings up an interesting point: the people that are the wrong kind of partners are the kind that easily say yes. Not that they're bad people, but they've either 1) got no vision or drive to work on stuff themselves, or 2) too nice to say no. Either way, not a good fit for you right now.

How to Start a Business in a Competitive Market

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Jonathan George, founder and former CEO of Boxcar.io — the first push-notifications-as-a-service platform for iOS - which he recently sold to Kwaga

You're starting late.

A few years too late or maybe just a few months. Either way, you're already running behind someone else. They've learned a few things that work and some things that don't.

Your natural reaction is to look at what they've built and start to build it yourself, too. All of it. Every little feature, you think you need to match.

You don't.

Stop worrying about playing catch-up with the other people in your market. Forget all of the extra bells and whistles that they each have. You have limited resources and you'll just spend forever chasing instead of pushing the entire market forward.

Focus on the core problem, release and expand outward from there. The rest of the functionality will define itself as you become more intimately familiar with the problem domain you're working in.

When he's not peppering fellow startup founders with inspiring sentiments, Jonathan is mentoring startups and building great teams to fearlessly attack big ideas. He blogs at jdg.net

RFID vs. Barcode: Why Inventory Processes are Seeing Red

At a company I previously worked for, we implemented solutions for tracking inventory. We were using a 3rd-party-supplied mobile platform to track inventory and push all the data into a big, expensive, well-known asset and business process management suite. The companies involved were all Gartner magic-quadrant vendors, but the reality was that the solution still generally sucked, as most all such software applications do. Don't get me wrong, these companies are pushing hard, but they're still light-years behind where they could be.

It turns out that inventory management is hard to improve upon without taking on a big, risky investment. Thus, in most companies, cycle-counting is still a drudgery and though mobile apps have improved this a bit, its still a big tedious effort. And yearly inventory audits are generally still nightmarish. You would think that there's enough money tied up in these processes that someone would have solved it by now.

They tried to solve it with RFID. That was the darling concept of the mid-to-late nineties. Companies fell over themselves trying to find out the merits of this ground-breaking idea. Some, such as America's largest retailer, even made bad PR mistakes by touting their forward-thinking inventory requirements which all hung on implementing RFID. Turns out, most business analysts couldn't get past the one sticking point with using RFID for inventory:

• It doesn't really solve any inventory problems.

The core of inventory management is knowing what you have in stock, not just guessing. Waving an RFID wand at a box or a shelf or walking a box of parts through an RFID gateway may give you a warm fuzzy feeling, but what it doesn't guarantee is an accurate count. It provides a guess. And by that I mean, unless you open the box or climb up on the shelf, you can't really tell if the inventory count is correct, or if some sneaky person just left the RFID tags and took the item or if there is a piece of lead sitting on top of your item.

RFID is generally an expensive way of giving you a guess as to whether there is really inventory that you expect to be there, and that really is the best case. Its expensive because the good tags aren't cheap and the inexpensive ones aren't detectable from a distance. If you have a warehouse of any size, rolling out an RFID implementation can run in the 6-digits from the expense of the tags themselves to the labor cost of training of workers and the actual installation of the tags. And when its all said and done, you have software and hardware that lets you guesstimate the inventory count. Nice.

Where RFID shines is in larger assets where you only want a sanity check. For everything else, its line-of-sight plus paper or good old red-laser barcoding.

Broad vs Narrow Marketing: Observed Outcomes

I am in the lucky position of being friends and business partners with a very sharp, very forward-thinking researcher and marketer by the name of Matt Tharp. Matt is currently focused on his new blog BreedLikeHabits, where he will be focused on writing about behavioral analysis with respect to its applications in internet marketing. In a recent conversation, he imparted some anecdotal wisdom to me concerning his experience with broad versus narrow marketing, in which he said:

"Marketing is easier to ramp up when you know exactly who/what you're targeting. For a long time, web companies in the post-bubble era have been marketing to "people looking for product x", which has worked OK for a lot of those businesses, but it has rarely allowed them to create a more proactive marketing approach until they started focusing on one (profitable) target audience. At that point, they are finally able to begin marketing to decision-makers and are able to grow faster.

I've worked at two companies that have tried the broad and the narrow audience approach. One has always effectively done vertical segment and persona marketing, which allowed them to focus the message and content. The company that focused on the narrow audience approach started the same year as the company that followed the large-audience approach and grew to essentially 30x the size in the same period."

Its an interesting and telling anecdote if two companies, presumably with similar market sizes, would have so much different outcomes by using two predominantly different marketing approaches. Certainly there could be other factors, but Matt's anecdote lines up with what a lot of other folks have been pointing out: if you want to be successful in growing your business you first have to know who your audience really is.

If you're not following Matt, you should. He has a lot of things going on under the hood at BreedLikeHabits that will be surfacing soon.

Apps for the Enterprise: Upcoming Topics

In the coming weeks, as I'm wrapping up my first Startup Blog Topics series, I'm going to shift gears and start talking a bit more about the implications of building apps for the enterprise. If you're building software for enterprise clients, or are looking for software solutions to meet your enterprise needs, we'll be touching on topics related to that. Upcoming (varied) topics include:

• RFID vs. Barcode: Why Inventory Processes are Seeing Red

  RFID solutions are relatively simple and cheap to implement, so what is preventing companies from adopting RFID in a meaningful way? Why is barcode asset tracking still the inventory method of choice for many applications?

• Features that Sell Enterprise Products

  A brief look at a few features that your product is going to need if you expect to sell in the enterprise market.

• How to Price Products for An Enterprise Market

  When it comes to pricing, the enterprise is more practical than you think. In this post, we'll go into a few ways that you can create a justifiable price-tag for your products.

• The Mobile Platform Paradox

  Large companies are so used to using 3-5 year-old technology, but the mobile space has so far surpassed what the enterprise is doing that they can't keep up with the shift, and its creating pressure to continually reconsider their platform of choice.

• Employee On-boarding Done Right

  Some companies' employee on-boarding process is straight out of a Dilbert comic. No guidance for day-one, no training, no meeting with upper management, no meeting on expectations, no on-boarding followup. This stuff shouldn't be this hard. We'll look at ways to do employee on-boarding right.

I'm jazzed to write about a few of these topics, and I'll link the title of each to the actual post once it's complete.

Building Products for the Enterprise Market

"Large companies are quite price-sensitive... Corporations will always base their purchase decisions against their internal cost of building the same products... You're out of the running if you use the wrong technology."

A week ago, I listed a set of topics that I would write about soon. I'm excited that I'm already getting to this particular topic, but I also feel bad because my startups need TLC and I'm procrastinating. So it goes.

Note: This post is based on anecdote and my experience inside several medium and extremely large companies. If you have your grain of salt ready, then lets get started!

1) Believe it or not, large companies really are price-sensitive when it comes to buying products

I know that nobody in software likes to say this, but its true. After all, companies are staffed by individuals who bring their own biases when researching software solutions. Often, large companies are price-sensitive enough that in the world of B2B and B2C marketing, they like to lump these folks in with the B2C market so that it doesn't destroy their marketing paradigms. But, it really is surprising, having worked inside large companies, how very price sensitive they are.

Now, a large company isn't going to balk at a one-time purchase that varies $20 to $50 from the low-end solution, but they do get consternated about cost differences when it scales. So whereas in pricing your product you may think in terms like "I can sell this company a 10-seat license. At $50 per-seat license, their costs will fall in the comfortable range of $500/year", they're thinking "Well, geez, what if we expand and roll this out to 10,000 users, those $50 per seat fees are going to eat us alive!" Businesses in growth industries tend to translate those prices into a much larger multiplying factor than what you may be targeting, even if their current expected number of seats makes your software interesting at first. So if you're selling per-seat licensing, at the very least you may want to include price-breaks at certain levels to bring that price down into tolerance, because corporations will make somewhat ridiculous calculations based purely on a potential for expansion.

I worked for a software product company once where we brought in a reporting-solution vendor that we were considering for integration into our $30,000 application. Understanding our price points, they wanted somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 per installation. I had done the evaluation and the company demonstrated every kind of integration we wanted and it played very nicely with our software. I was surprised when the vendor came huffing out of a close-door meeting along with his regional sales manager and our marketing team. They seemed quite put-out. We wanted a price in the range of $30 per installation, 0.1% of our install price.

2) Corporations with IT shops will always perform a buy versus build analysis

Oftentimes, it isn't even important that they can get the software 3 months sooner by buying it from you. Some companies certainly may have what they call a time-preference, and it matters a lot to them to get things faster. But companies are so used to buying software that takes months to integrate, and are so used to planning months in advance for things, that unless it solves a real pain point right now, a time preference just doesn't factor in as an advantage for you. But, where you can almost always compete is on a price basis that is relative to their internal costs.

Where I worked before, they had internal per-hour costs of between $75 and $100/hr. So whenever they would estimate something, they multiplied the projected number of hours to complete by those per-hour values to arrive at the estimate. That will be the basis of comparison. If the cost is less or it's about the same as buying it off the shelf, and it creates a new internal capability for them, then they'll choose to build instead of buy. If the cost to build it internally, after factoring licensing and consulting support costs, if it costs less, they will build it themselves. So, there is a limit to what companies will pay. It's not as subjective as you think.

Another caveat: If you are selling a completed large software package to a business with an IT shop, then there is one extra benefit where you can capture enormous value that throws out the whole "What would it cost if we built it?" calculation. That benefit is that the product is complete. And by that I mean you successfully built it. This is a benefit because corporate IT has a long history of failed software projects, and they tend to have doubts about their ability to build fairly complicated software internally. This is probably where the most blue-sky is sold in software. If that isn't the primary driver for IBM's and Oracle's success (its probably brand at this point) then its a secondary reason.

So it may seem arbitrary from your perspective, and you think "Geez, companies really pay a lot for software", its really not arbitrary at all. Its just that their tolerance for paying is based on their internal costs. Its not really a value perception, its whether they can build it or not or whether they will get any other benefit from building it themselves (such as training the new guy to develop apps).

At one very, very large firm, I was tasked with evaluating mobile asset tracking software. The vendors were very astute. They were charging very close to what it would cost us to build the same solution, so to us the pricing was very reasonable, and it had the added benefit of ongoing support and limited upgrades. However, they lost the bid simply because we felt like we wanted to develop the mobile development capability within our staff.

3) You're out of the running if you use the wrong technology

The #1 requirement you're going to run into all the time is that companies want to self-host their solutions, and if they want to self-host, they'll probably only tolerate 3-4 technologies. Generally those technologies are:

• .Net
• Java
• +1-2 random scripting languages (Perl, Ruby, Python, etc). Typically, these are only used for batch scripting, so don't get your hopes up.

If you're building a product that allows large companies to self-host, congratulations, you're halfway to an acceptable enterprise app. However, if you wrote the application server in Ruby, you probably won't have much success selling it. This is because companies won't want to have to bring their staff up to speed on Ruby to support it. So if you're going to write self-hosted client-server software for large enterprise, you need to consider building your product in Java or .Net. Also, you better build your software with the idea of integration with their existing systems otherwise, again, you'll be out of the running.

More about architecture considerations in an upcoming post. Also, in an upcoming post, we'll talk about an actual list of ideas for products you could build for this market.

[1] Note: We are really talking about price-sensitivity as it pertains to total-cost-of-ownership. In per-seat or per-installation licenses, they go nuts when the price is $20 more, but 1-time purchases create much less chaffing, even when there is an order of magnitude of price between competitors.

Generating Tons of Value While Lacking Focus

The reason why people want focus is because when they are unfocused, they don't seem to create much value. But, what if you could create as much value when you're completely unfocused? Lets spend a few minutes looking at that.

First off, when I talk about an unfocused individual, I don't mean lazy and tired and lacking motivation, I mean that they have a great amount of energy, but they can't seem to direct it at the right stuff. You're excited, energized, but you don't know how to use that energy. This is a common problem among lots of bright, talented folks.

The Power of Having Focus

We understand that focusing on a single idea to the exclusion of other things, is generally very productive. When you have focus and you're in the zone, focus is a multiplying factor for getting stuff done. Distractions are an inverse multiplier for creating productivity.

That's why, in a workplace setting, some great developers won't even talk to you until they've purged their entire cache of code before stopping to speak with you. At a company I worked for a while back, there was a developer there who would spend 30-90 seconds finishing his thought before we would even turn around and address you. It was awkward for everyone, but that was his way of clearing his cache and making sure he found a good stopping place he could return to at the end of the unwanted interruption.

Mental focus allows us to have a single, unbroken line of connected thought. It allows us to do a deep dive and see the next 10 moves we want to make. It allows us to be come the Bobby Fisher[1] of coding, of accounting, of metalwork, of brand analysis, or of real-estate. Focus allows us to see the big picture end-to-end and have all the context for the problem set in our head. This allows us to make smart decisions about how modifications in one part will have downstream effects elsewhere. Whereas, when you don't have the whole context in your head, the small changes you make aren't well thought-out and can have negative effects.

The Power of Lacking Focus

The cool thing is that focus is not necessarily the mother of creativity. Creativity happens in the world between concentration and random thought. If you concentrate on something too specific, it can destroy creativity. When you're in the weeds and unfocused, its a great time to be creative, to brainstorm.

As a developer, at the end of the night when I go home from my day job and I sit down and begin to think about the problems I can attack, the majority of the problems that I want to attack are way too large to fit into the time I have to write code. So, often the best use of that time, when I don't have enough to get into the zone, would be to brainstorm and come up with creative approaches to things, or come up with new ideas for businesses.

So, the power of being in the weeds and unfocused is that you can allow yourself some completely unhibited brainstorming of the most crazy things, crazy ideas that hopefully solve real problems. That's how you leverage a lack of focus.

The key is in recognizing whether you have time to focus, to get in the zone, or not. For me, its a good rule of thumb to say that if I have 2-3 hours of time to sit down and work uninterrupted, then I can knock out a fairly complex implementation and feel good about the result. However, if its 30 minutes or an hour, then I will default to my old habits of piddling around on HN, Reddit, or CNN. And that's where the problem lies, right? I'm using the lack-of-focus time to goof-off instead of being creative. I have defaulted into being a consumer and not a producer. Use that time to play. If I simply could play around with a new concept, whether it's riffing on a guitar, or coding up an experimental app, then that would be a powerful way to use my unfocused time.

Things to do when you can't focus (software startup edition):

• Draw mockups for that business idea you have.
• Setup a blog, write a blog post about your product idea.
• Get out your banjo, harmonica, or whatever, and write a jingle for your business
• Experiment on how to calculate LTV or COCA in your app.
• Think of a product hook, that is, a reason for a journalist to write about you.
• Research your competitors (be careful, this can be a trap), and come up with one feature that you can do better that they can.

Knowing when you have time to focus and when you should be creative takes discipline, because you'll want to default to your consumer mentality. It takes a certain amount of focus to be able to know when to focus. :). But, if you can convince yourself that unfocused time is creative play time, then you can extract a lot of value from that spare 30 minutes or an hour.

Who knew that lacking focus could be a superpower?

[1] Bobby Fisher was a chess champion who could visualize his next 12 moves on the chess board when playing against opponents.

CLOP

This is genius. A game with seemingly simple mechanics, but nearly impossible to beat. You keep playing because it just seems like it should be so simple, and it "vexes" you that you can't seem to get it right. Its also named in a way that makes it instantly recognizable.

Like QWOP before it, its fun, addicting, and awkward.

Its also great marketing for the follow-on apps in the app store, I'd bet.

Here are some ideas for building apps similar to QWOP/CLOP:

• MOP - A janitor, mopping the floor while leaning on his mop. Clean the floor, but don't lose your balance, else you start over.
• POP - Your car is driving down a bumpy road and your soda is sitting on the dash board. Swerve to create angular acceleration that keeps the pop can from spilling.
• PLOP - You're a waiter holding a platter of drinks. Control your arms to keep the drinks from spilling.

It is likely that these concepts don't have all the elements of an addicting game, but I can't help but feel that they aren't far off. Just some playful, Friday-afternoon ideas.

Startup Blog Topics: Upcoming Posts

Here are some topics that I'd love to write about soon, or else invite someone to write about with me. I think that doing a shallow-dive on these topics will create enough value that they are worth pursuing, however anecdotal the experience. I think these will have valid, relatable ideas with lots of useful and interesting content.

I will link the titles to the posts when they are complete.

• How to Get in the Zone, Or Not

  A look at the value of focus and how to attain it. Also, balancing in-the-zone with in-the-weeds, and deriving incredible value from both. I'd also like to title this post, 'Generating Tons of Value While Lacking Focus'. I'm excited about this one.

• Building Products for the Enterprise Market

  An early look at building products that target an enterprise audience, based on my experience building and analyzing line-of-business apps for the largest private enterprise in the world. Likely this will be a multi-part post.

• Connecting with Your Customers at the Right Moment

  A look at the reasons why you should move fast on a hot lead, and some tools to let you do that. Plus, how to get the most value out of lead-generation software. With special guest blogger Matthew Tharp of LogMeIn.

• How to Start a Business in a Competitive Market

  How to attack a competitive market with pure grit and an IDE. With special guest Jonathan George, former founder of recently-acquired Boxcar, who is working his latest, unnamed startup.

Note to self: Wow, now I've achieved the dopamine I wanted without having to actually write anything useful yet, yay! Writing about topics-I-want-to-write-about is addicting, and it generates a lot of extra work for me. I'll need to limit this kind of thing in the future, but at least I'm writing my goals down, right? Right!

To Share or Not to Share that Great Idea

Scott Mace and I used to exchange ideas for businesses all the time. We called it the Business Idea of the Day (BIOTD). We were both paying close attention to startups while we were running our own little company on the side, and we were generating a great idea just about every other day.

We've long-since stopped exchanging these ideas since Scott is busy building his company, AppSling. Its too bad, because we really made a good team when it came to generating/vetting ideas. We were both driven 'wantrepreneurs' and we built neat software, its just that at the time we weren't brave enough to start selling it. That's a separate subject in itself, but lets just leave it at that: fear.

My calculations have changed. I am brave enough to build software and then ask people to pay money for it. It took quite a while to get there. More on that in an upcoming post. But, the idea-generation has been hard(er) lately. I'm not sure why. Perhaps its because I don't have Scott anymore. More likely, I've been sharing ideas with the wrong people.

People who aren't inclined to entrepreneurship have a hard time seeing the potential of any idea. I spent a couple of years trying to convince another buddy of mine I worked with at a big company to work on various side-business ideas with me. I could never break through. Either he felt that the idea wasn't good enough, or he just didn't have the level of interest in participating at the ground level. This kind of constant-zero-value feedback from others has a net-negative affect on your ability and willingness to generate ideas and build products.

When they say bad friends can drag you down, its also true of entrepreneurship. A super-driven entrepreneur friend can fuel your fire to build products. A friend that poo-poohs every idea tends to extinguish your flame. I guess I'm saying that if you're driven, you might want to keep your ideas to yourself, lest you lose steam from interacting with negative people.

I do have about 5 ideas in my queue that I feel good about and that I want to share with someone, but I'm not sure I will. I think from now on, I'm going to wait to talk about ideas until after they get built. At which point, I'll have something interesting to say about the true potential of the idea. Until then, mum's the word.

A Marketing Idea for the Mobile Minded Business

"The reality is that SMS can be used for online lead generation as well as any web form can. And in the physical world, its hands-down better than the non-alternative of QR-codes."

In 2010, I worked alongside BoldChat founder Kent Johnson to build a startup called TextMyOffice. We were trying to find ways of invigorating his group-messaging company, SendGM, so we started it as a spin-off to try to chase vertical markets.

Before long, we had chatted-up a couple of potential customers and found that there was some interest, but we felt like no-one was really gung-ho on the TextMyOffice idea[1]. The problem was that everyone, including us, felt that SMS products were in the middle of their decline. Since smart-phones were taking over and QR codes were becomming popular, everyone just assumed that some set of apps would completely dry up the SMS market and it would die. Kent eventually lost interest in chasing the product, and he signed it over to me.

I didn't do much with it either, and in 2011 I finally mothballed the website. But, that seems like a mistake now. It seems quite obvious that SMS isn't dying. It has stayed strong despite an onslaught of chat apps and other communication tools. In fact, quite a few really smart companies have sprung up around SMS lately that suggests a very bright future for the medium. SendHub, for a great example.

The reality is that SMS can be used for online lead generation as well as any web form can. And in the physical world, its hands-down better than the non-alternative of QR-codes. If you're a realtor, you can put a short code on your realtor sign in front of houses and send information to customers who want price and size information. If you're a dealership you can put short codes on all your cars and in all your ads to provide info and capture leads. The best part of TextMyOffice, and the reason I am bringing it back to life, is that we can not only capture leads information, but hand-off the automated responder-initiated conversation to a live chat agent in your office.

We're not only bringing TextMyOffice back to life, but we're working to build the most advanced toolset for live-chat found anywhere in the SMS marketing world.

[1] TextMyOffice is an SMS company that lets you capture a lead (they text to a short code to get some automated reply with information) and then it allowed the customer to ask a question which either starts a live chat with you on your mobile, or directs the question to your office email addresses where a live coversation can continue with the customer.

The Mystery of Creating an Online Business

At least once a month, I have these recurring thoughts:

• Why isn't every possible market saturated yet?
• Why do I sit here, observing all these opportunities, and rate-limit myself by not attacking more of them?

I can tell you, from experience in running a small software company in a horizontal market, that it continues to baffle me that there is still room for more competition and more growth in the markets. I mean, I habitually create simple products in areas that you would consider a long-ago-solved-problem, and somehow I'm making it work. Granted, I'm not making a killing, but I have found it amazing[1] that I can even turn a profit!

Creating a successful business, I have found, has more to do with being willing to spend the time to execute on it rather than having to do with foresight, existing knowledge, or having sudden, miraculous market insights. Regardless of the kind of business you start, whether its a warm niche (something you know a lot about) or a cold-hearted horizontal market, you will never know how to be successful in it unless you actually start doing it, and keep doing it.

To illustrate my point:

Reading so much of Rob Walling's content as of late, I feel like its helping me get back to the fundamentals and re-energize myself to take on more of these opportunities I've been neglecting. Its helping me realize that building a business can be deliberate, formulaic, and mysterious at the same time. The cool thing is the mysterious bits fall away as you execute. Following Rob is also helping me realize that the opportunity-cost of dithering on picking the right idea or waiting for that one-in-a-million idea to come along is way too high to keep stalling.

Time to get building again!

[1] What's more unexpected in my travels is how your mindset changes after you pass a certain threshold. You stop doubting that you can succeed as a solo-entrepreneur or a small company and you stop waiting for success to happen. You begin to see that success in many kinds of businesses can be formulaic... and repeatable! Once that happens, your fear ebbs and the biggest barrier you face is dithering on the best idea to attack next.

Rob Walling Diet

So, I committed to a Rob Walling-only information diet last Friday, the reasons for which you can see in my previous posting. A quick status report will show that, thus far, I've failed miserably... but not for lack of trying!

It turns out, it is incredibly hard to maintain a focus on one source of content! But, I'm sticking to this. It will be totally worth it.

To my credit I have been reading/digesting a lot of Rob's content. The most surprising thing is that I've seen/heard most of this before. But, I've decided that's ok. I think my goal is now more about about building a frame-of-mind for niche-entrepreneurship.

To be clear, my new, more succinct goal is:

• Consume all of Rob Walling's content (and perhaps his suggested content) and completely avoid the dopamine-inducing hamster-wheel of Reddit, CNN, and Google News, and also avoid the chase-this-fad-technology posts from Hacker News, for the purpose of creating a zen-like frame of mind that is focused on entrepreneurship and building products.

Time to Stop Acting as the Content Filter

I remember the early days of Techcrunch, I tried to read everything. Before long, I wasn't keeping up, then I quit trying. It didn't help that Mike Arrington bashed my startup, CalendarHub, at the Under The Radar Conference. But after I stopped trying to read everything, I foolishly promised myself that I would eventually go back and read ALL Techcrunch articles. Silly, I know. But, I wanted to absorb as much good information as I could. I wanted to become a tech-startup dictionary.

I certainly don't feel that way anymore about Techcrunch. I haven't for a long time. The articles stopped being relevant to me sometime in 2007, quite a while after they had shifted from covering startups. But, I still have that feeling like I need to do a deep-dive like that. I have had the same thought about Hacker News. What if I just started from comment #1 and started reading? That's so unrealistic because of the number of comments, but it also poses the same problem. I don't want to have to read too much garbage just to extract a few good ideas.

Then, there's what Daniel Tenner said about brainwashing yourself by what you read. I think there is some merit there. If I'm going to do a deep-dive, I need to find a place where I can absorb everything and not be afraid that I'll come out with the wrong ideas about entrepreneurship or how startups should work.

So, then I thought, why not pick a startup founder/blogger who knows his stuff and literally read everything he's ever written? Surely this would finally rid me of this strong, long-held desire to deep-dive into startups and software entrepreneurship. It would also help me understand strategy and perhaps learn some new tactics that only a true deep-dive can uncover. So, my criteria seemed to be:

• Someone I've heard about who has impacted my thinking on startups.
• Has been writing about this stuff for a while.
• Doesn't write too many empty, fluff articles.
• Doesn't self-promote to the point that it's a distraction
• Someone who has actually built a successful startup.

That's a tall-order to be sure. Honestly I don't know of anyone who fits this description other than Rob Walling and Patrick McKenzie, though the former is almost disqualified by the amount of self-promotion he does, the latter is certainly disqualified by the lack of writing (but not by quality).

So, I guess what I'm saying is that I'm tired of acting as the primary filter to a storm of articles that want to infect my brain with their sales pitch. So I'm going to tie my wagon to someone for a while. Probably Rob Walling. My regimen will be to consume nothing but Rob's content until I've covered all his writings and videos. That means no HN, no CNN, and no Reddit until I come back up for air. Like the Twinkie Diet, this may be incredibly unhealthy, but I think it will have some positive results.

Granted, I'll still be meeting with founders, and will still occasionally watch the stray TV show, but I want as much isolation as possible so the ideas can soak in. A bit like the guru goes to the mountain to meditate. So, like a seminary student studies the ancient texts, so I will study Rob and his companies. It'll be like a one-way apprenticeship.

I'll let you know how this turns out.

Top Online Software Marketplaces

One of the perks of being a resident entrepreneur at a small consultancy is that you're given more freedom on developing new products. The downside is that with the freedom comes the expectation that you can figure out the nitty-gritty of getting a new product to market, despite having a background in engineering.

On the fortunate side of things, I do have a head full of splendid business ideas which I attribute to 10,000 hours of practice (reading HN, that is). So, I can usually spin up on an idea rather quickly. I can hash through all the technical bits in a jiffy and usually track-down and kill the technical unknowns in good time. The problem always comes when you actually have to start thinking in terms of how to get people to find the product in the marketplace. Here is where fortunate outcomes rely less on fortune and more on sheer willpower, as we shall see.

Turns out, in the last 3-5 years, lots of software marketplaces have sprung up to satisfy the need for developers[1] to get their products to market. That's a great development, but generally what that means is that every marketplace has its own platform and its own low bar for entry. And, because of the low bar, once you get inside the marketplace, the noise is so high that its hard to compete.

So, what's a guy to do if they want to avoid the business software CPC money-pit and get the cost of a customer acquisition down to $0? You have to acquiesce to the demands of the many marketplaces, and build a relevant/related product for each one in the hopes of driving enough traction through to your core application. Ugh! See, willpower.

That said, here is a list of the top marketplaces that you should be launching into with the hopes that you can create a compelling enough product to get to the finish line:

Mobile

Platform Core Marketplaces:

These marketplaces are the well known, OS-centric marketplaces that are generally controlled by the OS manufacturer. The names and standards should be familiar:

• Apple App Store)
• Google Play
• Palm Software Store
• RIM App World
• App Catalog (HP/Palm)
• Nokia Store
• Windows Phone Marketplace
• Blackberry Appworld

Third-party Marketplaces:

There are other pay-to-play and free marketplaces where you can list your app for sale. These basically offer a tad more exposure for apps and should be considered supplemental, if not necessary. The importance of these marketplaces is that they help solve the discoverability problem that an OS-centric marketplace can't really solve on its own.

• Amazon App Store
• GetJar
• MobileRated
• FastApp
• Handango
• Samsung Apps
• Appitalism
• CellMania
• Handmark
• LG Application Store
• MobiHand
• Mobspot
• SlideME

[2]

Web

The mobile marketplaces are certainly the hot commodities these days. However, there is still lots of life left in web stores and platforms. When targeting a $0 customer acquisition spend, one shouldn't ignore these great markets. You'll notice a lot of them are CMS platforms and that isn't a mistake, you might think that Facebook is the promised land of web app distribution, and while it shouldn't be ignored, the CMS platforms are where the most valuable content creators are:

• Wordpress Plugins
• Wordpress Themes
• Blogger Gadget Directory
• Facebook Apps.
• Weebly Developer API

And I wish these guys were on par with Weebly in terms of integration, but if you have a crack bizdev team, you can probably reach them:

• Posterous Developer API
• Jimdo
• Yola
• Wix
• Webs
• Bravenet
• Site2You
• VistaPrint
• Homestead

The long tail marketplace, though often sub-par in many ways in terms of reaching an audience, are also an important supplementary tool. Some examples are:

• BloggerPlugins
• DivTagTemplates

Well there are plenty more to be sure, but that's about it for me... lots of platforms to build an audience from, and quite simply if you have a lot of time on your hands, its much cheaper than pouring money into Google Adwords. However, this is a long-term strategy, not a short-term one.

[1] They weren't built FOR the developers, I should say, but rather to LEVERAGE developers. I think this distinction is important to keep in mind. Know when you're being used, and account for it.

[2] Sources: http://www.quickstonesoftware.com/blog/2011/04/25/mobile-marketplaces-a-review http://www.pdasnews.com/articles/mobile-app-stores-comparison-i-believe-windows-marketplace-sucks-the-most.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_software_distribution_platforms