One simple piece of advice I recommend to entrepreneurs is to reserve their company name as a username on popular services like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. The username has to be unique to the service and acts much like a domain name where it is first come, first serve. Registering the name now doesn’t cost anything, so reserving it is a good move even if there aren’t plans to use it anytime soon.
So, head on over to usernamecheck.com and start reserving a username.
I had lunch with an entrepreneur today and we talked about the web app he’s building. He was interested in my thoughts on how to do it in a scrappy, but high quality manner. I told him to use these sites and services:
As for the programming of the web app, I recommend hiring a good software engineer in-house, but that’s a much longer topic. Good luck!
There was a meme a few months ago where people were trying to come up with a better term than lifestyle business to describe a non Venture-backed startup company that could scale. Last week, I was reminded of this when I talked to an entrepreneur and she described her company as a boutique services provider, and said her aspirations were to work for herself and not get big. Boutique businesses often get overlooked in the technology world.
Now that I think about it, I can name several entrepreneurs, in technology, that run boutique businesses and love it. They are some of the more successful and passionate people I know. My advice for entrepreneurs is to think hard about boutique businesses, generally with no employees, vs a lifestyle business, with employees and more visions of organically-grown grandeur when thinking through what they want to be as a company.
There’s an interesting phenomenon that’s bound to happen with books in general and their first 30 pages. The Amazon.com Kindle, both on the specialized device as well as generic devices like the iPhone, removes the traditional friction involved in the purchasing of a book. With the Kindle, potential book buyers can read the first 20 or 30 pages of the book at no charge — why not since there’s no marginal cost for the distribution of the digital media.
Here’s my prediction: successful book authors are going to focus even more on their first 20 or 30 pages to get readers sucked into the story so that they purchase the entire work. In the offline world, readers might browse at a local bookstore, but there is much more work involved to read 20 pages at the store to decide if the book is worth purchasing. At home, on the plane, or on the train, there’s much more down time where reading 20 pages to see if a book is interesting has less opportunity cost. With the Kindle, there will be more serious trying before buying.
Only time will tell if this prediction comes true.
Recently, a colleague of mine introduced me to the walk, jog, run approach to partnerships. The general idea is that many partnerships between companies don’t result in the desired level of success. Generally, this is due to a lack of properly set expectations as well as jumping in too deep, too fast — something I see much too often.
The concept is pretty simple:
I recommend this approach whenever possible.
A friend of my brother (who’s a Spanish Dictionary entrepreneur) reached out to me to talk about my experience running Shotput Ventures in Atlanta as he’s thinking about putting on a similar type of program in another major city in the Southeast. Only, he wants to do the program without providing any investment capital. I told him it wouldn’t work.
He cited these benefits for joining his program:
This, of course, is in exchange for a small amount of equity. I said that resourceful entrepreneurs can get the items he mentioned on their own, and that if they aren’t resourceful, they probably aren’t going to be successful.
In addition, without capital, he’s going to have a hard time getting entrepreneurs to move to his city to participate in the program. For Shotput, the majority of our companies moved to Atlanta for the program. Entrepreneurship isn’t a geographic endeavor.
My advice to him was to raise money to be able to invest in the companies as part of the program. Money talks.
David Cummings on Startups 