Passionate about Startups and MicroISVs

I’m really into saving time, and one way I’ve found to do that is to skim books, or listen to them as abridged audiobooks when I’m on the road.

In line with this, about a year ago I found an awesome collection of summaries of the best marketing books ever (in the opinion of the book’s editor).

These are books I would never take the time to read, but I have gleaned wisdom and entertainment from the summaries. While there is no substitute for the real thing, digesting 5-10 pages is much more palatable for me than thinking of 50 or 100 books at 200+ pages each.

I’ve since had two similar books recommended to me bringing my time saving to a grand total of…a lot of time:

• The Marketing Gurus: Lessons from the Best Marketing Books of All Time
• The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You
• The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You’ll Never Have Time to Read

My roof is leaking. In five places. Whoever thought it was a good idea to build a house with a flat roof should be forced to duplicate Google’s PageRank algorithm in assembler.

So I called a roofer, Fred, to give me a quote to fix this mess. His skin is like leather and his voice sounds like a cheese grater…signs of a good roofer in my book. And damn does this guy knows what he’s talking about.

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This morning Seth Godin published a post titled Debt, equity and a third thing that might work better. The third option he covers is pre-selling future income by offering someone $x of every widget you sell forever (it may be a sliding scale that decreases after x units are sold).

I was surprised by this, as I thought Seth was going to discuss another option I’ve seen used with great success: customer financing. That’s when you find one or more (future) customers that help fund your product development in exchange for input into the process and free or highly discounted use of the software.

This situation is so unbelievably advantageous to a startup it’s like strapping rockets to your running shoes. Not only are you getting financing with little risk, but with customer financing you have someone in the industry with a vested interest in your product succeeding.

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Business of Software is a conference organized by Neil Davidson and Joel Spolsky, and was held this year in San Francisco. The speaking line-up is a who’s who of software bloggers and authors, including Geoffrey Moore, Paul Graham, Dharmesh Shah and Joel Spolsky.

Overall the conference was well executed, the speakers were engaging and the opportunities to meet people abounded. The conference was the second reminder in just over a month that I need to get out of the house more often and meet other developers and entrepreneurs.

After getting used to hanging out with a few hundred people with a shared passion for starting “real” software companies, riding home on the train was a let-down as I realized the excitement of the previous 3 days was over.

There were several great presentations during the conference. These highlights focus on the key points I took away from my favorite talks.

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Yep, that’s me (photo by jmpk).

Somehow I allowed myself to get talked into doing the Pecha Kucha at the 2009 Business of Software conference in San Francisco (seriously though, I want to thank Jeff Atwood for convincing me to go through with it).

Pecha Kucha is 20 slides, 20 seconds each…in 6 minutes 40 seconds you are done. And it’s twice as hard as it sounds.

I hope to share a video of the talk with you in the coming weeks, but for now here are a few resources I mentioned during the talk that I want to provide to anyone interested.

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Apologies to those who read this blog via RSS. For about two weeks no new posts were showing up in my RSS feed, then last week old posts were marked as new with multiple rows of links added below them.

The real issue, though, is that ever since Google acquired FeedBurner there’s no human support so when something like this happens you’re on your own. It’s an interesting twist on the problem of trusting your data to the cloud, and one that has left me spending several hours trying to figure out the problem (a problem that began out of the blue).

In any case, I apologize for the inconvenience. Things appear to be back to normal.

Product naming is hard.

Too many factors come into play when looking for a name and it’s almost impossible to decide on the right name once you’ve stared at the same list for a week straight. This is the kind of thing that keeps you up at night, even after you’ve made the decision.

And asking opinions is fine, but more often than not the people you ask are not in your demographic:

“Hi Mom. Things are good, thanks. Hey while I have you on the phone, what do you think I should call my enterprise level encryption engine?”

About two months ago Patrick Thompson, a member of the Micropreneur Academy, was in search of a name for his speed reading eBook reader for the iPhone. We emailed several times about the process he followed to find his optimal name, and given his creative approach I wanted to share it here.

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Hot off the press, hear the hosts of the Startup Success Podcast interview Mike Taber and I about the Micropreneur Academy. You can download the MP3 here.

P.S. I did a written interview a few weeks ago for LocationIndependent.com. You can find it here.

Work Less, Get More Done: Analytics for Maximizing Productivity – Patrick McKenzie is the embodiment of Micropreneurship; his focus on marketing, metrics and outsourcing is nothing short of impressive. This is a great post on how working hard is not a defensible advantage.

Making Open Source Convenient: JumpBox – A startup focused on making it dead-simple to get started with open source applications, they create virtual machines completely pre-configured to just start and go (including versions that runs on Amazon EC2). If you’re having trouble installing an open source app, JumpBox is your answer.

What a Startup is Really Like – Another great Paul Graham essay. My favorite points:

• 12. It’s Hard to Get Users. If you make something where the challenges are mostly technical, you can rely on word of mouth, like Google did…but with other types of startups you may win less by features and more by deals and marketing.
• 17. The Value of Community. A surprising number of founders said what surprised them most about starting a startup was the value of community [hanging around other people also starting a company]

A Story of a Launch Disaster…Fast-Food Style – While the truth of this tale is dubious, it’s still a good story of doing the unexpected to thwart your competition.

CrossLoop – Mom calling you for tech support? Send her to CrossLoop, affordable online computer help.

Coolest Business Card Ever – How am I not stealing this design right now?

Know Thy Audience – And look at creative funding sources.

How to Avoid Being Outsourced or Open Sourced – Pointed out to me after my post about competing with open source competition.

On Monday I attended Stack Overflow DevDays in San Francisco. Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are hosting this series of one-day conferences as a way to get alpha-geeks out of the office to hear experts talk about new technologies ranging from Python to ASP.NET MVC. It was the best $99 (including lunch and coffee) I’ve spent in quite some time.

The highlight of the day was that I finally had the pleasure of meeting Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and Stack Overflow. We’ve emailed several times over the years but never had the chance to meet face to face. And yes, he’s as smart as he sounds on his blog and podcast. And a super nice guy to boot.

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