Blog Entries tagged 'startup'

We Are NOT Pinin for the Fijords!

admin — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:00:00 +0100

You remember that scene in Monty Python where the guy explainst that the parrot is not dead, it's just "pinin for the Fijords!"

Well, we went from posting daily (or twice/daily) to a few times a week to ... silence for a week at a time.

Well, two products in beta, a couple of unexpected PO extensions from existing clients (thanks guys!) and a nasty flu that someone brough [...]

Doing The Math - No Money In Facebook

admin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

The otherwise very very smart Don Dodge posted this gem that gets some bits right:

I talked to a Facebook App developer at the ReMix conference. He told me his app is generating 300 million page views per month. Wow! Then I asked what kind of CPM (Cost Per Thousand) ad rates he was getting. He shrugged and said somewhere between $0.02 and $0.05 per thousand. That pencils out to betw [...]

My Personal Deadpool of Funded Venture Business Cards

admin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I was pondering yesterday's post about Mowser's demise and ran across an old (last boom) stack of business cards from VC's, startups, and "advisors." So I decided I would try a very unscientific snowball sample experiment and grab the top 20 cards and see what I came up with.

Winners

The Monster Board Who? You know them as Monster. This card was pre-m [...]

Destructive Self Funding versus VC

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I was reading a very sad, frank, and wise notice from Russell Beattie about the death of Mowser, his mobile browser project. I know, and you know, that most startups die young, the ones that don't mostly become zombies living on consulting, and the small remaining percentage are bought for peanuts by larger companies lusting after their IP and management team.

Bu [...]

The Ten Commandments For Failure

admin — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I am not a big fan of "top 10" lists because my teeny tiny dinosaur brain can only remember two or three of the points, which makes me feel like I'm treading water watching eveyone else evolve their way ashore and I've left my proto-feet behind somewhere. But someone recently sent me this ancient (1994 era) email that had Bonnie McElveen-Hunter's:

The Ten Commandments For Failure

[...]

Digg Fascinates Me Like A Non Fatal Car Wreck

admin — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:00:00 +0100

You know, when a tanker full of eggs hits a rail car of charcoal and they roll into the propane factory? You don't get omlettes for Lubbock, you just get a stinky mess.

Digg Is Not A Stinky Mess

Well, it's a fascinating mess, some sort of mixture of socialism run amuck and web bubble captitalism.

By socialism I mean that people profess to want to "do good&qu [...]

Entrecard and Almost VC Money

admin — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

I was over on Mixed Martial Arts and saw the best google ad in a long time:

It'd take a long time to make a million bucks at $20K/month!

But, for some reason, it seemed very apropos given that the topic was Entrecard taking $112K on a pre-money valuation of $998K. It wasn't the odd numbers that caught my attention because that sort of thi [...]

Do Not Make Mad Decisions You Will Regret

admin — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:00:00 +0100

Earlier this week I had a perfect storm of things go wrong at work, any one of which would have been likely to infuriate me on a normal day. Combine them all together in a row, thrown in a quick round trip flight on United Airline (motto: You Think K-Mart Has Lousy Service?) and then add in several off-diet expensive-but-yucky airport food meals that made me gain three pounds. Result: One Ready To Explode Guy.

Bad Te [...]

From Consulting to Product

admin — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:00:00 +0100

So you're rocking along, doing some pretty good dollar consulting, and you build a small product, internal use only, to help you get your fixed price projects done more quickly. And now you're really pulling in some bucks.

Disaster Strikes

A junior consultant you just hired from Compsci-U gets drunk at TGIF with the client and spills the beans about y [...]

From Stinky Pig to PR3 Tiger in Four Months

admin — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:00:00 +0100

On November 1, 2007 we launched Promote My Site and on November 8th we figured out that Google Hated Us and on February 29th 2008 we woke up to find our site was now a PR3. How did we do that?

Tiger?

Well, ok, maybe a bear cub. But it feels very tigerish to go from the sandbox to having almost every page on your site in google's primary index. &nbs [...]

Is Your Business Model Built on Venture Capital?

Don — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Today's 400 point drop in the DJIA in the first three minutes of trading may be a temporary bump or a glimpse of things to come. So far it has recovered most of the loss, but if we're headed into a bear market we could be seeing the end of the Web 2.0 venture capital driven bubble.

Most Venture Capital funded companies think of themselves as cool, new startups that aren't affected by the goings on of Wall Street and huge companies. They live in their own world. How coul [...]

Why System Migrations are Utter Crapola

admin — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0100

You would think that with 120+ years of experience we'd do a better job at the inflection point - where you start moving test into restricted production.

Or, based on personal experience, you wouldn't.

Well, I did.

Let me count the problems:

Blog disaster - posts lost, URL's not found, etcTemplate dysfunction - widget A breaks, but widget B breaks on A fixDNS error - that one was my fault and I don't want to talk about itCheck-in-Dilbertiasim - like it was [...]

Dude, Where Did The Blog Go?

admin — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Or, a tale of hubris and lack of attention to detail....

When we kicked off this project we spent a LOT of time worrying about the backend, the UI, the toolset, the future directions, etc, etc. All that necessary, dead-sexy, and boring-but important stuff.

Then we went out, grabbed a blogging component, tried it for a rigorous 20 seconds, and said, "meh."

Well, we put in our final Joomla template in preparation for the art guys to do their, er, art, and it broke [...]