Biz in a Box
Digital Telepathy Helps You Build Your Web 2.0 Startup
San Diego based Digital Telepathy has changed direction from strategy-public relations to services, with a new model that will appeal to anyone who has ever wanted or needed a hand at getting their startup ideas off the ground.The concept is simple: Digital Telepathy offers three design my business options with varying service levels based on the length of each plan. The 15 day plan provides a wannabe startup with market research, strategic alignment, scalable revenue model, instruction manual for project completion and a concept summary delivered as a “Biz in a Box”. The 45 day plan offers (in addition to the 15 day plan) “initial buzz building,” and a range of design services including basic prototyping, usability testing, blueprints, concept mapping and other design services. The 90 day plan adds development services including full scale back-end development for beta release, front end development, private beta invites, feature development and more.
Silicon Valley’s math is getting fuzzy again
Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again – New York Times
Internet companies with funny names, little revenue and few customers are commanding high prices. And investors, having seemingly forgotten the pain of the first dot-com bust, are displaying symptoms of the disorder known as irrational exuberance.
Make a Startup in a Weekend
Startup Weekend, a trans-global set of mad events where a startup is put together in one weekend, is coming to London at the end of November.
Have you ever wondered what a group of highly talented and motivated people could accomplish in a weekend? Could they start a company from concept to completion?StartupWeekend answers that question and more. A unique three-day experience, StartupWeekend brings the best and brightest people together in a local office space to select the concept, break into teams, and develop the product, marketing and revenue model.
Past YoursOccurring in cities across the world, StartupWeekend is the new way to allow your local entrepreneurial community to come together and incubate a company from concept to completion in just three days.
Fear of failure halts start-ups
Fear of failure halts start-ups – Times Online
Fear of failure halts start-upsNEARLY half of all adults in Britain have considered setting up their own business, but one in two of them are too scared of failure to do anything about it, according to a nationwide survey commissioned by Orange Business Services.
The survey of 2,481 adults found that fear of failure is the No 1 barrier to people starting up on their own, followed by a lack of self-confidence.
Can your startup look like this?
From The Information Age To The Connected Age « GigaOM
Anne Zelenka takes up a couple of themes that are around at the moment and runs with them. She suggests that “Microsoft represents the Information Age, while Google hints at the shift towards the Connected Age”.
Google, however, is a gigantic corporation. Could the Connected Age make corporations obsolete, at least for purposes of web work? We need corporations for the agricultural, industrial, and knowledge tasks of
our society. But an entirely new engine of productivity might be built without formal organizations. Economist Ronald Coase has proposed that the reason firms exist is to decrease transaction costs. But the web makes transaction costs across individuals and ad hoc groups of people so small as to be unimportant to many web-era businesses. That is why we see an acceleration in the number of independent contractors and loose partnerships across small organizations.
zenstartups need to internalise this approach. A concious strategy to be of and with the Connected Age from the getgo is the correct strategy. But what does this mean? How do you become a connected startup? You may just be there already without realising it.
Future of Startups
Paul Graham once wrote a book called Hackers and Painters. He runs YCombinator, a hothouse for startups, and is an angel investor and coder with some high class successes in his past. But the best thing he does is have an attitude. It’s very zenofstartup. Graham keynoted (that means he was a key speaker) at the recent Future of Web Applications (FOWA) and posted his talk, which is well worth reading in full. His main contention is that startups (he’s talking about web startups, but let’s ask what isn’t a web startup these days) have become so cheap to do that they have become a commodity. Anyone can do them – and they compete on price. If this is true it obviously has a lot of implications for all sorts of areas of life. Read on …
The Future of Web StartupsOctober 2007
(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)
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Now as well as being produced by startups, this pattern is happening to startups. It’s so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. And if the pattern holds true, that should cause dramatic changes.
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So my first prediction about the future of web startups is pretty straightforward: there will be a lot of them. When starting a startup was expensive, you had to get the permission of investors to do it. Now the only threshold you have to get over is whether you have the courage to.
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One of the most important things we’ve been working on standardizing are investment terms. Back in the old days when there were only a few startups, investment terms were all individually negotiated. This was a problem for founders, because it meant raising money took longer and cost more in legal fees. So as well as using the same paperwork for every deal we do, we’ve commissioned generic angel paperwork that all the startups we fund can use for future rounds.
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Another thing I see starting to get standardized is acquisitions. As the volume of startups increases, big companies will start to develop standardized procedures for acquisitions, so they’re little more work than hiring someone.
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When founders can do lots of startups, they can start to look at the world in the same portfolio-optimizing way as investors. And that means the overall amount of wealth created can be greater, because strategies can be riskier.
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Fortunately, if startups get cheaper to start, there is another way to convince investors. Instead of going to venture capitalists with a business plan and trying to convince them to fund it, you can get a product launched on a few tens of thousands of dollars of seed money from us or your uncle, and approach them with a working company instead of a plan for one. Then instead of having to seem smooth and confident, you can just point them to Alexa.
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This is kind of true and kind of false. It’s true that you can now start a startup anywhere. But you have to do more with a startup than just start it. You have to make it succeed. And that is more likely to happen in a startup hub.
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If the best hackers all start their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college. Most of these changes will be for the better. I think the experience of college is warped in a bad way by the expectation that afterward you’ll be judged by potential employers.
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If it gets easier to start a startup, then it’s not just easier for you, but for competitors too. That doesn’t erase the advantage of increased cheapness, however. You’re not all playing a zero-sum game. There’s not some fixed number of startups that can succeed, regardless of how many are started.
Why are startup books so bad?
Face it – startup books are a land that time forgot. They offer the world but are generally so dire as to be unreadable. They commit the sin of putting you off starting the sodding business in the first place. Take this for example:
Top Ten Reasons Why You Need to Read This Book
You will…
1. Learn how to overcome the fear of business ownership.
2. Get ideas for deciding what kind of business to start.
3. Discover over 200 useful resources and website links.
4. Locate sources for funding.
5. Uncover ways to launch your business regardless of your financial situation.
6. Find out how to locate trade associations, vendors, and business license requirements for all fifty states.
7. Read stories of successful entrepreneurs from a variety of industries.
8. Get real world advice and unique ideas you won’t find anywhere else.
9. Utilize the ultimate business startup checklist to help you plan every step of the process.
10. Obtain the tools to transform your dream of business ownership into a reality!
Sounds reasonable. Bit formulaic. Bit listy. Bit magaziney.
Ah! It’s a book of checklists. Now I’m really hooked. I have to read this book in order to start my business.
A few years ago I owned a book with the wonderful title of Stepping Into Magic. But as far as I can remember, it was no more interesting or useful than the only other startup book I’ve ever owned, Engineering Your Startup.
I’m looking for the best startup books. I’m looking for a book that inspires, helps and challenges. That takes the idea of startup by the horns and shakes it till it bleeds. If I can’t find it, I’m going to write it. There, that’s a startup.
Ask the Wizard
This is such a good blog, written by the founder of Feedburner, Dick Costolo. Now owend by Google, Feedburner is an inspirational startup – and Dick’s blog is even better.
The bottom line is that you have to take something of a zen approach to what the “result” of your company will be. Your business will either be successful or it won’t. If it’s successful, then the outcome will take care of itself. How will it take care of itself? It’s impossible to predict.
That was then …
Internet Allstars ‘01: Where are they now?
“Bootylicious” was dominating the airwaves , Rush Hour 2 was battling American Pie 2 for box office (if not artistic) greatness and the US was more concerned about stem cells than homeland security. It was August in 2001, and just because the Internet bubble had already burst, the internet itself was still going strong. With a full six years of technological growth and consumer adoption, how has the internet changed?A lot.
We’ve been tracking internet activity for a while. Long enough, in fact, to look back now and find some really cool stuff. The table below shows the largest 50 sites circa August 2001, based on monthly attention. More importantly, it also shows how that attention share has shifted since.
Startupping – A Community for Internet Entrepreneurs
Startupping – A Community for Internet Entrepreneurs
User nalin recently posted these great ones:1. You’ll have to revise your ‘strategy’ every few weeks so don’t spend a lot of time in Word / PowerPoint / Kinkos making it look pretty.
2. No matter where on the emotional rollercoaster you are on any given day, project total confidence to the outside world — people respond more to that, than your schpiel on disintermediating blah, blah, blah.
3. If you go to a web 2.0 networking event, everyone you tell your idea to thinks they’re an expert on what web businesses will succeed or fail. They’re not. No one is. They just all read the same blogs which confidently assert constantly changing conventional wisdom.
4. Wear comfortable shoes. You’re frequently going to need to step outside to walk around the block while muttering to yourself.
5. Exercise and eat healthy. In the long run, you don’t increase productivity by consuming pizza, doritos and red bull while chained to your desk all day/every day.
6. When your friends/family ask you how the business is coming along… always start off by saying “Great!” Save the cathartic sharing of any doubts/stress with fellow entrepreneurs and sites like this! Non-entrepreneurs won’t understand and will just feel sorry for you…
