January 2011
10 posts
3 tags
Keep Your Customers Up to Date
The past week or has been unique in that I’ve had a couple experiences that have made me keenly aware of the need to make sure you are communicating effectively with your customers. Situation 1 A web app that has hundreds of thousands of active users has been offline for *months* due to a number of reasons. It has a very loyal following and the users are practically up in arms about the...
4 tags
If You Care About Foreign Markets, Watch the Name
Today I was doing my usual news browsing and I came across this headline:
Ex-eBay exec launches Ongo, a personal news service funded by media giants
The name really stood out. I kept saying it over and over again in my mind… why did that sound so familiar? Then it hit me.
Hongo (Spanish) masculine noun 1. fungus (biology) 2. mushroom (comestible) (especially Am); toadstool (no comestible)...
3 tags
1 Damn Easy Way to Improve User Experience
When I landed on this page after clicking through from Hacker News, I thought it was a joke… until I scrolled down and got to the actual content of the article. Here is my response:
2 tags
Self-Employed vs Business Owner
Derek Sivers published a well-written and insightful piece on learning to delegate as business owner. In it he makes a statement that I absolutely love:
There’s a big difference between being self-employed and being a business owner.
I’ve always hated the term “self-employed.” To me, it’s always seemed to conjure up the notion that no one else wanted to employ me so...
4 tags
The Visa Issue / Being a Foreign Internet...
If you’ve made the decision to be an Expat Entrepreneur, then you will quickly come up against this topic and it’s a minefield of questions. Do I need to get a visa before I leave my home country? What kind of visa? How long can I stay? Can I work on this visa? etc etc. My suggestion to you would be to research this as much as humanly possible before you hop on a plane to some random...
3 tags
Discounts Don't Work
When it comes to the custom software development world the story usually goes something like this:
Idea guy: So I have this cool app I want to build, it does X, Y and Z… can you give me a quote? Dev: Sure, that sounds interesting… based on my extensive experience, I’d guesstimate that it might be around $XXX in total. However, given the flexible nature of software, we generally...
4 tags
Sunnytrail is Easy Startup Metrics
Tracking the finer details of your startup is important. You can read about this all across the web and your brain quickly becomes filled with terms like “Lifetime Customer Value”, “Churn Rate”, “Revenue per user”, “Cohorts” and much more. All of this is great. It’s important stuff that you should know about, especially if you’re running...
4 tags
Going Freemium with @TweetSaver
So I recently pushed out a major update to TweetSaver, my app that allows Twitter users to archive, tag, search and share their Tweets. You can read about the details of the update here. The main highlight is that I’ve introduced free accounts to the service. When TweetSaver was originally launched, I was staunchly against giving it away for free. I felt that since I was willing to pay...
OpenGovernment: Empower individuals and... →
thechangelog:
When 9 Trillion dollars goes missing from the Federal Reserve and the Federal Inspector General can’t explain the details of that missing money, what can “we” the people do about it?
Watch this YouTube video to learn more about this insane debacle. Sadly, Alan Grayson (the questioner) never asked the simple closed-ended question, “So, is that a Yes or No?”. However,...