Category Archives: Internet

What I’ve Learned from Failed Startups

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What I’ve learned from failed not so successful startups:

Focus on the customer first

I originally thought that this simply meant getting a couple low hanging fruit to say yes to an idea. What it really means is that you need to figure out a way to build buzz around what you are doing, before you do anything.  Telling people that you have 10,000 people that want what you are cooking is way more sexy then showing them what you spent a year building that 3 people are using.  Build buzz and don’t worry about “someone stealing your idea” because if an idea is all you have as an advantage, your dead anyway.

Cash is like oxygen, but too much cash too early is like poison

By not having enough cash to get customers and build a great product, all you are doing is starving the opportunity. Then before you know it someone else is there and has built your great idea. After all, ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution is what matters, and it is difficult to execute with limits in engineering talent, by outsourcing or by holding a day job.

That is why you SHOULD raise capital

Bottom line: If you can’t convince someone to give you 1M, you won’t be able to convince someone to buy you down the road for even more money.  Plus you are missing out on the network of those investors to take your product to the next level.

Investors invest in people first, ideas, then revenue

The most important aspect of your presentation to investors is the team member’s “relevant” experience. If this is your first rodeo and you don’t have X years experience in a vertical, spend a lot of your time finding the right mentor, partner, or advisor that does. If they do, they will have the right contacts to at least get you in front of the correct audience from day one. That is where the learning starts.

Launch something that you would use 

As mentioned before, ideas are a dime a dozen. Do you actually have the connections to sell or make money from the product from day one? Do you personally know 10 potential customers that you could call on today? 50? 500? If not, get someone on you team that does. He/she will be the most valuable person on your team.

 Launch something in a market that you know deeply

I’ve spent time with a lot of successful entrepreneurs that have built highly profitable businesses with under 10 employees. My questions are always the same – “how did you get your start?” and “Were you profitable from day one?”  One commonality is that they always launched a business in an vertical they both understood deeply and had lots of contacts in. Checkmate.

Know the customer

I’m not taking market statistics.  I’m talking about shadowing your customer, knowing what they buy, how they pay, and the process of doing so.  Case in point, we spent 6 months and built a solution for universities because they said they were interested but failed to realize that they were so buearacratic that it took months to get even a $50 payment approved.  But when we made the product free and owned the ad rights, we had more success. Much less approval and actually a better margin for us.

Investors like this format for presentations

It may be different in the valley but in the VC’s we’ve spoken to have told us that they are sick of waiting until slide 6 to learn what problem we solve.  Tell them on slide #1. Slide 2 they want to know about the team and if they even have the ability, background, and loins to solve the problem. If not, the investor can go back to answering emails or playing Angry Birds on his/her smartphone.

Business names should be short, memorable and unique

Memorable is the most important. Coincidentally relevant names are least important, though nice to have if you can satisfy the above criteria first. I once had a newspaper article interview me and post a to link back to someone else’s website – totally my fault. The business name wasn’t unique enough.

Even failed startups can have SOME success

Eric Ries suggests proving both your value and growth hypothesis in your startup as quickly as possible. His example: Facebook, for instance proved there growth by the number of people that were signing up and value since people were using it an average of 8x per day. We proved our value but never could get a good growth model going before running out of oxygen.

You don’t have to be in a great market, you just need to build a great product

The media gives the impression that you need to follow the latest shiny object in tech.  For instance in the late 90′s it was the web, in the early 2000′s it was social networks, now it is mobile apps.  What they don’t tell you is that only a small percentage of mobile apps ever gross over $30,000.  Also, if you read between the lines, you will notice that great, simple products that get released when there is already ample competition in the space, often do really well, like Mint.com or Basecamp.  Furthermore, there are plenty of unsexy products that practically print money.  A few examples of these that I know of are a logistics freight auditing company, a middle-man to transfer cars between car dealerships, and a marketing an promotion company that has less than 10 employees, but has clients like Disney and the NBA.  The commonality is that they all of their solutions actually solve a problem.

It is all about who you know, and more importantly, who knows you

My suggestion is to meet and get to know as many people as possible. Ask them about themselves, what they do, their families and be honestly interested. Most importantly don’t expect anything in return. You’d be supposed where people end up, how they remember you and what gates a bit of conversation might open you in the future.

Finally, get an investor/critic’s feedback ASAP

We didn’t start talking to investors until 10 months after we started.  Once we did, they lit us up.  But their points were valid and I wish we would have ad that feedback in month 2 or 3.  It would have saved us time and pride.  Disclosure: this cannot be a relative or any cheerleader that will make you feel warm and fuzzy.  It must be someone who as been there and also has your best interest at heart.

So I am sure I am forgetting other lessons but these are the most prominent currently.  More later…

USF Entrepreneurship in Applied Technologies ranked 5th in Princeton Review

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So I finally decided to take the plunge and get my masters degree – something that I have thought about since before I graduated from Florida Southern College.  Up until last fall I hadn’t found a program that I really liked that was attainable.

After searching around, I stumbled upon the Entrepreneurship in Applied Technologies MS program at the University of South Florida.   Princeton Review had the program ranked 9th in 2007 and 5th in 2008 for Entrepreneurship programs and Colleges and Universities.  It was exactly what I was looking for and available 30 minutes from my doorstep!

Here are some excerpts from a recent St. Pete Times article:

USF launched its Center for Entrepreneurship in 2002 after decades of offering entrepreneurship courses within its traditional MBA program. It was recognized by the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship three consecutive years beginning in 2004.

Last year, the Princeton Review ranked it No. 9 in the nation after surveying entrepreneurial offerings from more than 2,300 undergraduate and business schools. In September, the Review named it No. 5.

What makes USF’s program different, says director Michael W. Fountain, is the cross-discipline involvement of the university’s colleges of business, engineering and medicine.

…

Among the more than 30 businesses launched by recent graduates is a health and fitness center, a bath and skin care line, and an independent record label.

All are important to the regional economy, Fountain said, since roots for home-grown businesses run deeper than transplanted ones and are better able to weather adverse economic conditions.

…

But there’s more to the program than starting new businesses, USF officials say. The program also teaches students how to strengthen the performance of existing companies, a talent that makes them attractive hires.

iBrowser – Free Image Uploader for Tiny MCE (and SPAW, FCKeditor, Xinha, and HTMLarea)

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Screenshot

I, like many other people, did not realize that TinyMCE did not include the image upload plug-in as shown in the full featured example.  But after using TinyMCE for quite some time without the image upload feature, I became comfortable with the interface and the source code, and was hesitant to switch.

In the forum I came across a third party plug-in iBrowser written by Jaeger Consulting that works with Tiny MCE, SPAW, FCKeditor, Xinha, and HTMLarea.

The readme is vague at best and doesn’t offer any solutions to troubleshoot problems.  Of course, the plug-in didn’t quite work right out of the box.  Following are the steps I took to implement iBrowser.

  • Download the latest version of both iBrowser (1.3.8) and TinyMCE (3.1.1 at the time of this writing)
  • Upload the “ibrowser” directory to the TinyMCE “plugins” directory
  • Create one or more directories to store uploaded images and edit config/config.inc.php

$cfg['ilibs'] = array (
array (
‘value’ => ‘/path/from/webroot/images/’,
‘text’ => ‘Images’,
),
array (
‘value’ => ‘/path/from/webroot/gallery/’,
‘text’ => ‘Gallery’,
),
);

  • Ensure that ibrowser/scripts/phpThumb/cache, ibrowser/temp, and your image directories have write privilages (i.e. 755).
  • Copy the file ibrowser/interface/tinyMCE.editor_plugin.js with your corresponding version number to ibrowser directory.  If your version number is not there, use generic javascript file without the version number.
  • When you include TinyMCE in a page with javascript (tinyMCE.init), make sure that the following options are included.

tinyMCE.init({
...
plugins : "ibrowser",
...
theme : "advanced",
theme_advanced_buttons3_add : "ibrowser",
});

  • If you included everything correctly, you should see a new icon in your editor.  If you don’t, you are either using an incompatible versions of TinyMCE/iBrowser or your paths are wrong.  Try the other TinyMCE Javascripts and double check where the iBrowser directory is located.  It should be in the plugins directory of TinyMCE.  If that doesn’t work, download a version of TinyMCE that is compatible with iBrowser (see interface directory).
  • If you do see the new icon but nothing happens when it is clicked then you must add a line to the begining of the javascript file you are using.

var ib = null;

  • If you open iBrowser, click Insert, then click Upload and you do not see a green icon with a white arrow to the right of the Browse button then you must modify ibrowser.php to have a smaller input box, say 40 instead of the default 53.  This uncovers the upload button.

<input name=”nfile[]” type=”file” class=”fldlg” id=”nfile[]” size=”40″

  • That should be all you need to enjoy the benefits of uploading images to web pages with iBrowser.  Let me know if anyone else finds any other problems that I didn’t address.  Enjoy!