Archive for September 2004
Scott Johnson: “When you get started consulting you will quickly find that customers want references. This is central to your overall marketing effort so when you get that first customer who agrees to pay you $$$ for something then go all out to make them happy. Even if you lose money it’s still worth it. [...]
Woot! (first mentioned here) has changed it return policy: Call the manufacturer of the product you bought. You will likely get a replacement of a new model or better item from the manufacturer. If we still haven’t dissuaded you, email rma@woot.com with your woot order number, the name of the product you are returning, and [...]
Timbuktu Chronicles is an interesting looking blog about entrepreneurship in Africa. One of my favorite things to do after finding a new weblog is to skim through the archives. Timbuktu Chronicles has been published for almost a year, so I’m definitely looking forward to reading it. Have you found any interesting looking blogs recently? Please [...]
D. Keith Robinson: “The Web runs on good content, yet good content has to be written and can be hard to come by. I often get e-mail from folks expressing interest into how I’m able to keep writing constantly and keep coming up with good topics to write about. I’ll admit, it’s harder and more [...]
Chis Malta: It’s very simple, folks. Treat every business Email you send as if your entire business depended on it. Pretend that each person you send a Business Email to could be your next Big Break in Business. Always start your Email with a ‘Salutation’ (“Hi”, “Hello”, “Dear Mr. Smith”). Always use common courtesy when [...]
A reader wrote: When you’re traveling on business away from home, there can be problems: finding a place to stay, transporation around the city, making sure you have a clean and pressed set of good clothes…. Yet another problem is – lack of an office! Fortunately, now that problem has been solved. A British company [...]
Mark Frauenfelder: “This web page returns the ten most reputable eBay members and the ten least reputable ones. When I checked the page, it listed mario23g (with a feedback rating of -26) as the least reputable person on all of eBay, but I checked his page and it looks like he is no longer registered. [...]
A Labor Day Salute To Small Business Owners
Jim Blasingame: Today, unions represent less than 14% of all U.S. workers, a 60-year low. Small businesses, on the other hand, number in the tens of millions, and our numbers are increasing by almost 1 million per year. We currently represent over 98% of all U.S. businesses; create over 55% of all new innovations; employ [...]
Customers Won’t Buy Won’t They Can’t Understand
Startup Journal: “The ability to speak and write concisely and with clarity is fast becoming a competitive advantage for entrepreneurs and small-business owners (and for big companies, too). Articulating clearly what your business is, what kind of goods or services you sell and how much they cost helps the bottom line. Potential customers or clients [...]
Merlin Mann: Getting Things Done Advanced Workflow [PDF] Getting Things Done fans, definitely don’t miss this. A PDF illustrating a cool, annotated version of the basic GTD workflow.
Jim and James, the founders of HOT or NOT, are throwing a $200,000 sweepstakes to encourage people to register to vote. You can enter the contest even if you’re registered to vote.
Amazon: “Starting a business involves inevitable ups and downs, for first-time as well as experienced entrepreneurs. This updated, expanded edition by Jan Norman, one of the nation’s foremost small business authorities, guides readers through every stage of business start-up, from planning to marketing. What No One Ever Tells You about Starting Your Own Business is [...]
Toys for the Young Entrepreneur
If you’ve got a budding entrepreneur in the family, check out this wheelbarrow store my wife just found in the most recent Back to Basics Toys catalog: our child will take pride in running his or her own store, whether it becomes the neighborhood lemonade stand or an imaginative enterprise. Our Wheelbarrow Store, made from [...]
This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up on Joe Grossberg’s weblog.
Adventures in Capitalism: That got me to thinking about the world of micro-entrepreneurship. I’ll define micro-entrepreneurship as a one-person company that has a scalable business. That means no professional services; a one-person services company is a freelancer. I come from the traditional Silicon Valley world, where you raise a couple of million in venture capital, [...]
Some Thoughts About Network Marketed Products
Dave Stone: If you are considering an income opportunity in Network Marketing, a central element you need to consider is who your customers will be for the product and services you intend to offer. Here are a few thoughts: Is your product or service consumable or is it a single purchase item? Is the price [...]
WebmasterWorld’s Search Conference #7
I’ll be in Las Vegas, Nevada on November 16 – 18th, 2004 for the WebmasterWorld World of Webmasters Search Conference #7. If you’re going to be there, and want to meet up, drop me an email.
Why Are So Many Business Books Awful?
The Economist: “The formula seems to be: keep the sentences short, the wisdom homespun and the typography aggressive; offer lots of anecdotes, relevant or not; and put an animal in the title — gorillas, fish and purple cows are in vogue this year. Or copy Stephen Covey (author of the hugely successful Seven Habits of [...]
Do You Have to be Rich to be an Entrepreneur?
Infectious Greed: “A new study by Kevin Moore for the Federal Reserve shows that with better measures of wealth the link to entrepreneurship only exists for people in the top-quartile of home equity value. In other words, for the majority of people wealth is not the primary constraint in becoming an entrepreneur. Matter of fact, [...]
Why Long Sales Letters Work on the Web
Excess Voice: “If you can hold someone’s attention with your writing, a long page gives you the space to deliver all the benefits, cover all the features and address a myriad of reader questions and concerns. So long as the letter carries momentum and holds the reader’s attention, people will keep scrolling.” via Debbie Weil.
Franchisors Taking More Interest in Franchisees’ Employment Practices
Society for Human Resource Management: Traditionally, one area franchisors tended to steer clear of was human resources policies and practices. While franchisors would provide cursory resources for good hiring practices and employment law requirements, creating an “employment brand” usually was left to each franchisee. Why? Because dictating the employment practices of individual franchisees might hold [...]
Property Taxes a Large Problem
Law & Entrepreneurship News: “Small business owners rank property taxes as the 6th largest problem that they are currently facing in a recent NFIB and Wells Fargo report. 23% of those surveyed considered property taxes a critical problem.”
How to Take Your Data With You in an Evacuation
Robert Cringely: Hurricane Frances is bearing down on Charleston, our third hurricane or tropical storm in a month, and the first one big enough to motivate the locals. While the conventional wisdom of old-time Charlestonians seems to center on getting drunk, then lashing themselves to some sturdy part of their houses, this storm has even [...]
Startup Success Recipe from Eric Hahn
Eric Hahn, former CTO of Netscape, in a Red Herring interview speaking about his recipe for success: Although every situation is different, were I to write the recipe for success in a “typical” early-stage startup, it would go something like this: Identify a market with an underserved need and attractive economics which could potentially be [...]
World Magazine: “One of the hottest bars in the Chinese city of Nanjing sports only a sofa, a few tables, and tissue paper – a lot of tissue paper. The AFP news service reports that the city’s first ‘cry bar,’ where customers can sit and cry for $6 per hour, is growing in popularity. Owner [...]
Knowledge Management Critical for Start-ups
RealKM: “Start-ups are one of the most information intense and fastest changing organizations in Business. Yet most start-ups rely only on the basic tools like email and maybe a file-share to manage information. It’s crazy when I think about it…. 5 years back I co-founded my own start-up and we made the same mistake. It [...]
I’ve updated the comment posting rules.
SF Chronicle: A growing number of entrepreneurs, faced with spiraling accounting costs and stiffer corporate governance rules, are choosing to keep their startups private or sell them to a rival rather than take them public. For young companies, the choice between going public and selling to a rival was once an easy one. That’s because [...]
Is your e-commerce website ready for Christmas? 37Signals: “In these pages you’ll find dozens of ideas for improving the holiday customer experience at your site. Each idea is accompanied by examples taken from top retail sites (we’ve visited hundreds of sites over the past two holiday seasons seeking smart techniques).”
Law & Entrepreneurship News, a new weblog by University of Wisconsin Law School Professor Gordon Smith and his students, has launched.
Apple Launches iTunes Affiliate Program
Slashdot: “Apple has launched an affiliate program for their iTunes music store that earns participants 5% commission. Affiliates can link directly to songs, albums, and artists, as well as apply to the Apple Store affiliate program to sell hardware. It costs nothing to join and people that sign up prior to September 15 can win [...]
The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III
Mises.org: “Why does the Skipper let Gilligan help with anything when he knows he’ll just screw it up? Why did the movie star take a day cruise in an evening gown? Why did two of the richest people in the world board a dinky boat with the hoi polloi instead of leasing a private yacht? [...]
Why Do You Still Need an Agent to Buy a Home?
Slate: “Americans will spend about $1.14 trillion buying 6 million homes this year—both records. Yet the flat commissions paid to the realtors who handle the vast majority of those sales, averaging 5.1 percent, act as an enormous tax on the transaction process, taking wealth from both buyers and sellers in what for both is often [...]
Startup Journal: “At minimum, a good business plan will include an executive summary, a description of the business, the competition, marketing plans, background of the management and financial information including a balance sheet, income and cash-flow projections. You also may want to include tax returns, contracts and leases if you’re using this document as part [...]
How To Get Great Testimonial Letters
Brian Keith Voiles: As long as you are in business, you need to be in the business of gathering testimonials. Whether you’re just starting out or have been in business for years, you need testimonials. If you’re just starting out, I suggest that you simply get testimonials about yourself. These are better than nothing, but [...]
How Entrepreneurs Differ from Big Business Executives
Chuck Huckaby: Some people assume that individuals in Big Business are entrepreneurial and capitalistic. In reality, the largest corporations and their leaders are monopolistic. They believe in protecting their cash flow and do whatever is necessary protect that cash flow. While entrepreneurs think “I need to provide a better product or service and be better [...]
David Patterson writing on Small Business Trends: The majority of companies in the US and Canada with sales of over US$250 million are failing to respond adequately to emails with high-value purchase intent and are missing out on revenue opportunities according to an eGain survey conducted in July 2004. Three hundred companies were surveyed, and [...]
Brain Brew Blog: “This week Doug and David have ideas for taking your business to the next level, describing exactly what your business offers, opportunities in home repair and online gaming, being unique, attracting more customers, changing serial behavior, and ideas for advertising a new business.”
Please excuse the mess. I’m upgrading this site from Movable Type 2.65 to 3.1, so the site might act a little weird until I finish. Thanks for reading, and please email me if you come across any problems.
