I was chatting with Alvin of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia this morning on my site – he’s a law student thinking about doing a startup. He wanted to know: what’s Silicon Valley is like?

Having lived in the Bay Area and worked in the tech industry 30 years, I’ve got a pretty good sense of that.

The good news re SV is that now it’s digital and online: it’s all available to everyone on the planet. What you need to pick up on if you want to succeed is the habits, mindsets, techniques that work in the Valley and make the Valley work.

Other answer – lots of tech jobs available, great weather, new stuff all the time.

Here’s the habits I mean:

• You try something, it fails, you learn, you try something else.
• You help other people, because in this industry, what goes around, comes around, damn quick.
• Doing beats talking and wondering and trying to work everything out in advance every time.
• Make stuff people want, let them know about it, and the money will follow.

If you live in the Valley – even if you live in Valley online – the above are obvious. You go to other industries, places, mindsets and they above is anything but obvious. Where do you want to be?

(image from the Onion – a great read!)

You’re reading So what’s Silicon Valley like? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

The hardest part of building a startup isn’t coding, marketing, building the web site, finding your market, defining your product, raising seed money, raising equity money, getting press attention, building a Twitter or Facebook or Google+ following, finding a URL, setting up a VPS, getting approved by Apple, finding a co-founder, making a YouTube video, writing marketing copy, building a blog, deploying to your server, scaling your servers, managing your cashflow, doing your business taxes, or getting Robert Scoble to notice you.

It’s dealing with the doubts, fears, objections echoing around in your own head, dragging you down. Alone.

Mastermind Groups is an idea that’s been kicking around for 85+ years. Find a number of like-minded people trying to succeed, provide each other with feedback, constructive criticism, different points of view, resources, accountability. Meet on a regular basis, what happens in the group stays in the group, mutual respect and support are the rule.

A quick google makes it clear more than a few people have tried to make money one way or another out of Mastermind Groups. Chris Pirillo, whom I respect, started “Gnomies” a couple of months ago and I wish him well. But that is not kind of Mastermind Group I want to build or join.

What I want to do is find up to 1o technical founders closing in on launching a new startup willing to meet once a week via Skype or probably Google+ Hangouts to brainstorm ideas, get and give feedback, and support each other. Lifehack.org did a good writeup on what Mastermind group is really about – I intend to follow it.

Who’s in? Email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com.

You’re reading I’m starting a Mastermind Group – who’s up for it? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Charles Holbert over at Killer Infographics shared with me one of his agency’s new graphics I found interesting, “The Ten Biggest Entrepreneurs of 2011 under 30.”

Being considerably older than 30, I have to admit my first reaction was not unbounded joy and happiness. I don’t know about you, but I tend to with each story I read about a startup getting funded, sold, etc. feel a sharp pain right around my ego.

But as I thought about it, and reread this infographic, I realized none of these entrepreneurs possess super powers, they all worked their asses off to build their startups, and there’s nothing they did that I cannot do.

I hope you come to that same realization, and act on it for 2012.

From: Business MBA

You’re reading This will make you feel old… and that’s a good thing from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could take a class in how to build your startup, from a world known authority, at one of the best colleges in the world, for free?

That’s exactly what you can get from Steve Blank, at Stanford University, starting in February. The Lean Launchpad, also know as Engineering 245, is an online class with free enrollment. That’s right, for the price of your email address and name, you can take from the comfort of your computer an Honest-to-God Stanford University class.

How cool is that? (look for me there, third row on the left.)

Here’s the class description:

In this class you’ll learn how to turn a great idea into a great company.

We now know that startups are not smaller versions of large companies. Large companies execute known business models. They use big company tools – business plans, income statements, revenue models, etc. to help organized their execution. In contrast startups search for a business model. And all the big company tools are irrelevant in the early days of a startup. This class is not about how to write a business plan. It’s not an exercise on how smart you are in a classroom, or how well you use the research library. The end result is not a PowerPoint slide deck for a VC presentation. Instead you will be getting your hands dirty as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works.

You’ll learn how to use a business model canvas to brainstorm each part of a company and customer development to get out of the classroom to see whether anyone other than you would want/use your product. Finally, you’ll see how agile development can help you rapidly iterate your product to build something customers will use and buy. Each week will be a new adventure as you test each part of your business model.

And who is Steve Blank, you have to ask?

The Instructor:

Steve Blank is a serial entrepreneur and has been a founder or early employee at 8 startups, including 4 resulting in successful IPOs. For the past 7 years he’s been teaching entrepreneurship to Stanford Engineering students. He’s been awarded a Stanford Undergraduate teaching award, and the San Jose mercury news has called him one of the 10 influencers in Silicon Valley.

Already know everything there is to know about building a successful startup (Ha!)? Well, how about a couple of other classes? Technology Entrepreneurship or Software Engineering for Software as a Service? Same deal: free, online, world-class instructors and information.

(A note re the sign up pages above – the html/css coding is kind of funky, at least on OS X Chrome and Safari. After you enter your name, hit tab, then do your email address, then tab to get to the sign up button.)

You’re reading Go back to school for your startup. Free! from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Derek Sivers nailed it. So what’s the value of an idea? Well, it does have some value, but it’s really a multiplier for execution.

Say ideas are worth 1 to 20. 1 to 20 what? 1 to 20 as ideas in and by themselves. Not exactly enough to retire on, right?

Now do something with that idea. Make it real. Execute on it. Even if your execution is crappy, you will actually have something.

Here’s how he explained it in this AppSumo Action Video – (free, but go grab it now!):

So, if you already had the awesomely amazing idea (like I do – of course! – with ProductivityToDo.com) you’d better focus 99.9999% on execution. (He says to himself.)

An idea alone – that’s nice. Idea times execution: Now you have something.

You’re reading Weekend Ponderable: The net value of your idea from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

In the Zone

Of the Zone I mean.

You’ve heard about it over and over, but here is the best description I’ve read (Thanks Rands!):

Let’s talk about the Zone once more.
You’re either sitting down with your computer to futz around with something or you’re attempting to get in the Zone. This is that magical place where you’ve managed to fit the entire context of your current project in your head. With all this content in there, you can perform superhuman acts of productivity and creativity because you have the complete problem space at your mental disposal.

That’s it.

If you can claw your way past every email demanding attention, every web site (including mine!), every self-inflicted attention wound, you can load up all of the problem in your head and do really good work. But it’s all, or nothing. One damn call, one little growl, and the cathedral in your mind comes crashing down before you can actualize it into something external to you.

Oh, and don’t forget that little red devil slyly whispering into your ear! “You’ll never do it, you’re worthless, look at all those people being written up in TechCrunch. You’re not them! It’s not worth it, and you can’t do it. Go back. Give up.” That’s the voice of your lizard brain (see Seth Godin & Daniel Pink for details).

So it comes down to this: How are you going to repeatedly and deliberately get into the zone? Please don’t give me that crap about waiting for inspiration. This is about perspiration, about making real value.

Here’s a tip: make it as automatic as merging onto a freeway – you do it exactly the same way each time.

One more tip: You can “store” a Zone, go do other things, and reopen that Zone and pick up right where you left off, with minimal effort. But you need to at least power up and then power down that zone once each day to keep it fresh. Stored Zones (whether they’re a novel, a codebase, or all the moving parts you need to do a really awesome WordPress membership site) start to stink like dead fish in a day. Then you have to throw them out and start all over.

You’re reading In or Out? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

But I could use 20 seconds of your help. Do either of these HD YouTube vids play for you? After Iain’s killer post I decide to take a cannonball jump into video. Blame Iain :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkEqVPmupLY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gITrCFCDUC

Thanks! You should get over the shock with a few deep breaths.

(An aside: if you run a WordPress site (and who doesn’t?), check out http://pippity.com/ very very nice, and two! updates since launch a week ago.)

You’re reading ok – so this is ugly. from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Phil Simon (the Startup Success Podcast #104) is doing some very sophisticated customer discovery: Give this interview with him a read. While I am sure that Phil’s book is going to make a good read, the mechanism he’s using (Kickstarter) is a story in and by itself.

Screw traditional publishers.

Instead, give people a way to invest in specific content creation, and get in return extras that enhance the experience.

Very cool model, but Kickstarter, why stop there?

What about adding to this get big or go home funding model an investment model?

Say Fred the author is willing in to put up 40% of the post sale revenue for 18 months as equity that can be bought. He estimates, based on what else he has done, that that will be conservatively $10k. He will sell it for $5K, if enough people join the pool and pledge to buy.

Fred’s investors may lose their investment – it’s speculative. His investors decide if they want to place a bet that may lose, break even, make money or maybe lots of money.

Now, I have no idea how all those U.S. securities laws that since the Great Depression protected investors from conman financial types after the last time Wall St. raped Main Street work. Or for that matter, how the same laws got their polarity reversed so they protected the conman financial types when they raped Main Street again a few years back. Maybe it has to be some sort index fund arrangement where you invest in one fund, then divvy out your money in the fund to content you think will pay off.

Sounds like a startup to me. Sounds like just the kind of startup funding mechanism that would work. While somebody makes a few hundred million executing this idea, I’m looking forward to Phil’s new book – and I’m glad he’s not waiting for hidebound traditional publishers to allow it to happen.

You’re reading Ponderable: Bookfunding. from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Got into Google+ yesterday (Thanks Phil!) – now it’s time to start digging around to figure out exactly what a startup founder can get out of it. If you’re in, comment about how you are finding value there. If you’re not, and you’ve got a startup/Google+ related idea, tip, question – comment and I’ve got as of this moment 5 invites left (these may even work ).

The battle of the Google+ widgets

But first, a quick suggestion and thanks. Go subscribe to http://www.googleplustutorials.com/ – they blogged about the following two widgets.

1. http://socialstatistics.com. (GooglePlusTutorials.com link.) Sign in with your Google+ id (thats the number in the URL of your Google Profile in Google Plus). then, look for your widget in the sidebar after you refresh the page:
   
2. http://widgetplus.com. (GooglePlusTutorials.com link.). Subscribe to their feed FIRST, confirm, and then you can click Get Widget and get somewhere. By the way, the various options for color etc, are in a tab interface at the bottom.
   

You’re reading So how are you using Google+? from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Ben Pieratt

From Varsity Bookmarking, the tumblelog of Ben Pieratt:

“The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest client assignment of all time. The Western world is porting itself over to the web in mind and deed and is looking to make itself comfortable and productive. It’s every person in the world, connected to every other person in the world, and no one fully understands how to make best use of this new reality because no one has seen anything like it before. The internet wants to hire you to build stuff for it because its trying to figure out what it can do. It’s offering you a blank check and asking you to come up with something fascinating and useful that it can embrace en masse, to the benefit of everyone. [...]

“The internet kills all middlemen.”

What if he is literally, precisely, right?

You’re reading Something to fear or embrace this weekend… from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

If you don’t focus, you can’t create. But if you don’t connect, you can’t meaningfully create. Here’s my new approach to the whole “be industrious or be online” quandary.

A.M. – Set up exactly what I am going to do and unless there’s an earthquake or a gun shot, do it. No interruptions, deviations, distractions, mercy or remorse. Plan the work, work the plan and the touchy-feely stuff gets a quick note but that’s it.

P.M – I go hippy, and like, browse the web checking out cool stuff, people and ideas, IM friends, check out the cool video of the latest ScobleApp* and oh yeah, get some stuff done.

Given what I do (write, code, blog and podcast), and that I’m a lark not an owl, I need to create LOC (lines of content/code) and smell the digital roses, network like a crazy, and keep an eye on the future, which tends to show up in the wrong order and unevenly.

Works for me. How about you?
—

*ScobleApp – An app, technology or startup that Robert Scoble digs up and finds. Definitely worth your time.

You’re reading Industriously smelling the digital roses from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Ever notice how interesting things tend to happen in threes? Here’s my three things for the day, starting with that 170-year-old ebook.

No, when Ralph Waldo Emerson pulled together his notes for Self-Reliance from meetups where he’d social networked with other thought leaders his time, the only things digital were at the ends of people’s arms. Instead, he was trying to fill a gap in the public discourse, get a message out in the preferred media of the time that people then and now need to hear: conformity for the sake of conformity is quicksand for the soul. Being a nonconformist is more than an attitude, it’s a perspective.

Hats off to Seth Godin and company for bringing this classic back to life, and adding insights from thinkers and doers today. In fact, today and tomorrow you can pick up this classic in digital form free: Ibex is sponsoring the Kindle version so it costs you zip nada zero to get.

Speaking of today, my ebook, MicroISV Sites that Sell! had been rebranded, reformatted and hopefully debugged as Startup Sites that Sell – and you can grab it today only over at Bits du Jour for $12.47. If you already have MicroISV Sites that Sell, and you want a copy that will read well on an iPad and won’t gobble up your printer color cartridges, email me. No new content in this edition, but there’s a lot of developers jumping into the murky waters of marketing for the first time that I think this ebook can help, based on the many emails I’ve gotten since its first release in 2008.

And finally, I’m working on a new ebook especially for mobile app developers who need to build their own web sites and connect with customers outside the confines of any particular App Store. After buying 664 iOS apps, I have a pretty good eye for what works and what horribly misses the mark when it comes to creating a web site for your brand new baby. How do you reduce the odds your very first app gets slammed in its very first customer review? What’s different – very different – about a software web site where the actual buying happens elsewhere? What do people need to see back on that sales page to buy not just a given app, but buy into letting you on their smartphones?

I hope to find the answers to these and other questions as I write this ebook. Find, not pontificate about, because my approach is to go find people out there who know firsthand the answers, and bring back to my readers their insights, experiences, and hard-earned lessons. Case in point, I interviewed today Josh Clark, author of Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps and Best Iphone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders and a guest on the Startup Success Podcast (Show #80) who has thought long and hard on what makes an app work. Josh shared some excellent, actionable insights that every mobile app developer (or at least the ones who want to make money) need to think about.

If you make/sell a mobile app and want to share your experience, insight and URLs, please email me! bob.walsh@47hats.com.

You’re reading Of eBooks new, somewhat new, and 170 years old. from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

Hopefully you’ve had a more productive day than I have. I knew exactly what I had to do today for my startup, and yet I found all sorts of things to do instead.

I’ve come to the opinion most of the time most people know exactly what they should be doing to finish their software, build their business, make something, love somebody. But it’s as scary as walking across a room full of hissing, crawling snakes, and it’s so easy to turn back again and again.

I don’t have any 12 step plans or five bullet point posts to make it any easier to make that walk. But there is some comfort knowing anybody who wants to create has to make that walk every time, and everybody “important” you’ve ever heard of made that damn walk ahead of you.

What’s more, if you can see how what you are trying to do actually makes this world even a minutely better place, I think you can levitate at least some of the time right over those snakes.

Give it a try.

You’re reading Above and Below from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

First off, a hardy thanks to those who commented on this post, or tweeted, or emailed, or IM’ed, or called. Like the song says, I get by with a little help from my friends…

Speaking of help, if you need to kick your web site into a higher gear, you could do worse than attend AppSumo’s Action Class today at noon, PST. Your’s truly will be critiquing the sites of nine brave volunteers already picked. I think it will be worth your while.

And lastly, now there’s only 16 days before GE stops paying for your copy of Do the Work. at Amazon. Tick Tock! And by the way, you in no way need to own a Kindle to read Kindle books – Amazon has free reading/managing apps for every conceivable platform, including the one you are reading this on. In fact, personally I do all my reading on an iPad, except like, in sunlight.

You’re reading Three things quick from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

For the past two months, hell for the past 3 decades, every time I sit down in front of computer to create I have to push myself to do it. It’s like a force field or some sort of invisble mind-sucking SciFi monster pushing me away from creating. I can spend all day answering emails, surfing the web, looking for new Mac or iOS apps to buy, doing essentially worthless things. But try and write, try and create, and a truckload of rationalizations, excuses, distractions, emotions and other crap springs out of my screen like some sort of weird airbag.

For months I’ve known StartupToDo.com was deader than the half-eaten lizards one of my cats likes to bring in. I’d even figured out what I need to do to “Pivot” (polite-speak for dumping this baby into the garbage and starting over) and just maybe ship something that people want. And for about the same time I could not bring myself to posting to this blog.

As creatively constipated as I’ve been, there would be days, or at least hours, when I could confront my own Resistance and it would fade for a time. And during that time, I could create, I could have a few brief hours of just being able to make things to have fun we were all promised as children.

So how and why am I writing this?

The how is simple: Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work. Kindle version free at Amazon for another 18 days. It’s my garlic and Star of David to wave in the face of all the rationalizations and excuses Resistance puts in front of me.

When I think, it’s not the best time of day for me to be creating, or that I need to check email again, or I’m too tired, or that I can’t succeed because I’m whatever, or I really should go do this or that instead; when Resistance in its seductive voice whispers, “relax, take it easy, you can do that later, you can’t do it at all” I think of this one short book I’ve read a dozen times. And I pause – is this reality or just Resistance?

Nearly every time, it’s Resistance, that enemy with a thousand faces and 10,000 lies. It will fuck up your head, play on your self-doubts, do what it takes so you can’t do what you can do and create something.

The why is simple too: When you look, really look, at what’s in your way, at the excuses/rationalizations keeping you from creating, they fade. This post is my way of looking at Resistance in the face. One small victory. Think of it as a small note smuggled out to the prisoner in the cell next to mine to not give up hope.

If you’ve read this far, but you haven’t downloaded Do the Work, ask yourself why.

It’s not the cost – it’s free, thanks to a bit of unexpected corporate generousity. It’s not that you can’t read it – you’re reading this, afterall. It’s not that you don’t need any self-help crap, or you’re too busy or you should be doing something important, or you’ll get to it next week, month or year. Unless you are doing this instant the one creative thing that above all else you exist to do, you’ve bought into the same con that derails so many of us.

If you’re pissed off, indignant, angry that I just wasted your time, as yourself why – I’m just some guy with a blog.

The one thing good about Resistance is it’s the ultimate game cheat – the more it pushes you away from something, the more likely that’s what you need to be doing.

You’re reading I’m Back. Here’s Why. from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.

I’d like ask you to do one small thing.

Not for me – for you.

Right now buy Seth Godin’s about-to-be-unleashed Poke the Box (Kindle version).

While it still in experimental pre-release the bigger the buzz, the lower the price mode and it costs one buck.

Don’t cycle through all the old lame excuses – He’s a marketer, he wears funny glasses, he doesn’t understand all the work I have to, how hard it is to write an app, blah, blah, blah – just buy the book!

Before it’s released Tuesday and the price goes back up.

Tuesday is when everybody you know will be recommending you should read Poke the Box because it reads as if this guy was writing about you.

You can buy me a beer at the next conference with the money you save.

You’re reading Poking you about Poke the Box from: 47 Hats. If you like this post, there’s plenty more! Want more sales for your startup? Stop by and let’s chat, or consider a Microconsult with Bob Walsh.