Want to know the single biggest problem with every single GTD system in existence? They don’t enforce specificity when defining a task. Tasks, (unlike checklists which can be semantically reduced to a single word  - “milk”), require, demand, beg for as much specificity as you can muster.

What catches most people, most of the time, is that our To Do lists are a mix of things we’ve done countless times before and already know how to do because we’ve internalized their details, and things we’ve never done before.

• clean house.
• take out garbage cans.
• add Twilio to mySuperDuperWebApp.
• SuperBowl prep.

We hit Item 3 like a mountain bike hitting a tree as high speed. Thud. Item 3 is like just about every single one of hundreds of startup tasks – is not something we’ve done before. We need to query it and break it down into things we do have experience with:

• clean house.
• take out garbage cans.
• add Twilio to mySuperDuperWebApp by
  1. Reread Twilio API,
  2. Review Twilio Rails examples:
  3. Review this Rails example:
  4. Check StackOverflow for questions tagged with ruby-on-rails or ruby-on-rails3 and Twilio.
  5. Setup a testbed app
  6. …
• SuperBowl prep.

Whether you do that breakdown into things you do know how to do when you make your list or when you’re doing your list is up to you. But you’ll find the process easier if you mark those items (I use !!!) when you’re creating your tasks – to remind you that here there be dragons.

You’re reading If you want productivity, you need specificity 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.

Two of my favorite tools for managing my startup are Evernote and Followupthen.com. You’ve heard of Evernote – the in-the-cloud information storage for practically every kind of non-databased information in your life. Followupthen.com is a nifty service that will send you, or someone, or both of you reminder emails, free.

Since you can now share an Evernote note via email, and you can send that email to future self via Followupthen, you have a powerful tool for making sure you periodically tackle tasks in your startup.

For example, here’s my monthly WordPress workflow that’s stored in my @Marketing Evernote notebook. (At least once a month you should go into your WP site and update plugins, check your comments log, take a look at your stats, and at least note what’s popular on your site.)

WordPress Monthly Maintenance Workflow:

For each of my WP sites:

1. Go to Plugins>>Installed Plugins. Select all, update.
2. Go to Comments>> All Comments. – for the last 30 days, any spam sneak in? Any comments I need to act on (::create task)? Any comments I should followup via email (::create task)?
3. Go to Jetpack>Askimet Stats. Any Missed Spam in the last 30 days?
4. Go to Polls>>New Poll and create a new poll for readers. Change in Appearance>>Widgets Poll Name and active poll.
5. Go to JetPack>>Site Stats. Look around.
6. Check Search Engine Terms – any surprises there?
7. Check At a Glance>>Weeks. Up or Down?

End

I emailed it to every1st@followupthen.com so Followupthen will email it back to me on the first day of each month. (I wrote a pretty good cheatsheet on followupthen – download it from this post: Remember the future with FollowUpThen.com

Here’s what the email looks like when it arrives in my inbox:

Don’t rethink – reuse

Two quick points about how I approach this “workflow” First, having thought this through once I don’t have to ponder this again – just follow instructions, and get it done. Second, the first step only works if your detailed and specific – as you should be whenever you describe a task. Third, when in the future I hand this task off to a virtual assistant, it’s ready to go, making efficient use of their time and my money.

So what workflows do you repeat that can be done more efficiently by creating a workflow in Evernote, then emailing it to every1st@followupthen.com?

You’re reading No-excuse Workflow Reminders 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 a startup question? Ask it at AskBob and I’ll take a stab at it. And if it’s a question that other startup founders are asking, look for it as a post here.)

Gary Ferguson is building a Ruby on Rails xRM solution (stakeforce.com) for organizations who need to track deals but don’t have a funnel/pipeline mentality, like nonprofits.

His top startup problem? Finding development resources, and whether he should go public with the details of his idea or hold them close until at least the beta is done and out?

Ideas, Cofounders and Belief

Gary,

I’m assuming bottom line you’re looking for a developer cofounder, and that’s a very different situation than just finding a good developer you can hire. Being cofounders is a major, serious relationship: with the right person, it can lead to great things. But if you get into bed with the wrong person, you are going to regret it – big time.

Let me assume that you’ve been working all the non-technical aspects of creating a successful startup, like market discovery, researching and defining a business model, thinking through what differentiates your app from all the other xRM apps out there, etc.

What you need to do now is find another person with the complementary skills you need, who will believe in your vision. And that means you need to communicate that vision, share that idea, as widely as possible. Put another way, your first sale needs to be to a cofounder, and they are not going to just jump because it’s a nice idea. You have to make them a believer.

You need to inspire belief, passion and ambition. Belief – that you bring as much value to the relationship as will your developer cofounder. Passion – because both of you are are going be hammering away for weeks, months, maybe years and you’re both going to have to deeply care about your startup to make it. Ambition – because a good developer wants to work on projects that matter, and that advance their career, and that open new doors of opportunity and makes lots of money!

Something Dave Feinleib mentioned when Pat and I interviewed him would be a great first step for you to finding that technical cofounder: Make a 30 second video explaining what will be different and valuable in the app you want to build, put it up on YouTube and start evangelizing it everywhere you can.

Yes, that means sharing at least the broad outlines of the app you want to build. Ideas for apps is the smallest part of the puzzle. It’s the implementation and execution on that idea that is all-important.

Dave calls making that marketing video a forcing function, and it is. If you’re not willing to do what it takes to make that pitch, how can potential cofounders/mentors/investors take you seriously? They can’t. So make the video! Also, if you haven’t done your research on how to create a partnership agreement that works, definitely get that done too.

With the above said, I’d start by reading this great post from Alain Raynaud, 5 Strategies for Finding the Co-Founder of Your Dreams. Besides being a really nice guy, Alain has been deeply involved in the startup community in the Valley for years, and has built several valuable efforts focusing on connecting founders. He knows whereof he speaks.

Next, you need to get out there and let devs who dream of creating their own startups know what you’re building. Over at Find the Tech Guy, there’s a post with 16 ways to tackle this problem, plus Find the Tech Guy’s own take on the problem. Also check out TechCoFounder, where you can filter developers by skills, then make your pitch.

There are a lot of sites, venues, conferences, events, meetups worldwide where you can go cofounder hunting nowadays – it’s a huge unmet need after all! But the ammo you need to make that first sale to a cofounder is a combination of earnestness of intent and near-messianic zeal that your idea can change the world combined with doing the hard uncomfortable for most of us of putting yourself out there. Do that, and you will succeed.

Cheers,
Bob

You’re reading AskBob: Where do I find developer cofounder? 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.

Andrea Shillington

By Andrea Shillington
Founder & Owner 
Brands for the people

The first question every leader should start with is this: why does your business exists other than to make money?

It may come as a surprise to you that the first questions in a branding process is not about what the product or service is, or even how it’s delivered differently. Those questions will come, but the one that matters most to customers – and thus should to leaders as well – is why. It’s a matter of creating a partnership with your customers, one in which you both contribute to making the world a better place. This is not any easy question to answer, it requires business leaders to dig deep and get personal. The emotional connection you create by answering this will become the driving force behind your brand’s momentum.

For my new startup, Brands for the people, the journey began with a desire to help startup businesses with a vision to make a profit and make a difference. After 8 years of working with agencies branding large corporations and governments in the Middle East, Europe and North America, I had had enough of the singular goal of making rich people richer. I was seeking a higher sense of fulfillment from my work. I found my ‘why’ when I moved to Vancouver and I began meeting visionary entrepreneurs who wanted to have a positive effect on the world. I have always been passionate about helping startups achieve their dreams, but realized that most of these businesses could not afford the $30,000 price tag for a strategic branding process. I’d have to find a new way. Now that I had discovered my passionate purpose, I’d need to start thinking about how to create a new business model.

I wasn’t satisfied with the cheaper alternatives available for startups: finding a freelance designer or posting a brief on a logo competition site.  It can be a disaster if the designer isn’t competent or doesn’t match the business type. Similarly, a competition site sells the idea that a perfect logo is the magic pill for getting a brand developed. I had met many entrepreneurs who had participated in one of the above mentioned processes and possessed a logo design, but were still seeking a brand that stood out from the competition.  To provide a client, specifically a startup, with a successful product both alternatives are missing the essential and almost magical part of the branding process, where the strategic part gives way to business clarity. The step–by–step process that would help guide business owners and help them decide what they are and, just as importantly, what they are not. The part of the branding process that helps businesses create an ownable space in the market, which in turn directs how the brand gets designed.

The inadequacies of these cheaper alternative are what drove me to create a new business model and a unique technology platform. If you knew me you’d say, “she’s the last person I’d expect to develop a technology platform for her new business.” However, I realized technology solved one of my most important challenges in helping small businesses obtain the expertise they actually needed at a price they could afford. Hence, Brands for the people was born as a hybrid between the creative agency and freelance designer using the crowdsourcing model. I choose to deliver most of the strategic branding process using the ‘freemium’ model. Free brand tools are available to download from my site, brandsforthepeople.com, which helps guide leaders through creative exercises to develop a brand brief. Additionally, I wrote an E-Book, 5 Secrets to Branding your Business from the Heart, which is also free to download. It’s written as a branding how-to guide that helps business leaders think deeper about the difference they will make in the world.

The process for a startup wanting to working with Brands for the people is a streamlined, easy and collaborative process.  Once you submit your brand brief and have spoken to one of our consultants, we will connect you with designers from our hand-picked community – connecting you with designers that meet your startup budget, industry type, design style, personal characteristics and skill sets required for the project. In our community we have have designers in a range of industries and from a wide array of backgrounds, including senior designers who have worked as Creative Directors for global brand consultancies typically being charged out in the hundreds of thousands for a brand identity design. We offer the strategic process and the design online at a fraction of the cost. This business model is a win–win for both startups and designers.

I founded Brands for the people with a passionate purpose. We exists to improve the world through helping startups connect with their customers. I called my new business Brands for the people because I believe change starts with the people: the business people, the creative people and the people who buy stuff. I’m dreaming of the day when I will have helped thousands of startups to become world famous brands to do Good in the world.

Here are a few questions to get you thinking about purpose:

What moment in your life did you feel a strong calling?

What action could you take?

How will you product or service make people happier?

How will your product or service help the planet?

Why is the world a better place because of your product or service?

–END–

Andrea Shillington founded Brands for the people to help altruistic entrepreneurs create world famous brands. Before creating Brands for the people, Andrea was a brand consultant for several years in the Middle East, Europe and North America. She worked on a wide variety of projects ranging from rebranding the UAE’s federal governments to re-branding hospitality groups. After returning home to Vancouver, became passionate about helping the startup community and wanted to find a way to make strategic branding affordable. Going much deeper than logo design, Brands for the people was born to help startup businesses with a vision to change the world.

You’re reading Why branding a startup begins with a question, and not the one you’d expect. 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.

Why Startups Fail: And How Yours can Succeed

By David Feinleib
VC, Entrepreneur, and Author of Why Startups Fail: And How Yours Can Succeed

Startups fail for many different reasons. Turn failure into success by avoiding some of the most common causes of startup failure:

• Failing to drive demand
• Building a product people don’t want
• A lack of passion
• Running out of money
• Scaling too fast
• Small markets
• Failing to focus

Drive Demand!
As I wrote in Seven Ways To Market Your Startup, getting the word out about your product is key. All too often, entrepreneurs focus on what they’re going to build but not on their go-to-market strategy. Imagine that your product is already built. It’s done, and it’s ready to go. Now what? What is the tagline for the product? How are you going to market it? What’s going to drive massive adoption?

Figuring out how to drive demand for your product is just as important as figuring out what product to build. Inefficient, unleveraged distribution can kill a startup. There may be millions of small businesses you can sell your product to, for example, but you need an efficient, repeatable, and scalable way to reach them.

In fact, the best products today build marketing that drives adoption in from the beginning. Consider file sharing service Dropbox, which gives free space to existing users when they sign up others. The company now has some 50 million users.

Or think about social game maker Zynga, which builds games that require the participation of friends. Zynga leveraged the Facebook social graph to reach hundreds of millions of players. Marketing is no longer separate from product—it’s built right in.

Build Something People Want
Users of Apple products don’t just use the products—they evangelize them. This is the sign of having built and marketed a product people want.

So many entrepreneurs spend months or years building a product only to find out that few people want it. How does this happen? They keep waiting for the perfect product before being willing to get their product in the hands of early adopters.

Of course, the art of being an entrepreneur is finding the balance between products that are too early, which leads to unhappy users and negative publicity, and waiting too long to get real customer feedback.

There is nothing like real-world feedback. In the case of consumer products, build a product for yourself. When it comes to products for businesses, build for yourself if you can—and if you can’t, find a few early adopter customers who will work closely with you to be real world test cases.

It’s not that the best entrepreneurs get their products right out of the gate; rather, it’s that they fail fast and iterate their way to the right product quickly—and you can too.

Pitch With Passion
You might be surprised to see this one on the list. After all, what entrepreneur lacks passion? Yet I’ve sat through countless pitches where this was exactly the case. And if the entrepreneur lacks passion about the opportunity, how can potential investors be expected to get excited about it?

Investors in very early stage ventures aren’t investing in today’s numbers—they’re investing in the opportunity and the team. They’re making a logical decision based on pattern matching and potentially, early traction. But they’re also making an emotional decision.

They see something in the team and the opportunity that gets them excited. They feel heat on the deal, the scarcity of an investment opportunity that’s going away. They make an emotional connection and go for it.

Connect with potential investors, employees, and customers on an emotional level. Sure, it helps to be naturally outgoing and passionate, but there are other ways to connect as well—through delivering great products that people love and through measurable traction and growth. If you have trouble communicating passion, consider a coach, mentor, or advisor who can help you channel your inner Steve Jobs.

Manage Your Capital
Whether you’re funding the business yourself, have raised angel money, or have raised venture, capital is frequently hard to come by. And even when it’s available, it can be very expensive.

Managing your capital is all about knowing the numbers. Even if you’d rather be building product or out marketing and selling, knowing your numbers is key.

The first step is to know how much money you have and your burn rate. Put these numbers together and you get the runway until your “cash out” date.

The “cash out date” is not the date at which you get to take hundreds of millions of dollars of cash out and put it in your bank account. It’s the date at which, if things continue to proceed as they are and you’re not profitable, you’ll run out of money. Know the date. It can be terrifying staring down a rapidly emptying bank account—I know because I’ve been there—but there is nothing that lights a fire under you quite like the impending reality of running out of cash.

The second key part is to understand how much it costs to acquire a user or customer—your Cost Per Acquisition, or CPA—and what that user or customer is worth to you—the customer Lifetime Value, or LTV.

In the early, discovery stage of a business, your CPA and LTV numbers may be all over the map. You’re still figuring out the business and the business model. You’re trying lots of different approaches to acquire users and seeing how much various customers are worth. Once you see consistency in CPA, LTV, and your growth rate, it’s time to scale.

Scale When Ready
Nothing brings a rocket ship of a startup down to earth faster than scaling too fast. It can seem like a Catch-22. How do you acquire users and customers if you don’t spend enough money to acquire them? The trick is to know when to pour gas on the fire.

Scaling too fast can come in several forms. It can mean spending a lot of money on online marketing before having a site that’s optimized to convert the visitors who arrive. It can mean hiring people, especially sales people, too soon, before you’ve got the right product and the sales approach refined to a point where it’s repeatable.

The Sales Learning Curve (SLC) can help. The SLC was created by Mark Leslie, Former CEO of VERITAS Software, and Charles Holloway, professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Simply put, the SLC says that most products take longer and cost more to launch than entrepreneurs expect. You’ve walked your way up the learning curve when you have the right product, a repeatable approach to marketing and selling that product, and you know your CPA and LTV numbers. That’s when it’s time to pour on the gas.

Tackle A Big Market
It’s just as much work to go after a small market as it is to go after a big one—so why not go after a big one?

Of course, the decision about what kind of business to build is a very personal one. While I was in business school, I built an online lead generation business. It was highly profitable but relatively small. I loved building the business, but I missed working on something big and impactful. My Dad ran his own consulting business for decades and enjoyed every minute of it.

Yet when it comes to technology companies, many great teams have been beaten by small markets—there just aren’t that many customers and there’s limited revenue to go after. No matter how great a job you do on execution, ultimately it remains hard to be successful. So if you’re building a technology company and you have the aspiration to go big, start with a big market.

Focus
In a world where the barriers to entry to building products—at least software products—are rapidly decreasing, it’s easy to want to go after many different ideas. As my first venture investor told me when he wrote me a check, focus wins. The advice is as good today as it was 10 years ago.

It’s easy to get distracted. Distraction leads to lots of different features in a product. But winning is about finding one big feature that matters, a core feature so compelling that all of your users or customers want it, a feature that differentiates you from everyone else. Winning is not about having a thousand features. It’s about doing a few things really, really well.

Conclusion
Startups fail for lots of reasons. Fortunately, many of these reasons are avoidable. By driving demand for a product people want, focusing on what separates your product from the competition, and managing your cash along the way, you can turn your startup into a huge success.

===

David Feinleib is a former General Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures and a four-time entrepreneur. To find out more about making your startup successful, get Why Startups Fail: And How Yours Can Succeed and check out David’s blog at www.vcdave.com.

You’re reading Seven Secrets of Startup Success 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.

It used to be all you had to do is create a new startup, polish your Web 2.0 buttons and people would sign up for your service, and pay you. That was about 500,000 apps ago. Today with services like oAuth through Twitter and Facebook, getting visitors to join isn’t the issue – getting them to actually use your service and therefore value it and therefore pay for it is the nut you have to crack.

And emails (paraphrased to protect the guilty) like this one don’t cut it:

Dear Bob Walsh,

We’ve noticed that you haven’t logged in to your ACME account and we want to make sure you know how easy it is to get your support department set up.

We Know How Busy You Are
We want to help you see the value of ACME right away, so we’ve boiled it down to the quick steps you can do right now to get started with ACME:… (And another 7 bullets, 5 links and 399 words I [yes, I counted] I don’t plan to read.)

By the time I get this email, I barely remembered what this app did, let alone felt motivated to go to it. And while I’m sure the startup is trying hard with this missive to reconnect with me, sending me a long list of things to do is not the way to get me back. Such is the fate of startups who don’t sink the hook deep enough in this instant gratification, attention-starved world.

Prove your worth fast, earn your keep every day, and then I buy your app. Maybe.

Contrast that to an app like Buffer. What does Buffer have that a couple of hundred other Twitter-centric apps lack? Immediacy. As soon as I joined as a free member, I’d installed Buffer’s Chrome extension (could have done FireFox, Safari), hooked buffer into Twitter, and was using it. Like in under a minute, tops. That’s immediacy. And that’s why I started paying for the service.

So what can you do to give first time users of your app immediate value? Well,

• Look at the value to your customers of your app. What chunk of value is quickest/easiest to deliver? Focus on that, first, then everything else.
• Give them a sample data set so they can play with it, interact with it, screw with it, and see your app in action before they have to enter real data.
• The next time you find an app you like and value, dissect how they did it.
• Make a Chrome/FireFox extension that provides even just a taste of value in the app they are already using, their browser.
• Send them a report – even if it’s based on dummy data – so they have some sense of what real value lies ahead.
• Share a story about some other user (with their permission of course) who’s using your app and how.
• Share something with them that gets them onboard before something else gets their attention.
• Go through the process from first visit to actually getting value and count clicks and fields. Then think hard on how you delete, delay, defer or postpone each of those hurdles.

You’re reading It’s not getting them to try, it’s getting them to buy… 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.

Let's talk UK/EU Startups!

I’ve been conducting an experiment this week in going global helping self-funded startups.

Normally, I keep what I call online office hours here at 47hats.com between 4pm and 6pm PST weekdays.

(Stop by and I’ll be happy to chat via IM with your about ways to improve your site, conversion ratios, whatever you need to improve you startup, no charge.)

The problem is, that time slot is the middle of the night in Europe – hence the experiment. Results are in – for example:

Bob have clearly helped me figure out what I was missing to succeed in my venture. He took time to go through each point in a very precise manner, more than he had to and I appreciate that; I will definitely use his services again. Worth every penny!

Reda Sedrati
kloudsail.com
General Manager
London, UK

Starting January 16th, I’ll be available to chat, no charge, with you about your self-funded startup between 6:30 and 7:30am and 4:00 to 6:00 pm Monday through Friday PST UTC -8. Looking forward to hearing from more UK/EU self-funded startup founders!

You’re reading London calling… 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.

With something north of 10,000 Twitter related tools, services, and apps, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed and undermotivated looking for tools to help your startup. Here’s 5 new Twitter tools I’d recommend, and why.

Buffer

What: Repeat your tweets so more people see them.
Pros: Slick interface, good analytics, free account gets you real results.
Cons: Plan on going Pro for $10/month. I did.
Want: Built-in analysis of best times to autotweet to reach a) current followers, b) follower of a given Thought Leader/brand.
Comments: They just added autoposting to Facebook, check out Goodies, and they have a WordPress plugin to extend reach/range of tweets about what you’re posting (see bottom of this post). In a word, Awesome.

Buffer – Wow!

PeerIndex

What: You can only engage with so many people – how do you prioritize? All things being equal or unknown, by their reach and influence. Alternative to Klout.
Pros: More ways to use PeerIndex than Klout, useful comparison tools, can include your URLs in your score when you claim your page. Group function looks interesting.
Cons: Top Topics and Sources have issues… but it’s in beta.
Want: Polish the few rough edges, a free plan for startups when they release!
Comments: Like Buffer, you can install a Chrome extension and see PeerIndex within Twitter. To be fair, can do the same with Klout.

PeerIndex

TweetStats

What: Clear stats on your Twitter performance.
Pros: Solid stats focusing on what you’re really doing with Twitter.
Cons: Free tool, could be faster. Google ads. Sometimes down – like right now.
Want: Would like to see a way to store your stats over time.
Comments: You should go light on analytics until you have something to measure, but this will give you a good clear picture of how you’re doing.

TweetStats

mentionmapp

What: Visual interface to what has the current attention of someone on Twitter.
Pros: Who are the people you respect on Twitter? Which people and topics (#hashtags) have their attention? That’s the problem this tool solves.
Cons: In beta, can’t change size of what’s displayed.
Want: Would like to see a downloadable list of mentioned people and hashtags – easier to work with.
Comments: Say there’s a blogger you want to do a guest post for – this is a great tool for understanding said blogger’s network and interests.

mentionmapp

goLook.at

What: URL shortener with a twist: Which link would get more clicks? http://bit.ly/hrbuTl or http://vxn.go.ly/funny/cats/video?
Pros: Better human clickability, increase in SEO since relevant keywords in a URL do matter. Several really good URL domains to shorten to.
Cons: Current site is functional, but !ugly. Not a brand name like Bit.ly.
Want: New site, better explanation, more social proof this works, better UX, Chrome extension like Buffer.
Comments: Heard about this service today – have not yet used it. But given a choice between Twitter’s shortener and one that produces a comprehensible shortened URL… This could be huge.

goLook.at

Start with the above: if you’re looking for more comprehensive lists of tools, check out The Most Comprehensive Twitter App List You’ll Ever Need.

You’re reading New Twitter tools for Startups in 2012 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.

Andrus Purde, one of my MicroConsult clients, just suggested I expand my usual 4-6pm PST (UTC -8) free online office hours here so european startup founders don’t have to get up in the middle of the night just to connect with me. Well, time for an experiment!

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday (Jan 11-13) I’ll also be available to chat and offer suggestions at 6:30am PST (UTC -8) and 12pm Noon PST. Just come here to http://47hats.com and in about 45 seconds an IM chat window will appear, powered by one of my favorite engagement tools, Snapengage.com. Or click the big box in the footer.

I can’t promise I can help you with every single startup question, but I can try, and the ones I don’t have a good answer for will make great posts here.

The danger for me is that while social media/realtime IM chats are a powerful way to engage with your customers and clients I will need to make sure I fearlessly guard the rest of my time when I singletask away at coding DeveloperMemory.com, do client work and, you know, work.

You’re reading Danger! Experiment ahead 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 my cohost Patrick Foley, as he starts a new monthly column for startups over at Visual Studio Magazine. His first article, Lean Startup: Look Before You Leap is a must read if you still think the way to create your startup is to code first, everything else later.

And, kudos to David Schenberg, CEO of BusyEvent for being selected for the Capital Innovators Program. The program provides $50,000 in seed funding, mentorship from a seasoned pool of knowledgeable entrepreneurs, stellar perks, educational and social events, and the opportunity to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalist firms at the end of the program. Way to go David!

You’re reading Congratulations are in order… 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.

So, what actually happens during a MicroConsult? Well, did one with Craig Millman of Brisbane, Australia yesterday afternoon.

Craig’s the founder of The Trackster, a really nice web application for personal trainers who want to be more professional, save more time and make more money. Here’s what he had to say:

You’re reading Thanks Craig! 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 so, I can help you.

You see, about a year ago I realized just about every self-funded startup founder sooner or later gets stuck.

Stuck trying to figure out the next right action to grow sales, gain attention, connect with their market,  move forward.

I also realized I’m actually extremely good at helping those same startup founders get some perspective on which of all the things they should do next to improve their startups, define exactly with them what to do and how to do it, and nag them nicely as they work the plan.

I started doing MicroConsults, and they’ve worked great for over a 80 startup founders, and I’ve been having a blast. And when I ask at the end of the consult if they’d like their money back, not one person has said yes. So it’s time for me to up my game, and move MicroConsults from being nice sideline to major focus in the new year.

As we wrap up 2011, I wanted to offer my loyal readers still on the fence about doing a MicroConsult a really good deal: The Get Unstuck for 2012! Sale. From now to January 7th, 2012, one MicroConsult will cost you $99 instead of $147, and two MicroConsults ($198) will get you a third one free. Schedule them now, use them later, whatever works for you.

If you’ve been spinning your wheels in 2011, isn’t it time to make the commitment to take your startup to the next level of success?

What people have been saying about MicroConsult with Bob Walsh:

“I’m absolutely delighted with Bob’s approach and insights. I was fully expecting the benefits of a ‘fresh pair of eyes’, but I got a lot more, in both marketing and operational areas. I now have a clear view of where I am and how to get to the next level with a well defined action plan. I definitely recommend Bob for any small software company looking to maximise their potential.”  Marcin Coles, ZippyMeetings.com

“I just finished a terrifically valuable first mentoring session with Bob Walsh. He stretched my mind in multiple dimensions, and provided not only a satellite-level view of the micropreneurial landscape, but also specific action items to apply those insights and move on to the next steps. This was worth way more than the price of admission – I recommend Bob’s mentoring services whole-heartedly!  - “Jack”

“The Microconsult with Bob was excellent. Our particular problem was lack of sales. Bob analysed our website in detail and made specific suggestions for improvements, which would make it more likely for customers to buy our service. He is very patient and offers great value for money. The phone call in the Microconsult offer is for one hour, but our session lasted more than 2 hours! Bob is a true mentor. We are very excited and optimistic about making the relevant changes to our website.” – A recent client in stealth mode.

You’re reading Are you Stuck? 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.

As we count down the days to a shiny new 2012, here’s another New Year’s Resolution to consider for your startup:

Resolution #2: I am going to engage more with my customers.

Enterprise companies are scrambling to engage more with their perspective and actual customers on multiple social media platforms, via relevant email, and realtime conversations on their sites. What are you doing to do the same? Here’s three specific ways that play to a startup’s strengths for your consideration:

Go realtime on your site. Customer questions lead to customer sales. If I have to submit a ticket, fill in a form, beg you for an answer to a question that’s roadblocking my purchase decision, how does that work to your benefit? Questions mean they’ve giving you the increasingly valuable gift of their attention: you want to make it as easy as possible for them to engage with you when, where and how they want. Increasingly, the when and where is your startup’s site, and the how is some form of live chat.

Two such services are SnapEngage (which I use) and Olark (which I’ve heard good things about). A snippet of JavaScript, a few settings and your are ready, willing and able to answer questions, engage with customers, and be there for your market. While there are other, enterprisey/corporate services that do the same thing, they are at best stuffy and at worse imitation customer support. Let your customer talk with the real you.

I use SnapEngage at 47hats to answer any self-funded startup founder’s questions I can. Most of my MicroConsults in 2011 started that way. In 2012, I’m going I want to be a lot more consistant with this form of engagement by being constantly available here from 4pm to 6pm Monday through Friday Pacific Time. Stop by and give it a try.

Send your customers email they want. It’s pretty simple: we are all drowning in marketing/sales email and starved for relevant/useful email. Here we startups have a huge advantage over all those clueless corporate idiots who do “email blasts” of marketing spam: we actually know what we’re talking about. Software solves problems and because you started your own software company, you became (I hope!) a authority on the problems facing your customers. Help them! Help them get more out of your product or service. Help them by sharing interesting posts, stories, videos, whatever.

Mailchimp.com – with its plethora of ebooks, videos, online classes, easy website integration, and a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers/12,000 emails/month is what you want to use. Integrate their double opt-in form (tip: use foobar, hellobar, wp-subscribers to build your subscriber list faster) with your site, pick a template and do a short, useful mailing once a month. Need content? How about a 30 second YouTube video on one nifty feature of your software and 3 really good posts relevant to your customers? Keep the marketing to a minimum, respect their time and good things will happen.

Go Social. Whether it’s Twitter and Facebook, Stack Overflow and Quora, LinkedIn and Google+, connect and engage with your current and future customers. I do not mean sell to them. I do not mean market to them. I mean engage with them, share with them, laugh with them, commensurate with them, be a person with them.

In case you missed the revolution, a significant percentage of the human race now uses social media to connect with other people. It’s time to intelligently get connected, if you haven’t already. The particulars of what is the best way for you and your startup to Go Social is a bit beyond this post; all I can recommend is resolve to show up, contribute, help other people and go very light on the marketing. It works.

You’re reading Startup New Year’s Resolution #2: Engage more. 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.

With 2012 less than a week away, have you got your New Year’s Resolutions for your startup ready? You know, that list of things you’re going to tackle so that 2012 outshines 2011, at least as far as as your startup.

Here’s the first of a set of Startup New Year’s Resolutions I’m recommending this week, and exactly how to adopt, execute and enjoy the benefits.

Resolution #1: My startup site is going on a diet.

How long does it take to load your site? That’s too slow. Too slow for Google which factors in loading time when returning your site in a search, too slow for impatient prospective customers who will abandon your site, never to return.

Unlike human diets that miserably fail, here’s a site diet that will actually work in a couple of hours, not months:

1. Measure your site default page right now. There’s lots of web tools to measure your site loading time: I like Pingdom’s Full Page Test, even if it’s beta (In fact, I like Pingdom, period.). This site came in at an 3.87s – “faster than 44% of all tested websites”; The Startup Success Podcast came in at a dismal 9.50s, “Slower than 85% of all tested websites”.
2. Record that measurement. You’re in this for the long haul, so write it down. Evernote is an excellent place for it – Create a note called 2012 Load times, insert a table, and enter your baseline measurement. (Tip: take a screenshot, drag that into the note)
3. Where is the fat? Take a little time to familiarize yourself with the results. Where is your site bogging down? Loading images? Unminified JavaScript? External API calls to things like Tweetmeme.com? Look for where you can find the biggest time savings and focus on that. For example, I changed the Tweetmeme WordPress Plugin settings so the TweetMeme badge doesn’t show on the home page and in the RSS feed. That decreased overall load time by something like 3 seconds – a significant savings.
4. Squeeze those images! Depending on how diligent you already are about paring the fat from jpgs, pngs and gifs, this one change could do wonders for your site. In a nutshell, you want to a) use the right image types to reduce size, and b) actually reduce the size of images as part of your standard site workflow. You’ll find a list of tools under Resources that work online and off – find one or two that work for you.
5. Improve your server’s digestion.By that I mean there’s a range of best practices that lets your server better digest your site’s components. Since every site is different, you’ll need to dig into this (See Resources below), but here’s a couple of basic recommended practices:
   • Avoid Resizing Images in HTML – it makes your server work more.
   • Maximize and improve your CSS – little things like italicizing text via CSS instead of using and em tag add up.
   • Load your CSS first and your JavaScript last and minify them.
6. Don’t forget to put the squeeze on other key pages. Besides your index page, plan to run your main product, purchase and about pages through the load time reduction steps above. They are the ones your prospective customers are most likely to look at.
7. Change your coding/content creation habits. After going through all the steps above, you will be hyperaware of what bloats your site. Write those lessons learned and keen insights down as a checklist for the next time you add code or content to your site. Again, Evernote is a good, accessible, free, multidevice place to store that checklist.
8. Weigh in periodically. Controlling your or your site’s size is not a one shot deal. Close the loop and finish the task by scheduling it for the start of each new quarter in 2012 in whatever app you keep appointments for yourself. Your customers and your revenue stream will thank you.

Resources for your startup web site diet:

You’re reading A New Years’s diet resolution for your startup site. 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.

Brad Feld thinks so, and he’s ready, willing and able to explain to you what has and has not worked so far in his 18 year marriage with his wife, Amy Batchelor. Pat and I interviewed Brad – noted VC, blogger, early stage investor and cofounder of TechStars – for The Startup Success Podcast (Just posted as Show 127).

If you want to build a great startup, but have no wish to fail your wife, significant other, or yourself, this is one show you should listen to.

You’re reading Startups and Relationships: Can you have both? 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.