Small Business
E-Myth Revisited – A Review
I enjoyed reading this book, though after about a few chapters I started to get the feeling I was listening to a therapist rather than a business coach. This book is heavy into the psychology of starting and running a business. It’s about the way you think and how you mindset changes from someone that’s [...]
5 things I have learned about marketing.
Over the past few years of trying to sell robots, websites, etc. I have learned a few things about marketing I thought I would share: 1. It’s not all marketing, but at first it is Probably the best and worst movie of all time, Field of Dreams (If you build it they will come). This [...]
Disgruntled Members of TechColumbus
I have had two people email me over the past few weeks because they Googled "TechColumbus Sucks" and my blog popped up as #1. Though I never really talked about how bad they sucked, I have mentioned their organization a few times. I actually met with one entrepreneur last night that confirmed my opinion that [...]
Deciding on a Venture
In pitching my ideas to people I have often complained about pessimism and negativity. Now that I have been approached by a few people about possible ventures, I find myself doing the same thing. Why is that? I think a lot has to do with experience (mentioned above) but I think it more has to [...]
Goodbye TechColumbus
I had my Final meeting with TechColumbus this week. There's just something going on that I don't quite get, communication gap or something. What I find so strange about my relationship over the past year is that something is just missing. Emily & I were talking about it Monday night and we think that maybe [...]
Business Plans Are Crap, Without Market Research
In talking to a bunch of people about start-up business ideas, they always talk about your Business Plan. I find this so lazy it's funny. They should have asked, where's your market research? Because a business plan without that is useless. If I were ever going to give someone advice about a business I would [...]
Don't Outsource, Hire a Robot!
I have been reading articles about outsourcing for some time and I have always thought to myself, someday, a robot or program will be doing the job of people. I think that we are getting closer and closer to the day when peoples jobs will not be so complicated that a machine can not learn [...]
If they click it – Part 2
From my last post you can see the simple formula for market testing, "if they click it, then you build it." Now I am going to talk about the next step, what to do when people click on your ad. Maybe you should have done this before you spent any money, i.e. try searching on [...]
Thoughts On Marketing
I have been reading a lot of marketing books the past week and I came across something very useful. It's a curve that talks about how ideas spread between various groups of people, called Diffusion of Innovation. The breakdown is the standard bell curve: Innovators – 2.5% Early Adopters – 13.5% Early Majority – 34% [...]
In search of a problem?
After doing some detailed analysis of some of my products it's not so much that the ideas were bad, or the ideas have/had no market, it's that they just had an uncertain market and no cheap way to identify the size of the market or the best way to reach it. But aside from this [...]