Published on April 30, 2010
in Ideas.
We’ve all probably heard that “It’s better to be lucky than good.” For startups, the question is how do you create that “Luck”. Lot’s of very smart people and teams have gloriously failed when it comes to creating companies, while less talented teams have found luck by hitting a market just right, or getting a few things that happen to really matter to customers.
There isn’t a magic trick to creating luck, but here are a few of my thoughts. Try many things and see what works. In an effort to do many things, you might get lucky and find that thing that really changes your business. When you do find that lucky thing that works, do as much as you can of it. Sometimes one lucky thing can take you a long way. Other times you’ll need to hit a couple gold veins.
But here is something to think about. Mediocrity and luck could be an excellent recipe for rapid growth. As an example, Twitter wasn’t very good when it started, but it was lucky.
However, as a business matures and an industry becomes more competitive, you probably need to be really good to survive.
Published on April 29, 2010
in Ideas.
My uncle Tom was a senior executive at Chevron. Before he died, he told me a story about a board meeting where the CEO said there would be massive layoffs. His question was how do we know that we won’t end up with a smaller and less efficient business? When the ad market slowwwwed down, and things got tough, many people went smaller with their online businesses. Which I think was the right call. But. Things are changing. Now may be a good time to look at increasing your size in sales and product development to generate more revenue and achieve more scale. That’s what we are doing at HubPages. During the downturn, we hunkered down, but still grew our audience in a significant fashion. Now we are looking to become a larger and more efficient company.
I’m offering a $5K referral fee to anyone that refers me a Director of Media Sales or refers software engineers. send resumes to paul <at> yieldbuild.com.
Published on April 6, 2010
in Ideas.
I’m in my hotel room and my ATT cell phone doesn’t have coverage, but I noticed I had wifi coverage. So here is the case for Google Voice and Skype. I found a script a while back to use my mobile phone as a modem for my computer. My computer is connected via bluetooth to my mobile phone. My mobile phone is connected to an ATT wifi hotspot. My computer is accessing the internet from my phone. Bluetooth data rates aren’t great, but it looks like I’m getting about 70K - 100K transfer speeds. That’s enough bandwidth to use Skype on my computer. I’ve done about three calls today and it’s working fine. If I were dependent upon ATT mobile coverage, I’d have to leave my hotel room. The other good part is I don’t have to pay for hotel room internet since ATT includes the wifi service with my plan.
