Startup-ecosystem-infographic.png (PNG Image, 1000 × 6243 pixels) Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted? Updated. Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the trailblazing provider of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has changed the dialog about computing infrastructure. Today, instead of simply assuming that you’ll be buying and operating your own servers, storage and networking, AWS is always an option to consider, and for many new businesses, it’s simply the default choice.
I’m a huge fan of cloud computing in general and AWS in particular. But I’ve long had an instinct that the economics of the choice between self-hosted and cloud provider had more texture to it than the patently attractive sounding “10 cents an hour,” particularly as a function of demand distribution. As a case in point, Zynga has made it known that for economic reasons, they now use their own infrastructure for baseline loads and use Amazon for peaks and variable loads surrounding new game introductions.
In a subsequent post, I will share the model and describe how you can use it for scenarios of interest to you. How to Crowdfund Your Next Big Idea. Scott Steinberg is a small business expert, professional keynote speaker, noted strategic consultant, and creator of The Business Expert’s Guidebook series and video show Business Expert: Small Business Tips, Trends and Advice. Entrepreneurs and startups can download and share free guides, tip sheets and inside advice from his website. Cult favorite video game developer Double Fine recently shocked investors by raising over $1 million in 24 hours on Kickstarter for its new adventure game, despite the genre’s supposed death.
This has led critics to speculate that crowdsourcing isn’t just the hottest new thing to happen to startups and small business owners since Apple’s App Store; it may also present tomorrow’s most promising new source of venture capital and angel investment. From both research and ROI perspectives, the model makes sense. Why spend years building a better widget when you can instead find and fund tomorrow’s next million-dollar idea simply by asking potential customers?
Validate your startup idea by asking 3 simple questions | Paras Chopra. Last week, I stumbled across a personal post from a founder on his thoughts after first month of his startup. He writes in the post that he hasn’t been satisfied with the traction received so far and wonders whether existing product is the right path to continue on. I had exact same questions when I was starting up Wingify and now that we have seen some traction, I thought I should expand on a comment I made on how to know if your startup idea is the right one. When doing a startup, it is perfectly okay to wonder whether you are on the right track. It is not a sign of weakness. Like many entrepreneurs in their initial stages, if you are feeling doubtful about your startup, ask these 3 questions to yourself (and your co-founder): Do you think what you are providing is creating significant value for anyone? If answers to any of the questions is no, you better think hard about your startup before putting any more effort into it.
Providing value Realistically reaching a big target market. Look for opportunities rather than ideas. Yesterday, someone emailed me, asking about how to find good ideas to start a startup. Every founder who's been in the game a few years has clouds of potential ideas floating around that they can't find the time to work on. They might not all be good, but there are always too many of them. At the same time, though some people have this cloud of ideas following them even before they run their first business, many start off with few ideas.
Before I started my first business (and for a year or two afterwards), I was one of those people... Why is that? Can this shift in perspective happen before running a business? That said, I think there are a number of things you can do to drive towards that shift in perspective. Go out of your way to meet entrepreneurs and talk about opportunities (rather than ideas) with them. Ultimately, if you want to achieve this more quickly, jumping in at the deep end and starting a business will always be the quickest way to achieve this perspective shift. Startup Secret 39: Go where your users take you | Rafe's Radar. -- Dan Kurani, CEO, Thumb You have a road map? Prepare to rip it up. You can still get to where you're going, but the route might be the scenic one. When Dan Kurani started Opinionaided (now Thumb), the original plan was to get people to ask others for advice on products they were thinking of buying.
He saw a nice built-in revenue stream attached to consumer opinions on products (category sponsorships, product ads, etc.), and Dan and his team wanted to focus users on those products so the business model would work out. The users had different ideas. "They went off a different direction," Dan says. So the company adjusted, right? Nope. "We did everything wrong. They eventually saw the light.
Dan says that the team, "stopped banging our heads. The thing was, the product posts were still there. The company began to focus on growing the audience for the product, and Dan put the initial monetization plans on hold. "The growth and business is coming naturally now," Dan says. A classic startup horror story: the M&A bait and switch. The founder was home in his kitchen cooking dinner when the call came. It was one of those moments when the color seems to drain out of the food in front of you. The voice on the other line was the contact at the company that has been trying to acquire his small startup for several months.
“Our engineers looked at what you showed us during the due diligence and told our CEO, ‘It doesn’t look so hard, we can build it ourselves.’” His thoughts flashed to the NDA the two companies had signed. He tried to focus on not exploding in a stream of curses. In today’s startup industry, mergers and acquisitions are the fastest growing exit for venture-backed companies.
In the world of corporate mergers, AT&T and T-Mobile for example, the parties arrange an expensive break-up fee, like the $4 billion T-Mobile got when the deal fell through. Words of warning How does a startup ensure a good deal when its only leverage is to walk away from the table? Red flags in emails to angel investors. I've written before about how the very first email to an angel investor really matters, or at least to this angel investor. It's very easy to get thrown in a bucket of wannabes or bad first-timers. Here are a few of those red flags from my perspective. Sending an email through a service. My email is really easy to find. Yet you'd be surprised how many people write me cold messages through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Yes, I'm easy to find there too, but I prefer email, and I think most people do too. Financial consultants. Founders should send emails to investors.
Really long messages. When I see a wall of text I scroll down and just sigh because I know this is going to take a while to process. Too early. You need more than an idea to ask for investment. Not having links ready to go. If I'm intrigued by your email, I'm going to want to investigate a bit on my own. Hyperbole. I appreciate what it takes to get something off the ground and how most startups are movements.
Pressure. Killing Your Startup By Listening to Customers. The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It’s understanding who to listen to and why. Five Cups of CoffeeI got a call from Satish, one of my ex-students last week. He got my attention when he said, “following your customer development stuff is making my company fail.” The rest of the conversation sounded too confusing for me to figure out over the phone, so I invited him out to the ranch to chat. When he arrived, Satish sounded like he had 5 cups of coffee. But in this case, I suggested we take a hike out to Potato Patch pond.
Potato Patch PondWe took the trail behind the house down the hill, through the forest, and emerged into the bright sun in the lower valley. As we walked up the valley Satish kept up a running dialog catching me up on six years of family, classmates and how he started his consumer web company. “Next, we built a minimum viable product.” Oh, oh. Lessons Learned. The 6 Near-Fatal Mistakes We Made In Year One, And How We Built A Company Anyway. Launching a startup is like firing off a rocket ship, then trying to hold it together with duct tape. Simply surviving feels like success. The goal, in fact, of most new enterprises is to hang in until a scalable, repeatable, or comfortable path is found.
Celebrated entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen calls this “product/market” fit. In our quest for escape velocity, my startup, Contently, nearly exploded on a dozen occasions. In 12 months, we validated an idea, built a repeatable business model, and talked investors into giving us $2 million to grow it. But we cut things close. Looking back on that first year with a mix of pride and regret, I realize our blunders helped us mature as entrepreneurs. 1. “Great idea! 2 weeks later: "It’s not quite ready for scale. 3 weeks later: "Well... no one’s using it... maybe if we built this feature to go with it... " Sound familiar? 2. The problem was twofold. Needless to say, one day we looked at our bank account and found a nasty surprise. 3. Richard Branson on Decision-Making For Entrepreneurs.
Editor's Note: Entrepreneur Richard Branson regularly shares his business experience and advice with readers. What follows is the latest edited round of insightful responses. Ask him a question and your query might be the inspiration for a future column. Q: What were your most important managerial decisions -- the ones that changed your business?
-- Volodymyr Kravchuk, Kiev, Ukraine A: Most good chief executives or entrepreneurs only make three or four key decisions every year. Running your business's day-to-day operations and managing your team can take much of your time, so there are usually only a few that stand out -- the game-changing decisions that can make or sometimes break a business. Looking back over my career, which now spans more than four decades, there were many occasions when I got it right and a few when I did not. 1. This was the case when we launched our airlines Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Blue (recently rebranded Virgin Australia), in 1984 and 2000, respectively. 2. Schumpeter: Enterprising oldies. 14 Books on Leadership Every Young Entrepreneur Should Read.
There are a great many business books out there on everything from marketing and brand building to stories of the life and times of some great business person. For better or for worse, these books often shape the past, present and future generations of entrepreneurs. We asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invitation-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs, this question: “What business book do you recommend for improving management leadership?”
From Dan Kennedy’s “No BS Ruthless Management,” to “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath, to Eric Reis’ “Lean Startup,” here are 14 books on leadership every young entrepeneur should read. 1. “Good to Great by Jim Collins is one of the more exciting pieces of literature available on improving management leadership, and how businesses can be good, but how they can be exceptional and rise above the competition.” ~ Danny Wong, Blank Label Group, Inc. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Raising funding as a first-time founder. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet with some outstanding first-time entrepreneurs on a few different days during this week. In almost every case I can really feel the passion and determination they have, and I know that if they will just continue there is every chance that eventually they will be very successful.
One interesting topic which came up on a couple of different occasions was timing of raising funding as a first time founder. I’ve had entrepreneurs often talk to me with just an idea or a very early prototype with no traction and tell me that they want to raise funding. We closed our $450K seed round for Buffer at the end of last year, and joining the dots looking back I can see that a number of things came together which enabled us to raise the round.
Times during a startup at which you can raise funding What I’ve learned from talking with some very experienced and highly respected successful serial entrepreneurs is that there are only really two good times to raise funding. AngelList Takes A Shot At Standardizing The Startup Pitch Deck. If you’re a new entrepreneur or an angel investor and you haven’t heard of AngelList, it’s time to get a clue. The hybrid social network, communication and crowdsourcing tool is designed to connect first-time entrepreneurs with angel investors. It’s “easily the most important innovation in the industry,” as 500 Startups’ Dave McClure commented in response to our coverage last month of AngelList’s 2011 Yearbook. That product offers users, among other things, a highlight reel of all the activity that went down in the community (500 startups and 2,500 investors joined, resulting in a total of 12,500 introductions), fundings, and more.
Now, we’ve learned that AngelList is in the process of experimenting with more than just timelines plus CrunchBase data. Co-founder Babak Nivi tells us that the deck remains experimental and that the team may decide not to launch it officially, or may simply incorporate components of it into startup profiles. Conscious Startups. Conscious Startups. We believe in a purpose beyond making a profit We believe the purpose of a business is to make positive change in the world.
And just as humans must eat to live, a business must profit to sustain itself. But most people don’t live just to eat, and neither should a business exist just to make a profit. Profits are a necessary but not sufficient condition for success and fulfillment. We believe fear is the main thing holding you back Some people people may call it shyness or anxiety or stress or worry or a thousand other rationalizations. We believe in playing big You’re so much more capable, powerful, resourceful, beautiful, and worthy than you believe. We believe in love We believe that deep inside, what we all really want is to experience love. We believe in presence We believe in knowing ego from essence We all are awareness, our essence, a timeless consciousness. We believe there’s a reason you’re here We believe in becoming who you already are We believe in serving mankind Show your support.