Made by One
January 12th, 2011
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I’ve been hanging out on the Hacker news site from YCombinator. It is a great source of information and inspiration for anyone starting their own business.
The folks from YCombinator, who have funded some awesome startups, put a strong emphasis on funding teams of founders, rather than solo creators. Now I’ve been solo creating for a number of years, along with a few team projects, but the recent launch of Facto.me, I even blogged about it, got me thinking on the subject of solo versus team.
If you have all the necessary skills, being a solo creator cannot be beaten for time to market for your MVP release. Larger projects can benefit from a division of labor, but most MVP releases are small enough that this isn’t the case. Having co-founders can be useful to bounce ideas off, but I’ve found my network of friends is good for that, even if they’re not working on the project.
In the ended I decided solo creators should be celebrated! They shoulder all the risk for creating something where nothing existed, with nobody else to blame if things go wrong. Even if they do fail, they are a great way to learn for your next project solo or not.
Rather than just posting a blog entry listing a few solo creators with links to their works, I decide instead to build my first interview based site. Made by One is a series of interviews with solo creators about the creator and projects they have created.
I posted about the site to Hacker news, and was pleasantly surprised with the response. I wasn’t sure how many solo creators I would be able to interview, but now have a enough leads for about a years worth of weekly interviews.
Visit the site, follow us on Twitter feed, or subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll never miss our great interviews.
Posted in My-Launches
From concept to launch in 24 hours
January 2nd, 2011
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I thought I was pretty quick about getting sites built and launched, but I must bow to the master.
Yesterday Kyle Bragger (who also built Forrst), took a concept and launched a site in just 24 hours. He posted this blog post about Facto today.
Facto is a fun way for you to share facts about yourself with friends or anyone on the internet. It is a simple idea beautifully executed.
It sounds like Kyle had a great time building Facto, and thinks you should build one of your ideas too. As Kyle says:
There’s nothing more fulfilling than creating something out of nothing, and in my opinion there is no better time to transform yourself into someone who can produce something from a mere idea. It doesn’t have to be perfect, or even refined. The ability to create a working prototype of an idea is invaluable. It’s not a mockup, it’s not a powerpoint deck, it’s a real, living, breathing thing that real users can interact with now. If you’re a developer or designer but lacking in the opposite discipline, what are you waiting for? You could be hacking on a cool idea as we speak. If you’re a business guy/woman, or “ideas person”, why spend any more time relying on other people** to build your ideas?
Now back to my ideas, not sure I can do any of them in just 24 hours, so I might have to come up with something else!
Posted in Entrepreneur
Goals for 2011
January 2nd, 2011
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Following on my post reviewing of 2010 I thought it would be a good idea to set some goals for 2011.
I’m very excited for 2011 to hit. It will be a big year. The day job has some promising projects on the horizon, and the for the garage job, I’m hoping to get some awesome project moving.
Rather than being specific about launching particular apps, I’m going to set broader goals to allow myself to adjust to the year as things develop.
Mobile
I want to release at least 1 free, and one paid native iOS and Android app. This means getting to grips with Objective C, and the Android Java SDK.
I would like to add WebOS to the list, but unless HP does something amazing with its new range of Tablets, the market is going to be pretty small.
Dog fooding
Some of my most successful projects, have been applications/websites that I’ve needed myself. Episode List was born from the frustration of not knowing if tonights episode was a repeat or not. Most Inspired has saved me countless hours of surfing design galleries looking for that key bit of inspiration. This year I aim to return to building tools that I would use very day.
This year this will start with Mubdo. Frustrated with the many todo and time tracking tools out there (and yes I’ve used most) I decided to build my own. The aim to is be quick and simple, yes I know most tools like this aim for that, but very few actually stay that way.
There is enough functionality built to launch Mubdo, but I’m going to be running it for a long time in private beta. This is primarily a tool for myself, and I don’t want to get bogged down with people requesting too many features/changes.
Rebirth
I’ve left a few of my previous projects alone for too long. A lot has changed in the last couple of years, and fresh look at some old problems I was trying to solve is in order.
My first order of business will be turn Uberlook into more of a Reddit/Hacker News, style community site. I’ll be able to leverage a lot of that functionality into other sites.
Social
Not living in a big city makes it hard to connect with other lean startup folks, but I vow to try harder. I’ve been part of some local developer groups, but nothing aimed at people starting their own business. This may involve a little more travelling this year, but should be well worth it.
Health
Time to get my bum out of my chair. I used to be a lot more active, and therefore a lot thinner! I’m aiming to lose about 50lbs this year. This is going to involve a combination of more exercise, and watching what I eat. I don’t think I’ll be using Lose it or Lose it, but if things don’t go well in the beginning part of the year, it might come to that!
Money
Makes the world go round, right? I’m hoping by the end of the year, that my garage projects, can bring in as much income as my day job, yes I’m a long way from that right now, but it good to set targets
There you have them, my goals, for the 2011. I won’t be waiting til 2012 to post a review, I am to do one every month.
Posted in Sitenews
2010 in Review
December 31st, 2010
1 Comment
Looking back it turns out that 2010 was dominated by the day job way more than I had anticipated.
I’m very proud of the work I did at the day job, but lots of long hours at work left little time to spend tinkering in the Garage.
This years most significant work ended up being a relaunch rather than a launch. The rebuild of Episode List, took something that I originally built in 2001 and let fall into disrepair, with declining visitors, and turned into something that has continued to grow, in both visitors and revenue month over month.
I hope 2011 brings much more garage time.
I plan to refresh and relaunch a number of existing projects, as well add some new projects. I’m focusing on projects (web applications) that help get more done during the day. I’ll be documenting my plans for 2011 in another post.
For now I hope everyone had a great 2010, and wish everyone continued success for 2011.
Posted in Business, My-Launches, Sitenews
Making Money Online
October 11th, 2009
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I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a long time, but I keep putting it off, why would I write something so obvious? However, I’ve seen so many people ignore this point, so here goes…
Forget everything you’ve read about making money online and remember this, there are only 2 ways of making money online: Sell something; or help someone sell something!
There! Obvious isn’t it. But I think people get caught up in page-views, visitors, RSS subscribers, Twitter followers and everything else that they forget the fundamental things. You’re in business to make money, to make money you have sell something to someone.
If you’re not selling something directly you’ll be helping someone else to sell something, either thru some form of advertising or affiliate marketing.
As someone running their business in their spare time, it is even more important to remember the fundamentals. You often don’t have the luxury of figuring out how you’ll make money after you have lots of visitors, because you probably won’t be around if you don’t figure out how to make money NOW.
If you don’t plan on selling something directly on your website, think carefully about the types of visitors you’ll be getting and start making relationships with people that want to reach that type of person.
Posted in Business
From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.
September 21st, 2009
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TechCrunch recently published a post by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg.
The post provides some great advice on starting a starting a new company, which basically boils down to do it … before someone else beats you too it.
Whilst the article makes some great points, I have to keep reminding myself we’re not all in the same position as the author. Just like every great golfer has their own unique swing, as entrepreneurs we have to evaluate our own situation, what worked for someone else might not work for you. Some of the authors points are very much aimed at the consumer space, and just won’t fly in the business arena, where you only get one chance to impress.
Tags: Startup, techrunch
Posted in Entrepreneur
19 Free Web Services That Keep Saving You Money
September 7th, 2009
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When you’re bootstrapping every penny counts, and making use of the services listed in this article from PC World will save you money for sure. They are services that anyone starting a new business will need to use, and would normally have to pay for.
From telephone conference services, and free long distance calls to sending and receiving faxes, you’ll save money by making user of these services.
Article: pcworld.com/article/171435/free_services_that_keep_saving_money.html
Posted in Resources
Most Inspired Google Slap Over
September 7th, 2009
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For a few months now the Page Rank on Most Inspired has sat at a 3, where it had been at 5 for a long time before that.
I’m not exactly sure why it had been demoted to a 3, but that is the black hole that is Google. People can pretend to know why things have happened, but unless you’re on the inside, you really just guessing.
I decided last week to try and do something about it!
I’ve been a member of the Google webmasters program from about when it started, and made sure to add Most Inspired right from the beginning.
I hadn’t logged in a while since I’d already verified my sites, and added the sitemaps. When I logged in I noticed something that I hadn’t seen before.
Most Inspired was still being index by Google, and provides a stream of steady visitors, but clicked the link anyway. On the detailed page I found the relevant bit:
If your site isn’t appearing in Google search results, or it’s performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our webmaster guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site.
I followed the link and made sure Most Inspired wasn’t violating any of the guidelines, which I don’t believe it ever was, and them submitted my reconsideration request. You can only do this if you’ve added and verified ownership of the website in your Google Webmasters account.
The help page states that reconsideration can take many weeks, but on Friday I noticed that my PR was now up at 6! Wow! I have heard nothing from Google, but the volume of requests they get, probably means replying to everyone is unlikely.
Since I never heard back from Google its hard to exactly why Most Inspired was slapped in the first place. They only thing I can think of is that I used to use Text-Link-Ads on the website (which I’ve since removed), there was some rumors that this would cause problems, but I don’t know for sure.
It’s hard to tell what affect this is having on my search engine traffic, since this is a holiday weekend in the US and traffic is usually lower, but it makes me feel better.
Tags: google, pagerank, slap
Posted in Search Engine Optimization
Stop Password Masking?
July 4th, 2009
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Jakob Nielsen recently posted on his dislike for password masking. While I can see his side of the argument, I have to disagree.
The post itself acknowledges that are certain instances where you need the higher level of security afforded by password masking, such as when you are using a shared computer (eg, at an internet cafe), and certain functions high risk applications (eg, banking). I would argue that this need goes even further.
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Tags: ui, usability
Posted in Design
Where we stand…
January 18th, 2009
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If there was any doubt in peoples minds about how bad things are in the economy, all you need to do is watch the latest batch of advertising coming out of Madison Avenue.
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Posted in Industry