397 karma · joined December 29, 2007
Re traffic, it is the lifeblood of any site. Couple thoughts:
- Buy banner or link on site(s) that attract the type of users you want. - Submit to bloggers who'd find this cool. - See if there's anyway you can create original content out of this and seo that. Thinking out loud here, perhaps snapshots of what happened in different areas per day, and then seo those pages. But that'll take time to start building traffic.
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/02/how-to-be-the-luckiest-...
For me, it's getting up early, thinking about things I'm grateful for while I drink my coffee, then working out, then meditating, then hitting the day.
I've personally printed out a few of his posts and keep them on my desk at home to review occasionally.
Anytime is a good time to be a founder. There's always a need for something better. Technology and use of technology is always evolving.
Aside, I enjoyed this blog post of yours, good reminder. http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=438
But, he is single, doesn't have kids, and has done the travel, nightclubs, sex with many women thing, so using that experience.
If one thinks about it, none of us know the final day, we just live like it's far away in never never land. In a previous career, I worked in a level one trauma ER, and in four years, watched hundreds, if not close to a thousand, people die. Makes one think. None of those people woke up that morning, got ready for work, and got in their cars thinking this'd be their last day.
So that thought went into this as well. It was an off the head list, more of how I would live, and more importantly, how I should live whether I have 35 days or 70 years left.
I'm sure if I was to do the exercise next year, there'd be new items, some from current list might go. But that's the beauty of life. We grow, we change, we evolve.
It is a good exercise for anyone to do, regardless of age and impending birthdays. I highly recommend it.
So, I took out a calendar, kept track of days left. 30...29....
30 days later, I'd finished the novel.
This time, raising money for my startup, after our pitch went out on Angellist, it was unlike anything I or most of my friends have ever experienced. Angels and VCs contact you, I had two to three weeks of non-stop meetings, selecting who would be best to take money from, and we raised.
What Angellist did for us was (a) significantly decrease the time to raise money and (b) put us in front of VCs and Angels we never could have met on our own, not without at least dedicating months to the process.
My take - it empowers the entrepreneurs, which is why certain VCs don't like it. Classic internet play - disintermediate the middlemen.
It's just my opinion, but boy, it made my life simple and allowed me to get back to what I love, which is building my company.
1) Cojones - Extra large
2) A Bulldog's jaws - Once you grab on to something, you don't quit.
3) Bulletproof vest - There'll always be detractors, hanger oners, I-told-you-so'ers. Let it all bounce off.
4) A Dog neck cone - For focus. You only look back for lessons.
I'd add more, but with those 4, you can accomplish pretty much anything.
Classic saying, applies to what we build on the web, as well as our lives: What you measure improves.
You might want to take screenshots of a few use cases, skitch them up and post that on a more....link for those who want to learn more.
Interestingly enough, I was up late last night looking for a simple and collaborative task/project management solution - and here you are. Excited to try it out.
1. “I've started four or five companies now, based on how you count. There is one I am trying to forget.” Most serial entrepreneurs that I know don’t have a 100% “hit rate”. Just about everyone has had at least one venture that didn’t quite turn out the way they had hoped. I like that Paul’s able
2. Like me, Paul also started a company with his brother. I have to remember to chat with him about that over a beer someday. [Note to self: Write article titled “Starting Something With A Sibling: Understanding The Tradeoffs”.
3. Like many of my favorite software entrepreneurs, Paul’s a programmer by training. Interesting side note: In my recent travels and interactions with entrepreneurs, I’m finding that an increasing number of founders have a design/UI/UX background.
4. When asked “Why do you start companies”, Paul has one of the best answers I’ve ever heard: I start companies because it gives me an opportunity to create teams.
5. “Our priorities are always team first, customer second and profit third.”
6. The difference between an A team and an A+ team is the difference between a million in revenue and a billion in revenue.
7. Sometimes people Paul is interviewing say “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you.”. Paul: “Trust me, after a few months, you’ll learn that the reason you’re here is not me, but the people around you”
8. Paul English on recruiting (I’m paraphrasing this from a meeting I had with him and some pieces from this interview): When someone mentions the name of a person that they’ve worked with that they think is exceptional, a little clock starts ticking in my head. My world goes to black and white, and this clock is in color. From when the clock starts, I give myself seven days to track them down, back channel, get them in for two series of interviews that are intense and focused, and make an offer and have them accept it. That's seven days from when I hear the person's name.
9. At least one of the co-founders needs to be passionate about recruiting because that absolutely makes all the difference in the world.
10. When Paul started Kayak, one thing that was very important to him was building something that his friends could use. Before Kaya, when people asked "What do you do?", his response was "I work in an operations research group at data general, and we're studying advanced processes for doing disc drive manufacturing." Clearly, unlikely to be fascinating to most people. With Kayak he wanted it to be different. I have had almost precisely this experience. For my current startup, I wanted to work on something that when random strangers asked me what I did, I wanted a decent chance that the answer would be relevant to them.
11. “I had sold two companies. I didn't want to sell a company again. So my venture guys would sometimes say, "You know, explore it." And I'd have the meeting knowing in my mind that there is no way I am going to sell this company.”
12. When Paul was hiring his early team, he refused to hire people from the travel industry. He didn’t want travel people, he wanted consumer product people.
13. One of Paul’s investors said, “You’ll name this company Kayak over my dead body.” Paul: “Thanks for the input.”
14. The Red Phone: Paul found the most obnoxious, loud-ringing red phone he could find and plugged it in right in the engineering office. About 30% of the time, when a Kayak web visitor saw a support phone number on the website, it was the number of that phone. The idea was to build a culture that was centered around the customer.
15. “I guess this is the first time I'm talking about this. But I'm at the beginning of a new project, which will be my next 10 year project. I'll be at Kayak, of course, pushing it, pushing it, but I'm starting a new project that has an audacious goal of creating free low-bandwidth Internet for the whole continent of Africa. [This super-cool.]
16. In an uncharacteristic moment, I actually asked Paul a question in the session about how his advice around recruiting as a company grows from 5 to 50 to 500 people. He had two points: First, make sure you identify the stars. He does this by asking people on his team who the brightest people they’ve worked with is. Then, make sure that they know how much emphasis you put on the team and go after them — aggressively.
17. If you visit Kayak.com and hit the feedback button, you will get a response via email. Kayak responds, individually, to every email. That’s impressive. What is crazy-impressive is that the email response comes from either Paul or someone on the engineering team. He gets flack for using a $150k/engineer to answer support emails when the rest of the world is outsourcing it for $8/hour or something. Why does he do this? Because, when engineers respond to support issues, when the same issues arise time and time again, they are more likely to stop what they are doing and go fix the problem so that they don’t have to answer that same question again. And, because it sends a message to the entire team that they take these issues very seriously.
If you can't code (and I'm one of those, btw), then your driving a startup to success is significantly dependent on your level of experience in shipping products, doing sales, iterating, working working working.
One can learn to do this on the job, but do you want to pay for the mistakes they're bound to make the first time around?