For me, anything new starts with a brainstorm.  Almost everything I’ve ever written started as a brainstormed list and was later constructed into a complete thought.  As much as I’ve mentioned enjoying this in the past, in a way, I envy those people that can turn a blank page directly into to something well crafted and polished.  It certainly saves a few steps.

In college, my freshman year writing teacher once told me I was one of the most step-by-step writers she’d ever read.  I could apparently write (surprise to me), I wasn’t lacking things to say (less of a surprise), but I was just really, really sequential she told me.  (This woman had the dark, artsy grad student thing down pat.  I’m sure she didn’t know what to make of my engineering ass.)  My creativity simply comes at a different part in the process — the brainstorm’s where the fun is.  It’s putting together the puzzle from that brainstorm that’s logical sequential.

Anyways, here it is.  We’ll see how I put it all together.

Community

• Sustainability in your Community
• Eyeballs to Fingertips Ratio

Build systems, not products.

Feedback – get it every where you can

• Emails
• Webinar
• Power Users
• Coworkers

Revenue

• You need more
• Who has the pockets
• Traditional vs. Non Traditional

Operations

• Always getting better
• Document!
• Know when to fudge it.

Wikinvest – Working for a startup, analyzing conglomerates.

Changing Landscape

• Falling (failing) newspapers.
• Large institutions are out.  Little is in.
• Paying platforms – Mahalo, Facebook, iPhone
• Manager your own money

ADRE and QQQQ

Ownership

• Company Options
• Personal Investing

What’s Failure?  What’s success?

Your Network

• Casually
• Personally
• Network-ily

Recently, I’ve gotten away from that.  I’d gotten away from writing about tools and entrepreneurial ideas, and I became focused on writing the international startup series.  Now, I’ve really enjoyed the international startup series, but it’s become much larger and takes up much more time than I originally intended. (And in these dire/crisis/trying times, )  I think the size of the series is a great measure of the sophistication of the international startup scene, but it was eating up precious time and keeping me from focusing on what Enter Venture is all about. (And in this time of economic crisis, we need to prioritize)

Now, a post about feedback, that’s what Enter Venture’s all about.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s been said before that being an entrepreneur is all about soliciting and applying feedback. Refining an idea into a business is a constant struggle between trying something new, assessing the outcome, and trying it again.

Whatever you’re doing, no one’s done it before — not the exact thing, in the exact space, at the exact time.  Every entrepreneurial experience is different.  Take some of my recent entrepreneur interview series posts — ZDONK is working to leverage their industry connections in a way most outsiders couldn’t, Ativiti is working by moonlighting, and Baveo is working off of equity, without funding.  All three of these companies approaches the business creation process differently.

At best, someone can relate to your experience.  Someone can relate to your startup and offer ideas for how you can improve.  Some will even criticize your idea and startup.  You might not like the ideas; you might not like the opinions.  The key to being an entrepreneur, though, is your ability to consider all of these opinions and create an advantage out of their feedback.

When I was recently discussing this and Enter Venture with Dennis of ZDONK, he said:

“To be honest, I’ve really enjoyed all your posts but never really got into the international startup series. It seemed like you were kind of investigating and making a list as opposed to really getting into a particular startup or particular software/tools you thought would be useful for a startup. They were definitely interesting but personally I just wasn’t as engaged as I’d been with your previous posts.”

There it was.  I had created the series to try something new, but after a while, it was all that I was doing and alienated at least one of my regular readers.  After Dennis’ feedback and a recent Quick Sprout post about improving your blog by creating that helps people, rather than reports the news. I realized I was writing my own form of news.

You can expect that to change with Enter Venture because I’m mindful of your feedback.  (Feel free to leave it in my newly-updated, Disqus comment system).  I want to get a bit more into the entrepreneurial process and talk about the tools I use and the processes I go through to manage this blog.  I’ve re-organized Enter Venture a bit so there’s even a preliminary Resources section with everything from the blogs I read to WordPress plugins I use, tools, etc.

The entrepreneur interviews will continue — but as a way to illuminate the entrepreneurial process, not as a way of reporting the news.  We’ll save the news for TechCrunch, and the entrepreneur-relevant, feedback-incorporating blog evolution for Enter Venture.

What do you think?

Recently, Boris over at TheNextWeb.com wrote a bit about the things he hates about the web. After reviewing the new group socializing startup, MIXTT, recently, I was thinking about one of my favorite things about the web. It’s those rare moments, when ideas, computer code, and virtual screens somehow turn into fresh air and real conversation. I love when the web helps me get outside and talk to real people.

These days, no matter what your profession, it’s hard to avoid constantly being on the web. You write emails, text messages, and 140 character status updates. You talk to people on Skype, your cell phone, and your iPhone (which isn’t really a phone — especially given it’s lackluster reception). You have all of these ways of trying to recreate real, flesh and blood conversation. Every once in awhile, why not use some of the web’s tools as a way to experience the real thing? Go meet some real people. Go visit some real places.

Go to an event

Back in the days before the web, finding out about an event was a bit of a crap shoot. You might see a flyer for the event somewhere or an ad in a magazine or newspaper. With the web, you can find just about any type of event you can imagine. You can find business and tech events on sites like Garysguide or get a list of events by your location with Eventful. You can even find tickets to professional events (i.e., you have an overpriced ticket with a bar code) resold for extra high prices on StubHub, Ebay, or craigslist.

Create your own event

Services like MeetUp and MIXTT help you form both online and real life groups to help both your business and social life. You can create an ad hoc gathering focused on learning something new with a BarCamp event. If that doesn’t work, there are all kinds of other “unconferences” you can create — you can even create your own overpriced tickets with tools like EventBrite.

Find a date

It’s hard to watch TV these days without seeing the dueling ads between Match.com and eHarmony. Real people are using these services, and you can use not-so-real compatibility tests to find them. If that doesn’t work for you, try finding dates based on religion with sites like JDate, MuslimFriends, or, Christian Cafe.

Go to china (or somewhere similar)

Ernst-Jan of TheNextWeb.com has recently been traveled around China for with other bloggers. What a great idea! You can find great travel deals on sites like Kayak, Orbitz, or Travelocity. Read about about whatever the places you choose to visit with Lonely Planet (or get paid to write about them) or crash on a couch with CouchSurfer.

Go outside

When all else fails, fire up one of your favorite directions services and walk or drive to somewhere new. You can look up a nice park using one of your local park websites, or find a team to play sports using site’s like New York’s ZogSports.

I am, however, really excited to talk about iPhone applications because I’m really excited to have my iPhone back. I’ve been without it for 3 months since I dropped and cracked the screen. I have replaced the phone just in time for the App Store, which is a much cooler, easier to use version of the CNET Download.com site, tailored specifically for the iPhone.

Some of the blogosphere’s response to the App Store launch has been critical. That NDA issue is a big deal, but it’s solvable. I think some of the prices are misguided — $10 for Tetris?! Really? Can I get an iPhone-crash-free guarantee with that? The market will ultimately take care of this too.

On the whole, this particular user is completely satisfied with the first release of applications and looking forward to future mobile innovations on the App Store. As a glimpse of that future, here are my top applications and ideas for applications.

Feel free to add your own ideas to the Comments.

5 Favorite iPhone Apps

1. Mlb.com At Bat – Have you ever seen video playback of this quality on any computer? I have a MLB.tv subscription, and it never, ever looks as good as the replays you can watch on Mlb.com At Bat just minutes after the play occurs. Mlb.com At Bat is like having a personalized, DVD quality version of Baseball Tonight’s highlight reel in your pocket.
2. Pandora – Apparently Pandora’s been around forever because my roomate remembers first hearing about them in college. If it weren’t for the iPhone, I might never have known about Pandora. I don’t think I’m alone here. Pandora’s online radio just became a whole lot more compelling now that I can carry it with me.
3. Google – Google has an iPhone version for a lot of its major products so they’re obviously at the top of the list. GChat and Google Reader are my two personal favorites.
4. Wordpress – I have not used the Wordpress application too much yet, but I already know I love it. The level of control it gives me over my blog at all times is reassuring. The Guarantee Fairy has nothing on that.
5. (Tie) Truveo & Twittelator – At first, I would have said Twittelator. This level of access to Twitter has made me much more active with the service and is what prompted this post. At the same time, I just spent half an hour checking out Obama in Berlin videos on Truveo. I’m hooked on both of these applications.

5 iPhone Apps with Potential

1. PayPal – Paypal’s application is a great example of clean, simple, easy-to-use design. I wish I had more reasons to send money to people with email addresses just to try it out.
2. Bloomberg – The iPhone application is nothing compared to a Bloomberg terminal, but it’s certainly of the same quality and style.
3. NYTimes – This application would be great if it would just stop crashing. I’ll read the NYTimes and use this application all the time as soon as it’s updated.
4. All Games – Most Games are paid applications. The problem I have with the paid applications is that they’re mostly in beta. I want to see the dust settle a bit on paid applications before I start pulling my credit card out. (The MLB application doesn’t count. I had to have that.)
5. Shakespeare – I walk around with the entire collection of Shakespeare in my pocket these days. If that doesn’t get you laid in literature circles, it at least speaks to the potential of online books for the iPhone.

5 Apps I Want

1. Credit Card Sensor – This requires a bit more infrastructure than a simple application, but it’d be an amazing leap toward the idea of having one application in your pocket. If you could figure out a way to put any item in my wallet on my phone, it would also make this list.
2. More Video Applications – I want an application that gives me quick news updates, movie previews, downloadable content, etc. Truveo’s a search engine. I want a better content provider application.
3. Emergency Services Contact – By leveraging the iPhone’s location awareness services, this application could determine a caller’s exact location immediately for police / fire fighthers / ambulances to immediately navigate to the scene.
4. Level – I know, this is random, but who hasn’t needed a level when they’re hanging a picture? I’m sure someone could make a simple level tool that every iPhone-carrying-window-hanger would love. Update: There is a level for iPhone. PosiMotion has an “A Level” application. iPhone-carrying-window-hangers rejoice!
5. Fingerprint recognition unlock – I love the idea of having a lock on my iPhone. With my notes, my calendar, contacts, email, etc. on my iPhone, I think that makes sense. The problem is, I can’t stand the idea of having to unlock my iPhone every single time I want to use it. This thing has a touch screen, right?  If you can’t take an actual image, how about the shape and width of your fingerprint? I’d love to simply press my finger to a point on the phone to both activate and unlock it. That’d be both security and convenience.

I know a few of these things are impossible right now given the restrictions Apple’s put on the iPhone SDK, but give it time. The walls will slowly come down.

The internet’s biggest time problem is that there’s no starting point. It’s the most flexible version of recorded history, but it doesn’t have all of recorded history on it. You can find information on almost any topic in the world, but there’s no beginning and no end. For example, just imagine being a completely new user of the internet. Where would you start?

(I did a funny search on Google as part of my research for this post. I Google’d “how to use the internet,” and there are actually a few results for this. Of course there would be results, but isn’t it funny that someone would have had to know how to use the internet and a search engine in order to find these sites in the first place? I digress…)

The point is, we often talk about how the internet has put the world’s information at our fingertips. We can search to our heart’s desire and find detailed information on a seemingly infinite number of topics. That’s just the point though, isn’t it? We’re always searching.

Before the internet, if I wanted to learn something, I picked up a book and read from page 1 and read it to the end. Compared to a similar process on the internet, I’d start at page 25, then read pages 1-10, a bit of 76, n-1, and then I’d assume I’d read enough.

Our information is fragmented. It’s disjointed in time and sequence. I’ve been working to improve my web development skills and have felt this first hand. There’s no one place for me to start and finish. I find myself reading blog posts about advanced topics before I know the basics. I find information that’s outdated but must rely on intuition and error checking to be sure. Random topics rise to the top of the search pile based on a popular blogger. Who’s to know where this information should fit in time? Where’s page 1?

When you visit a blog, you’re presented with the most recent blog post. I’m not sure a new visitor always wants to read the most recent content. Whenever I find a blog I really like, I try to read a sampling of the earliest posts as well as popular posts. I want to know where the blog started, where it’s gone and how long it’s taken to get there. The archives help a bit, but for my purposes, they’re often ordered backwards each month (including Enter Venture’s archive).

No one’s really figured out how to organize the web this way, but I have the feeling plenty of people would appreciate it if someone started putting a bit of chronology to the web’s information. There’s an enormous opportunity to organize the world’s educational matter this way, but it doesn’t stop there. A chronologically organized archive of the world’s newspapers and history would be pretty swell too.

One of the biggest drivers of the internet’s time problem is the emphasis on NOW. Sites have to deliver fresh content. As users, we’re inundated with up-to-the-second information and are fickle with our attention.

You see this problem manifest itself everywhere. It’s not entirely unique to the web, but news stories last barely a week before there’s a new NOW to focus on. There’s no time to reflect on what happened last week. If you use an RSS reader, you find yourself overwhelmed with articles that have to be read now, else suffer the dreaded Google Reader’s 1,000+ unread items. You have that Twitter account with all of your friends and followers that have your attention. Your Facebook chat window. Friendfeed. Yoono. Gchat. Email. Now. Now. NOW.

That brings up my final issues with the time problem of the internet. It doesn’t represent all of time! Remember those nearly 6 centuries of recorded history prior to the internet? You know, the ones that aren’t on anyone’s Facebook feed? Between then and the internet era, there are a few important things you should know about. Some of this information is worth at least as much of your attention as “Robert Scoble posted a message on Twitter.”

I love what Google is doing with its Books Search Library Project, but it’s just a start. Just imagine what it’d really be like if we had access to all of the world’s information, and if we organized it in a way that suited the way we both made sense of time and navigate the internet. Before the internet, it took a lot of effort to record history. Ideas were condensed and forced to be organized in scrolls, books, and libraries. Only the best ideas rose to the top. It’s not just a time problem, it’s a bit of a sequence problem, a focus problem, and a hubris problem.

What’s that they say about those who forget history? They’re doomed to forg… — sorry, hold on, someone just commented on my wall.

1. It’s great to know how to teach one’s self
2. It’s great that there’s this thing called the “internets” to help

Point #2 is something I want to revisit later. Using the internet as a learning tool has its pluses and minuses. The pluses are obvious. You can search for anything and often, thanks to today’s search technology, find exactly what you’re looking for at the end of that long tail. The minuses, though, I think are less obvious and something I’d like to dedicate a longer post to. The internet has a time problem. We’ll just leave it at that.

Point #1 is the real reason for this post. Continuous education and self teaching are vital to the success of any early entrepreneur. It’s impossible for you to know at the outset everything you’ll need to know to be successful. Your success will be defined by your ability to continuously learn (and adapt, and get lucky once or twice).

Now, I have struggled for the past two years to better understand the value of my engineering degree. I have yet to really use the subject matter knowledge acquired from four years of biomedical imaging engineering. My single summer internship studying brain waves was fascinating, but a lifetime of working in hospital basements is not exactly what I’ve planned for myself.

What I’ve come to believe, and this past weekend substantiates this, is that an engineering degree teaches you the fundamentals to be a better self educator and problem solver. No matter what you go on to do after college, these fundamentals will help guide the way you improve, break down problems, and work with a team towards a solution.

Here are the 5 reasons I think my engineering education was crucial to my early entrepreneurship path. There’s certainly more, and I’d love to hear what other people think:

1. Self Education

I’m not sure if it’s by design or due to the general ineptitude of most engineering professors, but engineering tends to be really poorly taught. I certainly don’t blame the professors. Most of them were hired to do research. They simply aren’t there to engage you in the content, and the textbooks certainly don’t help.

You have to engage yourself in engineering. You have to find the right combination of study groups, office hours, and practice problems that work for you. You learn to focus and compile. You learn by doing.

The way we refer to ’studying’ before an engineering exam is probably a misnomer. More often, this time is spent practicing. Take that problem from Week 10 that you’re sure will be on the exam. Write out the solution step-by-step. Then, write it out again, but this time, change the numbers. Last, give yourself a final practice test by doing the problem without the book in front of you.

Even when you work out the answer to the equation, your job still isn’t done. Your next class will ask you to implement that solution with a program in Matlab. You’ll never know everything about Matlab and all of it’s functions so you better get used to digging around it’s help files and teaching yourself what you need to know along the way.

2. A Problem Solving Framework

I think the problem solving framework is best represented in an engineer’s final thesis or project.

My senior BME project team took on the following project: How could we create a portable set of underarm crutches to be used by sports trainers? We spent the first few months simply breaking down the problem. How small is portable? (Trainers typically carry duffle bags). How much weight must they support? (Accounting for the football team’s linemen, a lot). How much money do we have to build this prototype? (A little).

Once we knew the answers to these questions, we could think about solutions. Using our newly acquired Self Education skills we figured out the details for implementing.

(In case you’re wondering, we ended up building a crutch made of hinged aluminum segments with a wire running through the center that could be tightened and released to extend and fold the crutch. Cool stuff.)

3. Finishing spirit

It’s incredibly hard to get partial credit in engineering. Say you have a Java assignment that’s due at 9am on Friday morning. You could spend every waking hour from the Sunday night prior working on that assignment. You’ll make all kinds of mistakes, get sidetracked by random problems, but still find incremental improvements. What every engineering student knows, though, is if their program doesn’t run at 9am on Friday morning, it’s all for naught. Everything has to work when you hit ‘Enter’. I think it’s this feeling that keeps us up the night before. Success is relatively binary.

4. Side-by-side work

I can’t speak for every major, but one of the best things about BME was working side-by-side with professors and TAs during projects and labs. You can learn so much more than answers to problem sets this way. You see their passion and technique. How do they hold their instruments? How do they comment their code? It’s typically worth emulating.

I don’t think this extends outside of engineering all that often. Your poetry professors can’t write an example poem with you looking over their shoulder. Your ChemE professor can run that experiment though. Your CS professor can dazzle you with that on-the-spot ‘Hello world’ program in CS1007.

5. Teamwork

This was a bit of a late edition to the post. It’s also different than reason #4. Side-by-side work has more to do with emulating the best than working with a team of your peers.

I’m not entirely convinced that my engineering degree helped instill an appreciation for teamwork that I didn’t already have. Twenty years of team sports had already taught me most of what engineering school reinforced. If you haven’t had a similar experience, count this as an important reason #5.

I can remember a conversation my lab team once had with a graduate teaching assistant during some downtime in senior lab. He was a BME PhD student with a BS in MechE. He told us that if he had to do it all over again, he would have been a BME student from undergrad onwards. Obviously he just wished he could have spent another 4 years of his life talking about BME, I thought, but that wasn’t it. Instead, he told us that a BME degree would allow us to do anything. If you didn’t like medicine and biology, you could leverage your EE and CS classes. If you didn’t like those, you could leverage all of those math classes. If you didn’t like those, well, you could just fake it.

As I’m writing this now, I think his words ring true for practically any engineering major. Engineering isn’t about finding the right path over the course of a short, immature 4 year period of your life. Engineering is about learning how to learn, learning how to problem solve, and learning how to improve.

Thanks Columbia. (I never thought I’d say that before I finished paying the bill).

Now, I’ve never lived or worked in Silicon Valley, but I’ve heard about it. I’ve heard that students are encouraged to pursue entrepreneurship. I know that they have startup career fairs. What I knew about the NY startup scene during college was this: nothing.

So, here are my two ideas for how Silicon Alley can change that:

1. Silicon Alley needs to go to school

At the CVC event tonight, I heard and participated in several conversations that went like this:

• “I had no idea there were startups in NYC when I was in school.”
• “Are there companies that come to campus that aren’t investment banks or consulting firms?”
• “Why doesn’t anyone just go recruit from SEAS (Columbia’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences)?”

Great question. I graduated from SEAS in 2006. While there, I had no idea that NYC had even a single startup. I knew exactly who McKinsey, BCG, Booz Allen, Deloitte, UBS, Citibank, and Goldman Sachs were, or rather, after going to Columbia I knew who these firms were. I couldn’t agree more with Ari Greenberg of Baveo when he says that, “before I came to Columbia. I didn’t even know what the hell an investment bank or consulting firm was.”

I get the impression that Silicon Valley really cultivates the relationship with the young talent coming out of its area’s schools. I remember reading an article from Hacker News that said that many of UC Berkeley’s CS majors had multiple job offers.

Just before today’s CVC event, I ran into a recently graduated CS major who lived on my floor when I was a freshman RA (don’t ask). What’s he up to these days? He’s looking for a job. Looking for a job??!! Are you crazy?

Do you know how many times I’ve been at tech events lately where someone announces they’re hiring? This always strikes me as amazing. You’re looking to hire someone at an event full of people already working for startups or people planning to start their own? Really? Is there no better place to ask that question?

Silicon Alley should be hammering on Columbia and NYU’s doors. What more could a startup ask for than a recent graduate with lots of energy, the willingness to learn, and tons of time on their hands? Sure, it takes a leap of faith to recruit entry level developers from college, but it sure beats standing in a conference room while holding a “Looking for Developers” sign over your head.

The message to Silicon Alley is simple. Students have no idea that you exist because, well, you’re not hiring them!

2. Silicon Alley needs to be the most popular kid in school

I think this would be pretty easily attained by Silicon Alley once they start reaching into the area’s universities. How many college students really dream about donning that suit and tie when they graduate, anyways?

The area needs more buzz. It needs to create this buzz by looking outside its IAC walls. It needs success stories that people know about and hear about. Students shouldn’t find out about the Silicon Alley startup scene two years after graduation. They should be dreaming about being a part of it from the moment they step on campus. They’ll see startups, join startups, and think, “Hey, I can start one of these on my own.”

All of a sudden, that CS major becomes more attractive. You don’t need to move across the country. You don’t need to squeeze in that economics minor to make yourself more attractive to the McKinseys and Booz Allens (not that I’m advocating being one dimensional). Awareness will build on campus. Students will start telling stories about those firms that are dishing out free lunch and that let you wear jeans to work.

I can just imagine the career fair now. Imagine a table for Meetup right next to the table for JP Morgan Chase. How many engineers would choose writing back end financial software over working on a hot web product?

As Mark Davis said at today’s CVC event, “Columbia has a lot of people interested in entrepreneurship, but there’s not a lot of community.” The community has to come both from the universities and industry.

Columbia is starting to get it’s act together. Your move, Silicon Alley.

You might know you want to start a website, but it’s tempting to imagine your site 3 years down the line, rather than the first 3 months from now. I think this is something you’re seeing with a lot of social networks these days. It’s a way to make a successful business, but not all that distinguishing. We’ll call this the ‘zero to facebook’ method. Remember kids, Facebook started out as a simple friend connection and photo sharing site.

It’s probably been said to death that you should focus on that one, core idea. Become the leader in something. Well, how do you get there? I’m not sure I have an exact framework for finding the right idea, but I’ll offer a completely unrelated story to that point. I think there’s a message in here somewhere…

In high school, I was lucky enough to be introduced to one of the great, growing sports in the U.S. — lacrosse. I had played ice hockey throughout my childhood with some football, soccer, and baseball mixed in, but I had barely ever seen a lacrosse game. The ones I had seen were limited to rowdy, indoor box lacrosse games in whatever now-defunct league the Boston Blazers played in.

(Digression from my digression: These Blazers games were insane. I once saw a goalie, after the teams were pelted by debris for the remaining minutes of the game, pick up a squashed beer can with his stick and hurl the can back into the stands where it would have knocked out a heckler if not for a small railing between the can and his face. You could hear the ‘ping’ throughout the old Garden.)

Anyways, when I began playing lacrosse, I started with a blank slate and little understanding of the game’s rules, techniques, positions, or formations. My lacrosse coaches throughout my high school years taught me most of what I would learn about how to play the game over the four years that I played there.

One thing I learned about lacrosse is that there’s a position called ‘attack’. How cool is that? Attack only play offense (again, how cool is that?). In lacrosse, you have to have a certain number of players on each side of the field at one time. This keeps the defensemen in the defensive zone and the attack in the offensive zone.

When an attack ended up on the defensive zone, it was usually because of some kind of break down and it put the attack, and team, in dangerously unfamiliar territory. Attack spend all of their time trying to beat defensive sets and suddenly they’re on the other side of the battle. To combat this, my varsity coach gave the following advice, “Get to the net first and figure out what to do next once you get there.”

His point was, if all else fails, be the first person to reach the most important point on the field, and then figure things out from there. Run through all of the chaos, and get to the starting point. Once you’re in front of the net, you’re at least clogging up a key lane for the other team. You’re able to look out and find men to cover. You can be directed by the goalie or a defenseman to where you should be.

I think getting to the net first is exactly the type of advice early entrepreneurs need when getting to the essence of their idea. When you start out, there’s a million and one things your website and your business can be. You can offer the world’s greatest social network with messaging, profiles, chat, blogs, forums, vendor services, Q&A, and competitions, but the problem is that everyone’s site has messaging, profiles, chat, blogs, forums, vendor services, Q&A, and competitions. Now what?

You’ll find this same advice all over the place. Guy Kawasaki talks about the importance of having a mantra in the opening pages of The Art of the Start. Getting Real by 37signals hits you over the head with the ‘get to the net first’ mentality. From the first two pages of the Priorities chapter we hear things like, “Explicitly define the one-point vision for your app … What does your app stand for? What’s it really about?” and from the Ignore Details Early On section, “Details reveal themselves as you use what you’re building.” If anything, listen to these guys.

Make things simple for yourself. If Twitter can make a business (and no one’s sure of that yet) out of 140 characters, there’s got to be more one line ideas out there. You probably need to take your idea and cut it in half. You might need to just focus on that one piece of your idea. You might even need to keep thinking about it, but better this than sounding the trumpets for the marketing team and business development teams before you’ve defined what you’re all about.

Once you have that idea, you’re only 0.01% of the way towards becoming a successful entrepreneur. Success will be found in the execution of the 99.99% of your other activities, but starting from the right point will make all the difference.

Get to the net first. What’s your idea?

In this post, I will try to cover some of the more straightforward options.

1. Self-funding: If you are employed, or have any sort of income, some of that can be used to fund your idea. Depending on your circumstance, this may mean dialing back some elements of the “lifestyle” or re-examining your income and expenses to see what you can really afford.

Pros: Ease
Cons: Often inadequate

2. Bootstrapping: This works best for short term, high pressure, low risk usage of funding. While risk in a young venture can be difficult to grasp, suffice it to say that massing credit card debt or high interest small business loans (angel funding) should be held until they are truly needed.

Pros: Quick, relative ease
Cons: High interest debt

3. Big Bank Small Business Loan: This could also be the use of home equity or similar low interest collateralized loan. Typically taken from a bank or large money lender at published rates. In my experience this is very difficult to get without at least one success story under your belt. Defaulting can cost you your house.

Pros: Large sums, Low interest
Cons: Collateralized debt, track record needed

4. Venture Capital: So many success stories involve venture funding that it is easy to think this is the only way business ideas get funded. This is a great option if you idea is in some facet revolutionary, or mildly innovative in a field of interest to the VC firm. VC firms typically take a controlling interest in the company in exchange for their capital, which can be frustrating for the passionate entrepreneur. However, VCs can often provide the monumental sums that cannot be raised any other way. Typically, you need to have a compelling and differentiating business plan, and the patience to be rejected over and over again.

Pros: Enormous sums, no repayment
Cons: Very difficult, and not suited to all plans. Loss of control, track record a plus.

5. The Rich Uncle: While not always an option, friends and family are more likely to trust and understand the passionate entrepreneur and will frequently provide better payment terms and interest than lending institutions. However, defaulting will make you feel guilty, and may make family life uncomfortable. That said, many successful businesses have gotten their start this way.

Pros: Ease, terms
Cons: Risking family money can be worse than risking your own.

6. Grants: A new option to me, and one I am still considering. There are many institutions, the US government included, that gives away money to people who are doing things of interest to them in some facet. If your idea is, or can be adapted to fit that definition, you may be eligible for grant funding. Several colleagues of mine have raised thousands of dollars this way.

Pros: No repayment
Cons: Difficult to research, difficult to win

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Given the options facing a starving entrepreneur, what is the optimal path to funding?

The path I am going to explore follows:

Start with my own income capital, and build success on a small scale before approaching grant organizations for funding. Show them favorable track record on a small scale, and a detailed plan on how their funding will be used. This is an option for me as I frequently build charitable contribution into my plans.

Using grant funding to drive growth and payroll expansion, I will scout for a low interest small business loan, and more rounds of grant funding. The loan capital will be used as much as possible on appreciating or stable assets or property that can be used to collateralize it. After staying in the black for several months or a year, I will begin approaching VCs with the aim of structuring a deal that will pay off the loans and limit the level of control they seek. Ideal would be to gain funding from two firms so that their interests can be faced against each other when applicable.

Thoughts welcome.

-Vik

I’m not sure that everyone knows where we’re at. I’m not sure everyone knows what’s been created so far. I think there are a lot of basic, valuable tools that are right underneath people’s noses, but they don’t know how to use them.

There are all kinds of buttons popping up on your favorite websites these days like ShareThis, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and [insert more here], but so few people have any idea what these things are. It’s like the collective web viewing public woke up one day to Web 2.0 widget chicken pox and everyone just decided not to scratch. What is all this stuff?

I’ve been informally polling my friends lately and found them reasonably unaware of what any of this stuff does. Are they a wholly web/software centric crowd? No, not entirely. Does that matter? Yes. That’s exactly the point. If no one knows what these things are, how in the world will they get used?

We all know that developers know how to use RSS. Or, as the joelonsoftware.com sidebar states, “We also have one of those RSS thingamajiggies. If you don’t know what that is, consider yourself lucky.” For non developers though, I feel like it’s the opposite. You’re lucky if you know what readers are, but it doesn’t need to be that way.

See that orange button just under my picture? Looks familiar, doesn’t it?   These buttons are all over the web. They’re on blogs. They’re on newspapers, sports sites, job boards, forums, calendars…

I wont try to explain what feeds or readers are because Wikipedia can do that. But Wikipedia doesn’t really tell you what these things do, or at least, not in a way most non-PhD computer scientists can understand. I think it’s really as simple as telling people that “Feeds deliver your favorite website’s content to you so you don’t have to keep coming back to the site.” Or “Readers are your personally constructed web newspaper.”

I don’t think Wikipedia’s the right place to tell people either. How about some of our Web 2.0 chicken pock’d sites start doing the explaining? Companies, developers, and entrepreneurs are creating an amazing set of tools, but only a fraction of web users know what’s going on. People would love to know what this stuff does. Tell them.

For those of you who don’t use those RSS thingamajiggies, here’s how you can get started. Find yourself a reader. If you’re a Gmail user, you’re in luck. You already have one. Click on that top-left link that says “Reader” (or “More” > “Reader”). Done. If you don’t use Gmail, or if you want to shop around, try a few out.

Once you’ve set up your reader, click on one of those orange (or green) subscription buttons you see on your next visit to your favorite website. Then, do it for a few other sites.

Clicking on one of these links does one of two things, either:

a.) You see a bunch of crazy code that scares you and must surely mean that something’s broken. (It’s not, though I’m really sick of this). Just add the subscription manually in your reader (”Add Subscription”). or

b.) You’re asked to add this feed to your reader with a click of a button. That’s it.

Now, rinse and repeat with your other favorite sites and watch your personal content get delivered to you.

It’s simple and convenient, but the internet viewing public has barely started to use these tools. They see these RSS buttons and widgets all over the web but have no idea what they are. People don’t often click on buttons when they aren’t sure what they do.

You know how you can read a book and skip over words you don’t understand? You can get along just fine without the word and going to the OED isn’t worth your time? It’s something like that.

Why haven’t more publishers made their readership more aware of their RSS feeds? I think there are at least two reasons. For one, they’ll lose their viewership and those eyes are driving their advertising revenue. This can be solved by adding ads to feeds, which some blogs already use. Readers could also offer advertising alongside feeds and share the profit with the content creators.

The second reason I don’t think you don’t hear more about feeds from a lot of websites is that feed readers rob publishers of their brand. People kind of like their brands.

With those two problems solved, why wouldn’t publishers want to alert their users to more and better ways to consume their content? In fact, if any early entrepreneurs out there are looking for an idea, these might be worthwhile problems to tackle.

I’d love to see someone smartly combine an email inbox and a reader. There are opportunities for different types of aggregation and different types of data for distribution. As more people grow to understand feeds, they’ll be more and more ideas and varied uses for this technology.

I think this is all great for entrepreneurs. I think there’s an enormous opportunity to ignore the urge to be the next best thing, and instead, focus on those things that we already have that just aren’t being utilized properly. I think these tools need to mature a bit more. Developers, entrepreneurs, and companies need to better publicize the benefits of their tools. I’d love to see start seeing a greater intersection between developers and non developers, but I’ll leave that for another post. Go try that new fangled feed reader out.

1. Business plan = business success.

I think any endeavor will fail without a at least some planning, but a polished business plan document is neither a requirement nor guarantor for success. While a business plan will document your ideas and should clearly lay out your value proposition, unless you already have funding secured or a lot of staff, it will be too high level to be actionable. Recommendation: put more effort into the sales strategy and marketing plan.

2. Business plan is a tool for new recruits.

In two of my past startups, the business plan never graced the desk of a VC, but helped tremendously in communicating my goals and ideas to staff and potential partners that I came across. Be sure that your business plan clearly lays out operational details as well as clearly stating your high level concept and strategy.

3. Business plan is the gateway to real capital.

If you dream epic dreams (as starving entrepreneurs typically do) you will eventually want to use your business plan to get money out of potential investors. While small capital <$50K can typically be raised with a good story and a pleasant smile, landing millions of dollars from established VCs will surely take a polished business plan and more.

4. A business plan is a living document that changes with the organization.

When you do get up and running, don’t throw the business plan away, or let it collect dust. Keep it as a document that changes with your organization and catalogues your successes and failures — not only to show your readers how effective you are, but to keep for lessens learned and best practices in your next venture.

So how does one go about putting a business plan together? Typically with one of two tools — a normal word processor (Microsoft word) or else a specialized business plan builder
(Business plan pro). In my experience, the specialized editors work well if your scheme fits the mold of other mainstream businesses, like selling a product or service domestically through established channels, or if you are in the early stages of you plan. A wordprocesser is typically better if your plan is fundamentally different from established businesses — different channel strategy, different structure, global base, as your items may not be the ones offered to you by the template.

I have found that a good way to go is to use the template offered by business plan pro, and then edit the output in word until you like it.

Final Steps: Finishing

In the end, you are presenting more than your ideas, you are presenting yourself. Carry your brand through your document by finishing it in a way that defines it and you in exactly the way you want. Have relevant graphics in a layout that guides the viewers through your steps, and that makes the entire document easy to read. Pick a nice font, keep a consistent color theme, print on nice paper. Make sure that your brand is well defined and smells like success.

Do you have any other tips on a good bplan? Please share.

-vik