Category Archives: entrepreneurship

Developing New Startup Ideas

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Chris Dixon posts on his blog about sharing ideas to people so that you can work on improving your own selection process.  That was pretty much what I was thinking when I started my Free Idea Friday campaign on this blog.  I’m not sure if other entrepreneurs have this problem, but my mind is always trying to find solutions to problems.  This started in college when a good friend of mine and I wanted to start a business coming out of school.  We tasked ourselves with thinking of one idea a day and bouncing that idea off each other.  Somewhere along the line he lost steam and eventually we stopped talking about it.  However, even though he stopped thinking of ideas, I continued.  Now anytime I have an issue with something, my brain starts to go and I start brainstorming solutions.  At the end of every week, I typically have about 7 – 8 ideas on my iPhone’s notepad and voice recorder.

Some people may think it’s a horrible idea to just give out your ideas, but from what I’ve seen in the last 4 – 5 years, I’ve realized that it’s typically not the idea that matters, but it’s execution.  You may think your idea is great, but it’s the little tweaks and adjustments to the idea through the execution that seems to make the difference.  Mind you, I haven’t had a success yet, so this is just theory.

So please feel free to critique any of my sites, my blogs, or my ideas on Free Idea Friday.  I love talking and thinking about solutions, so any feedback would be great!

Your idea sucks, now go do it

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Someone on Newtech posted this interesting blog post from 2008 (an oldie but a goodie) – Odds are, your idea probably sucks, so hurry up and go do it.  From what I understand, VC’s and Angels expect about 20% of their investments to be home runs, 30% to get their money back, and 50% to outright fail… and these are the experts!  Given that I don’t see as many ideas as VC’s and angels do, I give myself a 20% chance of succeeding.  What this means is I need to keep throwing stuff out there till something sticks! I need to keep failing in order to figure out what the hell works, or what I’m doing wrong.

This is definitely easier said than done.  It’s so painful …  I’m in the middle of it.  It’s a lot of self exploration,  a lot of feeling inadequate and lots of ‘What the hell am I going to do with my life if this doesn’t work?’.    I feel your pain.  One mental trick that I use on myself to keep me in the game is thinking that the closer I get to 8 failures, the likelihood of success becomes higher :) .  So I keep trying things… I keep failing… toward the hope that just one will succeed.

If anyone else has thoughts on increasing their success %, I’d love to hear it!

Explanation of the different types of hosting options

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‘What type of hosting should I get?’  I’ve had this question asked of me several times by other entrepreneurs, I thought I’d cover the Pros and Cons of each of the different types that you can get.  Hopefully it will help you decide what the best approach is for your startup.

dedicated server – this is what you traditionally expect with hosting.  a service provider allocates you physical hardware in their data center that is dedicated to your website, and your website alone.  Pros:  You can do whatever you want on that machine, because you are leasing it.  Cons:  If you get a sudden burst of traffic because you got on the Digg homepage, you’ll most likely crash the server.  Also, you need to have someone highly technical to administer the machine.

a cloud server – a cloud server is a virtual server that runs on a shared massive computing infrastructure – such as the Amazon EC2 setup, or the Rackspace Cloud Server setup.  Pros:  They are in essence, dedicated servers, so you can do whatever you want on each of the virtual servers.  If you know what you’re doing, you can typically startup new machines to handle unexpected load/traffic.  Cons:  You’ll need an even more technical person to understand how to create virtual machines and administer them.

shared hosting – shared hosting is a setup where you and several other clients of the hosting company share a dedicated/cloud server.  Pros:  All administration should be handled by the service provider, including email setup, security, and website setup (but not maintenance).  Cons:  You don’t have admin access and you can’t install anything you may need on the server itself.  Sometimes you may not even have access to the machine, except through FTP.

shared cloud hosting - shared cloud hosting is similar to shared hosting, except that everything is stored on an administered cloud infrastructure.  Examples of this type of service are: Rackspace cloud sites, Microsoft Azure, and Google Apps.  Pros:  All administration is handled by the service provider.  Generally if your site gets slammed with traffic, the shared cloud site can handle all the additional traffic.  Cons:  No control of the environment that you’re in.  If you have a highly customized server that requires add-ons that aren’t in a standard package, then you probably need to go with a cloud server or dedicated server.

Ok, hope this helps.  If you have any questions of thoughts shoot me an email.

Free Idea Friday

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Every week I’ll blurt out (really that’s what it is, a blurt) some product ideas I have for a specific technology.  This week it’ll be the iPad.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the iPad, especially after reading Paul Bucheit’s thoughts on it.  I was pretty excited to hear about the iPad when it was first announced and after reading his thoughts, I’m much more excited about it.  What he says is true, there are no other devices that are lightweight enough to carry around.  Most of the PCs we’ve seen so far to do this have been big fat and really clunky.  I don’t think that the iPad will be a huge success however. I just don’t think many people are thinking about the product for future uses.  I think like Paul has said, most people are comparing the product against current technologies.

Regardless here are a couple of ideas that I came up with this morning:

1)  The first thought that came to my mind was a recipe flipper for when I’m cooking.  I’ve always found it frustrating to have to print out a recipe or carry a book with me into the kitchen.  the book always ends up being in the way or all the way on the other side of the room, and I have to run back and forth to read it.

2)  Student notebook.  I remember in school i had to carry around my notebook, i think kids of the future will most likely be carrying these things.  I think the iPad is a perfect replacement for the notebook as we see it today.

3)  Menus or Order taking devices – take orders, find out who your customers are.  see who is checking into your restaurant via Foursquare/Gowalla.

4)  Sales devices – i think this is most likely where it will have a huge enterprise impact.  most sales reps in the drug industry need to carry around laptops everywhere.  It’s heavy and a pain in the ass to carry around.  This would be their new demo device.

4.5) No more doctors forms – hand out a light weight device that people can fill out medical forms with (or login to Google Health and auto update your form with that)

5)  Here’s a simple product – an iPad upright tray that you stick anywhere (kitchen cabinets so i can scroll through recipes… :) ).  I suspect most people will want to hang their iPad upright and use it as a display of some sort.

I’d love to hear what other ideas people have!

-d

Startup Digest – go make your own luck

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There’s a great article on venture hacks about going out to the StartupDigest events and making your own luck.  I have to be honest, I’m not really an out going person and making that stretch to actually talk to people is a difficult thing for me.  No excuses, but I think its a byproduct of my Asian up-bringing where my parents always told me not to make a scene and to not cause a stir.  But I’m learning that part of being an entrepreneur is at some level starting a stir and putting yourself out there. So I’m making it a goal this year to put myself out there. I know it’s going to be difficult and at times painful, but I hope it will make me a better entrepreneur.

Also, if anyone suffers social anxiety like I do, email me, and we can start a non-stressful dialogue, and head to one of these things together.