Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
Kevin McGovern once said, focus is the laser to success. I believe that today and I have internalized that through hard work and many mistakes in the last few years. I realize now that in order for a start-up business to be successful a team must be relentlessly focused on doing one thing very well at any given time. Distractions must be labeled and turned down. I cannot say the same is true for larger corporate firms (after all, there is much more talent and capital available in that circumstance).
The Scrimple team was always most effective when labor and resources were focused on tackling one big task at a time. For instance, this past summer when we shifted our business from doing printable coupons online to a local discount card model. We did this in a matter of about one month. We signed over all our clients, built and launched a new website, placed orders with suppliers, and signed a contract with a local distribution partner for $2,000 immediately turning a profit.
In the past, my mistakes as the company’s leader lie in the fact that I acted less like a laser and more like a spinning top. To be a “spinning top” means to work sporadically and to re-appropriate one’s energy too often toward different projects or tasks that are not interdependent. Thus, less is accomplished than otherwise would be. For example, at the start of last summer we had a particular vision for our company and a specific path that we were headed down in order to realize it. It involved making our coupon website more scalable and viral. However we began to drift a little as we investigated other ideas, such as our coupons on a credit card concept and also with two supplementary website develop jobs for local businesses. We also spent time trying to raise capital, which was not necessary either.
Looking back on it now, those two side jobs actually provided unnecessary income for the company compared to where that effort could have been allocated. Also, we should not have been looking too intensely into the credit card idea and instead realized that we did not have the bandwidth at that moment to fully implement it. Rather we should have been focused on scaling the website by building on top of what we already had.
Success requires many mistakes, however repeating the same mistake must be avoided. Now that I have made this mistake I will strive to never again repeat it. Learn from my mistake; understand the difference been the laser and the spinning top.
Tags: entrepreneurship, focus, spinning top
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Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
We’ve had some difficulties resolving cross browser display issues recently. For instance, display in Internet Explorer has been inconsistent with other, more modern browsers (Firefox, etc.). A decent percentage of our audience still uses IE6, which merits our time being devoted to this task.
One very annoying problem that I managed fix today was the IE6 float bug. For example, in IE6 when you float something to the left it will float it to the left however it will add extra margin to the left so that the div appears to be indented by about 55px. The link in the first sentence of this paragraph provides a relatively simple work around. My hope is that browsers are moving toward a more widely agreed upon set of interpretion/display rules of the W3C spec for CSS. IE7 and FF3 seem to be a positive step forward in terms of a roughly equivalent display.
List of items to fix on the site:
1) Fix positioning of navigation menu at top of page
2) Graphical hyperlinks are not clickable in IE6 (I know…)
3) Display of divs on business page
4) Display/ orientation of divs on directory page
5) other stuff that I’ll put here later…
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Friday, February 20th, 2009
Today I had a chance to check out the recently launched FoundYourCareer.com. FoundYourCareer offers advice for individuals looking for a more practical approach to landing their next job. I was skeptical at first if the price of the service could possibly match the value offered after sign-up. However, I am impressed having now tried the service. I would recommend it to other current students or individuals seeking to get a leg up on how to interview and develop their interpersonal skills, among other key factors that will contribute to landing a new job.
I will give a few examples of how FoundYourCareer offers value to job seekers.
- It has a great video clip to go with each Lesson (this was one of the first things I noticed). In each video, a member of the Found Your Career team discusses in a personal and personable way the topic of the lesson. They tend to give examples of how the knowledge applies from experience, which makes the information much easier to understand and remember.
- The written part of the lessons, similar to the videos offer practical knowledge that can actively employed and adsorbed, whether you’re networking with people at various companies or you’re going on interviews.
- There are over 35 lessons total and over an hour of video footage to supplement.
- Many of the posts are written with numbers and bullet points, which make them extremely user-friendly to read through and review.
The only possible negative I could find was a lacking design. However, this could be viewed a positive as well since a minimalist design simply serves to put more of the focus on the content/product which is high quality in this case.
Overall FoundYourCareer has entered the market at the right time considering of the abismal state of the economy. There are a lot of job seekers out there and the numbers are only growing. Products like FoundYourCareer offer benevolent value in the form of career-seeking knowledge.
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Monday, February 9th, 2009
How do you become a successful entrepreneur or a better entrepreneur? You learn to practice it, and then you keep practicing it as much as possible. Entrepreneurship and skill in business are no different from learning any other trade or skill. If you want to be a great musician and you have some baseline level of innate talent and a willingness to learn, you must practice your instrument in order to get better. If you want to be a better computer science programmer you must practice the skill in order to get better. If you want to get sharpen your public speaking skills, you will not improve your ability to do so by thinking about it. You must practice it. You must get up in front of an audience as often as possible and speak.
Entrepreneurship is the same way: the more you practice the better you will get. There’s no secret formula. Depending on the type of business you are looking to create you must develop a set of general skills and knowledge. If you are starting a web-based business, you should probably learn a little bit about programming and design. If you are starting a financial services firm that manages the assets of large, private investors, you will need to refine your communication, sales, and analytical skills.
There is a wrong way to practice entrepreneurship, and that is to not practice it. By this I mean to not act, to become too mired in your own thoughts and apprehension and circular planning that you forget the fact that to accomplish anything in business you need to do two simple things: build & sell. If your business product idea is a widget, you’ve got to build it and then sell it. If you need funding to do so, you will have to raise it. If you need the help of others you will have to thoroughly communicate your ideas to potential team members and convince them to help you get stuff done, and to get the product built.
It is simple in practice but difficult to do in reality. To practice entrepreneurship you need to constantly build and sell. If you become mired in planning and forget the importance of building and selling then you unlikely to succeed. The more you practice the better you will get and the more likely you are to succeed.
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Monday, January 5th, 2009
Chrometa LLC
I recently spoke over the phone with Brett Owens. Brett is the CEO and co-founder of Chrometa LLC (formerly Time Tracking Buddy). Brett and his team originally positioned Chrometa as a consumer facing utility that would help users track where they spent most of their time while on their computers. However, the Chrometa team realized that it would be better to reorient the company’s product as an enterprise software application. The perception of value by business customers, for instance law firms who have become increasingly concerned with tracking billable hours, was much greater than for individual consumers.
The value for large enterprise firms is that it provides a screenshot time of what an employee is working on at different time intervals. By making the work that an employee does or does not do public to Managers and Executives, the company is able to view in the aggregate and at the micro-level how time is being spent and therefore hold employees accountable.
The choice to become a B2B company has thus far proved to be a fruitful one, as Chrometa recently finished a pilot test with a healthcare company. The company is looking to roll out version 1 of its software in the near future.
Best of luck to you Brett. In today’s attention deficit world the computer offers an endless slew of distractions; your software has the potential to help companies keep employees motivated, focused, and productive.
I will predict that time and task tracking software like this will increasingly go mainstream. The recession should accelerate its adoption. By knowing which employees are slacking and which are on task employers will be better equipped to reward and punish the behavior.
While such solutions make perfect sense for employers there may be some pushback from privacy advocates. Such software may give the negative, omnipresent feeling that one is being watched all the time at work. Employer interests, however, are likely to prevail since all employees are employed at will and in general make concessions whereever and whenever they use company resources. Finally as work systems become increasingly mobile and the divide between work and liesure time is blurred, this shift will only increase the need by employers for this type of service.
Tags: Brett Owens, Chrometa, Enterprise Software, Time Tracking Software
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