In his Energy Independence blog Mark Paul posted a link to his essay The Presidential Speech I’d Like to Hear. As Mark says at the beginning of the essay:
To solve our energy problems, once and for all and to make a significant dent in the price of gas at the pump, we must take bold actions in a concerted manner.
We cannot drill our way out of this grand challenge, nor can we tax our way out. We can only innovate our way out: Moving beyond business and government as usual, we must come together to overcome this grand challenge.
I would like to hear the President of the United States address this grand challenge with the following speech, backed up with actions.
The essay sets a goal of energy independence by 2025 and lays out proposed policies and investments to reach the goal. To read the details, download Mark’s essay.
Startup Nation published an article and podcast on establishing credit for your business and why that’s important. Both the article and the podcast have some good points as to the why and how of building business credit.
In the recent survey of the local high-tech community we sent out at OTBC asking about location preferences for our upcoming move (more to come on the move; and we’ll be publishing all the survey results soon too) we also asked what event topics people would like to see. “How to bootstrap” was high on the list of interests.
I’m sure we’ll be talking about bootstrapping more at Side Project to Startup. Meanwhile, the survey reminded me that I had some additional bootstrapping material to add to the OregonStartups.com Startup Road Map, so I went ahead and made the additions to the following sections:
If you’re bootstrapping (or will be) these might provide one or two helpful ideas. For that matter, you might also check out the rest of the Startup Road Map for other ideas on starting a a company.
The Silicon Insider post Jason Calacanis On How To Get PR For Your Startup: Fire Your PR Company has some great advice on getting PR. Calacanis was CEO of Silicon Valley Reporter magazine, then CEO of Weblogs Inc. and is now CEO of Mahalo — so he does know a few things about the media.
I don’t agree with quite everything he says (example: I believe there can be a role for a PR professional!) but he makes a lot of good points, including:
- Be the brand
- Be everywhere
- Always pick up the check
- Be a human being
- Embrace small media outlets
If you’re looking for PR for your startup, it’s worth checking out the full post.
An Oregon State University press release dated yesterday featured 6 projects that have been funded by the University Venture Development Fund – the fund that Oregonians can contribute to in return for a 60% state tax credit, with the goal of helping move university research to the marketplace.
Six projects, ranging from thin-film solar cells created with ink-jet printing technology to a meter that can measure the nitrogen content of leaves to a device that promises to revolutionize mass spectrometry – the molecule-smashing technology made famous on the “CSI” TV crime show – are being funded at Oregon State University, thanks to an innovative tax credit program that supports commercialization of university research.
A recent Seth Godin post The secret of the web (hint: it’s a virtue) argues that strategy takes a while to kick in:
I discovered a lucky secret the hard way about thirty years ago: you can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.
It still takes ten years to become a success, web or no web. The frustrating part is that you see your tactics fail right away. The good news is that over time, you get the satisfaction of watching those tactics succeed right away.
OTBC resident Elia Freedman made a related post to his blog, arguing that the key to success is time (or, in particular, having enough time that good things finally happen).
And just last week, another OTBC resident was mentioning that after a couple of years of working on a business, some unexpected (and very high leverage) strategic partnerships were beginning to develop.
I keep seeing this happen. It almost always takes longer than you expect for a startup to take off. Partly it’s because the idea itself usually changes (see my earlier post: “Your Idea is Wrong – But go for it Anyway“) and partly because R&D always takes longer than you expect. And partly because you never know when “luck” will happen. The companies that succeed tend to be the ones who figure out how to stretch cash far enough to survive long enough that their product or service finally gets finished and gets traction and/or they get the right series of breaks that accelerate the business.
It all takes time. And with enough time, good timing can (and probably will) eventually happen. But you have to survive long enough and, of course, you have to be ready to take advantage of those “good timing” breaks when they happen.
A post on the E-Consultancy blog talks about “How to price your product”. It certainly covers some good advice (like make sure your price covers you cost) but leaves out one important technique for determining price: ask your customers.
Surveying just 10 or 15 prospective customers will tell you a lot. That’s not enough for a lot of “statistical significance”, but it will still provide a lot of guidance.
The trick is to ask the right questions. I recommend the survey technique Mark Paul describes in his book The Entrepreneur’s Survival Guide. Mark’s approach zeroes in on determining what price is too high and what price is too low, which gives you a range (usually a pretty focused range) that helps you choose the right price: not so high that you lose business, but not so low that you leave money on the table.
But whatever methodology you use to price your product, it’s always a good idea to ask your customers!
I read another Paul Graham essay this weekend, Why to Not Not Start a Startup (which is worth a read – he does a great job of debunking the usual reasons for not starting a startup). One of the reasons he lists is: “No idea”. Paul’s comments:
In a sense, it’s not a problem if you don’t have a good idea, because most startups change their idea anyway. In the average Y Combinator startup, I’d guess 70% of the idea is new at the end of the first three months. Sometimes it’s 100%.
That’s impressive: between 70% and 100% change. Our experience at OTBC is similar. In the FastTrac® TechVenture® program we ran in the spring, roughly 70% of the participants significantly changed their business idea, or completely abandoned it for another idea.
I’ve always thought that one of the biggest challenges a startup faces is that the team has to commit to an idea and push hard to make it happen, ignoring the nay sayers that are always there. But on the other hand, sometimes you have to realize that the idea isn’t quite right and has to change.
Determined commitment combined with flexibility — a hard balance to strike! But if between 70% and 100% of startups significantly modify their idea, that balance is clearly an important one to reach.
So take your idea and run with it. Just realize that odds are, it will change. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
In another post on Venture Fund Economics, Fred Wilson explains why VCs look for a 20x return.
My second reference today to a post by Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Ventures — this one on Is Social Media a business? In this post, Jeremy reacts to an Technology Review article claiming that Social Networking is not a business. Jeremy argues that although social network ad rates do tend to be a bit lower than rates for other types of websites, but Myspace, as an example, has managed to eek out a fairly respectable amount of revenue. Perhaps there is a there there after all.
