#business (408 links)
<blockquote>"Mr. Lam’s revenue is low, about $50,000 a month, but it’s doubling every quarter, enough to pay his freelancers, invest in the site and keep him in surfboards. And now he actually has time to ride them. In that sense, Mr. Lam is living out that initial dream of the Web: working from home, working with friends, making something that saves others time and money."</blockquote>
- Docracy - Free Legal Documents docracy.com
<blockquote>The web’s only open collection of legal contracts and the best way to negotiate and sign documents online.</blockquote>
- Venture Hacks - Good advice for startups. venturehacks.com
- Growing One's Consulting Business training.kalzumeus.com
<blockquote>This is, far and away, the most important lesson to learn as a consultant. People who are unsavvy about business, like me in 2009 or like most freelancers today, treat themselves like commodity providers of a well-understood service that is available in quantity and differentiated purely based on price. This is stunningly not the case for programming, due to how competitive the market for talent is right now, and it is even more acutely untrue for folks who can program but instead choose to offer the much-more-lucrative service "I solve business problems -- occasionally a computer is involved."</blockquote>
- YunoJuno yunojuno.com
We don't pitch often, but when we do the question of pitching creative work usually crops up. We never do it, even when - as happened when we pitched for ITV - other people we're pitching against do, and we want it, and there is pressure to conform. But it would be utterly wrong to talk about how important it is to discover and validate the customer need and problem space if the very first thing we produce for a client presents completely the opposite approach. Doing creative work at the pitch stage is a dangerous fiction
- Rise of the Independents bryce.vc
"Historically, people have tried to call these “lifestyle” businesses. But, as anyone who’s actually started and run a business can attest, the imagery of a leisurely lifestyle led business really does this kind of business a diservice. In the comment section of the post, othersuggestions are offered up such as “bootstrappers”. But that doesn’t resonate with me.
The term I’ve had rattling around in my head for a while now is Independents or Indie businesses."
- Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? | Valve blogs.valvesoftware.com
The current system of corporate governance is bunk. Capitalist corporations are on the way to certain extinction. Replete with hierarchies that are exceedingly wasteful of human talent and energies, intertwined with toxic finance, co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast, a form of post-capitalist, decentralised corporation will, sooner or later, emerge. The eradication of distribution and marginal costs, the capacity of producers to have direct access to billions of customers instantaneously, the advances of open source communities and mentalities, all these fascinating developments are bound to turn the autocratic Soviet-like megaliths of today into curiosities that students of political economy, business studies et al will marvel at in the future, just like school children marvel at dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History museum.
- IR35 contracts & risk: 10 things to be wary of when signing a consultancy contract :: Contractor UK contractoruk.com
"Another point to be aware of is the difference between signing a contract with a client to "supply a worker" to perform services and signing a contract to directly perform services. Different liabilities will arise under each form of contract and there may be arguments that your limited company is acting akin to an agency when "providing personnel" and consequently subject to unexpected regulations and tax legislation."
- Don’t waste your time in crappy startup jobs. « Michael O.Church michaelochurch.wordpress.com
I don’t intend to argue that people shouldn’t join startups. If the offer’s good, and the job looks interesting, it’s worth trying out. I just don’t think that the current, unconditional “startups are awesome!” mentality serves us well. It’s not good for any of us, because there’s no tyrant worse than a peer selling himself short, and right now there are a lot of great people selling themselves very short for a shot at the “startup experience”– whatever that is.
- Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? -Full Post | The Trichordist thetrichordist.wordpress.com
Actually that’s the number one “new model” that the Digerati suggest. Sell T-shirts at your shows to make money! This despite the fact it’s not new. Bands have been selling t-shirts at live shows since the early 1970s. Recording albums to sell a few t-shirts is a terrible way to make money. Thanks for the advice but no thanks. Plus t-shirts are just as bootlegable as music.
There's a lot wrong with this article but there's also a lot right with it, too.
- A List Apart: Articles: Getting Clients alistapart.com
- Net Promoter - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
"A management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm's customer relationships." Mmmm.
a lot of the value of an MVP is testing the risky assumptions every startup has
- Crispy Fried Software Ltd - Hiring your first employee (a UK guide) blog.crispyfriedsoftware.com
- Fetch — The easiest way to sell downloads from any website, social network, Goodsie shop, or Shopify store. fetchapp.com
"Sell digital goods such as music, videos, photos, e-books, PDF's, or software from any website, blog, social network, Goodsie shop, or Shopify store." OK then.
Wondering why I didn't save this in 2008. Keep referring to it.
- Self employed business and commercial insurance | The Co-operative Insurance co-operativeinsurance.co.uk
- 1% for the Planet | Home onepercentfortheplanet.org
You're so busy, doing everything yourself. You know you need help, but to find and train someone would take more time than you have! So you keep working harder, until you break.
Unexpected. "In Sweden, both Sony and UMG are making more money from Spotify than from any other retailer – online or offline."
- Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups « jolieodell.wordpress.com
I would like to propose that technologists apply their ample skill to solving the real problems of humanity, not just the perceived problems of their very privileged social set. And for my good friends at several of the aforementioned startups, I challenge you to find a way to solve a social or human problem with your app.
- Third Door Office & Playspace third-door.com
"Third Door combines professional, flexible, co-working office space, a communal social area and fully equipped Ofsted regulated childcare for pre-school children." Clever.
- The most effective debt collecting email I ever wrote | For A Beautiful Web forabeautifulweb.com
I like this. "A quick note to say that I am really disappointed that you have still not paid me the [..] that I'm owed for the work I did for you. In the grand scheme of things, it's not a lot of money, but actually I think that this is more a matter of respect."
- The slow death of Dopplr | Technology | guardian.co.uk guardian.co.uk
Boo. True. Sad. Can't blame people for selling, mind.
- The Management Myth - Magazine - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
The world of management theorists remains exempt from accountability. In my experience, for what it’s worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). Unless there was some hope of renewing the relationship (or dating a sister company), it was Hasta la vista, baby. And why should they have cared? Consultants’ recommendations have the same semantic properties as campaign promises: it’s almost freakish if they are remembered in the following year.
- Think Vitamin » How to Track Six Key Metrics for Your Web App thinkvitamin.com
- Rands In Repose: How to Run a Meeting randsinrepose.com
There are two useful types of meetings: alignment and creation. Briefly, alignment meetings are tactical communication exchanges that rarely dive into the strategic. These are fine meetings that have a weekly cadence, and while there are lots of ways to screw up these meetings, their tactical repetition often keeps them on the rails. Creation meetings — diving into solving a hard problem — involve, well, more creativity. Each hard problem requires a unique solution, and finding that solution is where creation meetings can go bad.
- What Happened to Yahoo paulgraham.com
"So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are "in the software business" in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software."
The key idea here that most entrepreneurs miss is that you really need to vet your own ideas. Many aspiring entrepreneurs dream up an idea, and then stick to it doggedly, either because its the only idea they have, or they find it technically interesting. They don't want to discover that it won't work, so they don't try to figure it out! This is a bit like writing some code, and then not testing it because you really don't want to discover that its buggy.
- MuckWork - we do your dirty work muckwork.com
From Derek Sivers: "assistants to do your uncreative dirty work, so you can do what only you can do".
- The scariest pricing idea ever. That works. | The Freelancery thefreelancery.com
"Here’s a pricing technique that sounds, at first, like the dumbest newbie move of all time. Call it ‘fill-in-the-blank’ invoicing. Or ‘pay what you want’ pricing. The notion is, you do the work first, then let the client decide how much to pay for it." Heavy caveats.
- Organic Startup Ideas paulgraham.com
The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?
- Invest in Hackney invest-in-hackney.org
Details and links to managed workspace providers in Hackney.
- Why trivia is so important | Life and style | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
""This has come to be known as the Colour of the Bike Shed Phenomenon: the time spent on any item will be in inverse proportion to its cost and importance. Relentlessly, the trivial squeezes out the non-trivial [...] Similar effects – where small stuff preoccupies us because it's small – course through our lives [...] I fear that something related is also what's transpiring whenever I get that delusional feeling of achievement from having powered through multiple unimportant items on my to-do list, leaving untouched the few tasks that really matter. Taken together, Parkinson's two laws amount to a wry but certainly not trivial warning: the work we do expands to fill the time available – and, half the time, it's not even the most important work."
An interesting (though obvious, after-the-fact) consequence of increasing our hourly rate, is that the customers that were left tended to be exactly the type of customers we’ve always wanted to work for — they appreciate, value and demand high quality, and are doing interesting things.
- Grand Union sells for £15m as Jaimes Leggett quits for Ogilvy - advertising news - Campaign campaignlive.co.uk
Grand Union, the full-service digital advertising agency, has completed its sale to the digital network FullSIX in a deal estimated to be worth £15 million.
At a time when the limits of the more traditional capitalist model of shareholder ownership stand cruelly exposed, John Lewis's ongoing success is increasingly prompting all three main political parties to point to it as a possible template – for other companies, for schools, hospitals, even local councils.
- Alex Payne — Don't Be A Hero al3x.net
Heroes are damaging to a team because they become a crutch. As soon as you have someone who’s always willing to work at all hours, the motivation from the rest of the team to produce reliable, trouble-free software drops. The hero is a human patch.
- ongoing · Doing It Wrong tbray.org
What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.
"Bring tech-heads into creative conversations early to color communication ideas with what's possible in web development." But don't call them tech-heads.
- Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? — Times Labs Blog labs.timesonline.co.uk