Archive for September, 2009
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
Back-to-School With Excellent Adobe Illustrator Tutorials – http://bit.ly/3U6qDI
A-Z of Free Photoshop Plugins and Filters – http://bit.ly/17Iphb
10 Wonderful Letterpress Type Tutorials – http://bit.ly/3qSwYv
Importance of label design on wine bottles – http://bit.ly/2Ha9t
20+ Car Pimping and Tuning Photoshop Tutorials – http://bit.ly/gxe3d
The Principles of Good Web Design Part 3: Colour – http://bit.ly/1atKNJ
32 Indispensable Bookmarklets for Web Developers and Designers – http://bit.ly/L9LNZ
5 Lesser Known JavaScript Libraries that Make Web Design Easier – http://bit.ly/HGp4V
Weekly Web Design and Development Inspiration – N.09 – from @speckyboy – http://bit.ly/P6xud
Best jQuery Tutorials for June 2009 – http://bit.ly/51yJQ
Excellent Interview with Web Usability Guru, Jakob Nielsen – http://bit.ly/2il6CP
15 New jQuery Plugins To Help You Conquer The Web – http://bit.ly/svJOR
Famous logos made out of lego http://tinyurl.com/yeqzphr
Principles of Good Web Design: Layout http://bit.ly/AJxHL (expand
) | Navigation http://bit.ly/QBCmq (expand) | Color http://bit.ly/1atKNJ
Simplicity in Good Web Design : Advantages & How -to – http://bit.ly/8QPwC
Inside the Brand: Q+A With Skype – http://tinyurl.com/y9bvm3j
40 Websites Using Photography as Their Primary Source of Design – http://bit.ly/12UEzo
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Tags: crowdspring, design, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, leadership, links, pr, public relations, small business, smallbiz, social media, startup, twitter
Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, crowdsourcing, design, How To, inspiration, Interviews, marketing, Reviews, social media, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology | 2 Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2009
When Ross and I were working on the crowdSPRING business model late in 2006 we needed to prove something to ourselves before we asked others to risk an investment in our business: could our idea become a profitable and viable business? For both of us there was significant opportunity cost in pursuing this venture/dream and we needed to be able to answer for ourselves (and our families) one question in the affirmative: ”is this worth it?” In order to answer this question we needed to first analyze the historical data that our research was uncovering on the market (such as incumbent’s historical growth, revenue, and traffic) and use this analysis to build our own projections for crowdSPRING. We also needed to ascertain a value for the company, which we could justify to potential investors, banks, and other interested parties. Our approach to this was to build a model which could not just answer those questions in a meaningful way, but which would act as a tool for our financial management of the company going forward. What we ended up with was (probably) overkill, and the typical response we got was “Why did you bother with so much detail?” Well, our answer to that was “Better too much, than too little.” Here are 10 tips gleaned from our own learnings on building a great financial model:
1. Learn from your ancestors. Just as I advised last week in my post on writing business plans, you should get your hands on a template. Many others have cracked this nut before you and you can benefit greatly from their work. Find a template or ask for help from someone with experience in building complex spreadsheets. Also, read everything you can get your hands on; the business press has hundreds of great titles on this topic and the information contained in those is priceless to the entrepreneurial community. (photo credit: er1danus)
2. Gather your wits (and your data). Be sure that you are storing and organizing your data well. Your market research, historical data on comparable companies, traffic data for other websites, and any relevant information you have uncovered in your readings. When you start to construct your spreadsheet, you will need to access these raw numbers for inclusion and you will want to be able to find them quickly.
3. Stay organized. It is critical that your spreadsheet be well organized. Use multiple worksheet tabs within the spreadsheet; keep your charts and tables clearly defined and labeled; use data tables but try not to let them get too large and unwieldy. Keep in mind that if you get hit by a bus, someone else may need to access your information and make sense of it.
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Tags: financials spreadsheet modeling projections assumptions revenue budget
Posted in business, How To, inspiration, start-up tips, Strategy | 11 Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
760+ Photoshop Tutorials For Web & Graphic Designers - http://bit.ly/tx1Td
30 Bad Practices of Web Designers – http://bit.ly/Hqr2Z
The Principles of Good Web Design Part 1: Layout – http://bit.ly/a47Y7
The Principles of Good Web Design Part 2: Navigation – http://bit.ly/eASEv
51 Form Element Resources and Tutorials Using CSS And Javascript – http://bit.ly/j02Ai
43 PSD to XHTML, CSS Tutorials Creating Web Layouts And Navigation – http://bit.ly/pw9M3
18 Impressive Tutorials on Creating Vector Illustrations - http://bit.ly/A9t8Z
21 Awesome @font-face Embeddable Typefaces – http://bit.ly/jwN8A
Design Inspirations from the History of Business Cards – http://bit.ly/DnvYT
30 Professional Logo Design Processes (step-by-step) – http://bit.ly/183aP8
27 New and Fresh Illustrator Tutorials – http://bit.ly/PvfOG
Techniques for a Powerful CMS using #WordPress – http://bit.ly/tBnTj
Simplicity in Good Web Design : Advantages & How-to – http://bit.ly/gt5ql
Excellent roundup of design tutorials and other resources - http://bit.ly/2xr2m
Photoshop Tutorial: Create a Professional Music Album Template – http://bit.ly/37qS6q
Beautiful Visual Identities Inspiration – http://bit.ly/2I3k8y
(more…)
Tags: crowdspring, design, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, leadership, links, pr, public relations, small business, smallbiz, social media, startup, twitter
Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, crowdsourcing, design, How To, inspiration, Interviews, marketing, Reviews, social media, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
crowdSPRING is a small company (our team is 10 people). For a small company, efforts spent on one marketing initiative typically take away from other marketing initiatives. Entrepreneurs and small businesses often ask us about how we market – and especially about SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (paid search). Here are our top ten suggestions, based on our own experience, for supercharging your SEO and SEM efforts:
1. Set Specific Goals. It’s important to establish specific goals for your SEO and SEM efforts. While ultimately, you are probably looking to make money, you’ll want to establish specific interim goals so that you can properly measure whether your efforts are worth the investment of time and money.
Why This Is Important: If you don’t establish specific goals, you will not be able to evaluate the opportunity costs of your SEO and SEM efforts. For example, you might see more conversions (i.e. more traffic to your site), but you will have difficulty assessing whether you could have increased the traffic even more through other marketing efforts. You’ll also have difficulty scaling your efforts.
Tips: Think about what needs to happen for your business to succeed. For example, if your revenue model is driven by advertising on your site, one interim goal could be to drive a certain amount of traffic to your site. If your revenue model is the sale of a service or product, your goal could be to get your cost per conversion below a certain amount after 90 days (i.e. make sure that you’re paying less for paid search than your profit on a transaction from a customer who visits your site via paid search and buys a product or service).
image credit: HackingNetflix
2. Define Conversions. A conversion is an action that a user performs on your website. For example, if you care most about registrations of new users, a user who registers on your site from an SEM or SEO lead will count as a conversion. If you care most about traffic to your site, then any user that comes to your site from an SEM or SEO link will count as a conversion.
Why This Is Important: Conversion is important because you will want to know the cost to obtain each new conversion on your site. You’ll also typically want to keep the conversion cost below your profit from each transaction (unless the value of the customer to you over a period of time, is sufficiently high that you’re willing to pay MORE for the conversion cost than your profit for the initial transaction).
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Tags: crowdspring, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, small biz, small business, smallbiz, startups
Posted in business, crowdsourcing, How To, marketing, social media, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology | 22 Comments »
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
300 Most Amazing Photoshop Tutorials of Summer 2009 – http://bit.ly/R3dzH
Over 5000 FREE Adobe Photoshop Brushes – http://bit.ly/Vs6S4
Guide To All Photoshop CS4 Tools (Part 1) – http://bit.ly/580Pz
Guide To All Photoshop CS4 Tools (Part 2) – http://bit.ly/Z8rxl
FREE e-book: Contracts for Software Developers Who Hate Contracts – http://bit.ly/devcontracts
FREE e-book: Contracts for Designers Who Hate Contracts – http://bit.ly/contracts4designers
How to get design inspiration without ripping off the original designer – http://bit.ly/1a5yv1
How color communicates meaning – http://bit.ly/UV9CK
35 Excellent Wireframing Resources – http://tinyurl.com/l7zzwr
Five Secrets of the Marquee Tools in Photoshop – http://bit.ly/ZAjEH
10 Ways To Gain More Design Work by Building Trust and Relationships – http://bit.ly/2bNML
Top 50 Web Design Education Blogs – http://bit.ly/18yGS2
20+ Best Tutorials to Convert Psd to Html/CSS – http://bit.ly/2JFCwP
20 Javascript and CSS Tooltips Plugins and Tutorials – http://bit.ly/iWsFN
(more…)
Tags: crowdspring, design, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, leadership, links, pr, public relations, small business, smallbiz, social media, startup, twitter
Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, crowdsourcing, design, How To, inspiration, Interviews, marketing, Reviews, social media, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
In the past 5 years, I have written or co-written at least 10 business plans. With each one it got a bit easier, and each one got a bit better as I practiced writing in “biz plan” style and learned what information was important to include and what information was extraneous. My first experience with co-writing a business plan was the one Ross and I wrote for crowdSPRING (Note: Ross discussed our process in his post on raising capital from Angel investors last year). I found that this was a great way to write – to bounce ideas, to edit one another, and (mostly) to have another set of eyes looking for mistakes. Here are 10 tips on writing a great business plan:
1. Learn from your ancestors. Or at least use their plan as a template. Read as many business plans as you can get your hands on. Search the tables of contents and see which parts are applicable to your venture. Flip to the index and see how well organized and granular it is. Check out any exhibits or charts the author included and consider how your business plan could benefit from these. Remember, you’re not re-inventing the wheel here. There have been many who did this before you and you can benefit from their experience and expertise. (photo credit: guilhembertholet)
2. Do your homework. Don’t mess around - research ’til you drop. For instance, Ross and I did research on the market, the industry, and potential competitors for over 3 months before we even drafted a rough table of contents. This homework paid off in many ways: first, it made drafting the biz plan that much faster, as we had so many facts already gathered; second, it gave us a facility with our business which served us well when we met with advisors and potential investors; and finally, it allowed us to imagine innovations and brainstorm ideas, many of which are reflected in the product today.
3. Know your market, understand your competition. There are so many resources available to you, that there is no excuse for not knowing EVERY pertinent fact and detail. Ask the people in your network for their ideas. Use the CIA website (yes, that CIA) for information on populations and demographics; use the Census Bureau website for information on different industries; use the Bureau of Labor Statistics for information on..um.. labor statistics. We love the Wayback machine for looking at old versions of competitors websites and to mine historical data. And we often use Quantcast to look at current traffic and statistics on other websites. (Note: we footnote everything – readers will want to know where your data comes from and having a reliable source listed is a huge help for the credibility of your plan).
4. The Table of Contents is your friend. The TOC is effectively your outline for the plan. Take your time with it; make sure you are including all of the relevant topics. At a minimum, your plan should include sections on the company you are forming,your marketing plan, financial information, and your growth strategy. This screen shot is the TOC from the original crowdSPRING business plan – you can see that we kept i straightforward with only five main areas of discussion.
5. Don’t give away your secrets. Require confidentiality and write a disclaimer (or get a lawyer to help you do so). Be careful. There – I warned you. You should take care to protect your proprietary information and your intellectual property. Be sure to ask for a non-disclosure agreement before sharing your business plan (and even then, don’t just hand it out to anyone and everyone). And make sure you cover yourself with a strong disclaimer – the last thing you want is for someone to claim that you misrepresented yourself or your business.
6. Write a great Executive Summary. Many of the people you hope will read your business plan are ridiculously busy. Go figure. In any case lots of folks will read only the summary and flip through the rest of the plan. This makes for both a challenge and an opportunity; the stronger and better-written your summary, the better chance you have of a follow-on meeting to make your pitch in person.
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Tags: biz plan, business plan, bwml, crowdspring, pro-forma, projections, revenue model, simple, start-up, startup
Posted in Awesomeness, business, How To, Interviews, marketing, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology | 5 Comments »
Monday, September 14th, 2009
Prior to co-founding crowdSPRING, I spent 13 years practicing law (representing small, medium and Fortune 500 clients around the world). Along the way, I advised many small businesses and startups. Entrepreneurs and small businesses often ask me about legal problems facing most small businesses and startups and for tips on how to avoid those problems. Here are the top 10 mistakes and tips on how to avoid them:
1. Choosing The Wrong Ownership Structure. This is your most important first decision when starting a business. The decision you make will impact whether or not you’ll be able to accept investors, how many and what types of investors, whether you’ll easily be able to sell your company, what your personal legal liability will be, what your tax liability and benefits will be, and many other significant issues.
Why This Is A Problem: If you’re going to be looking for outside investment, you’ll want to create an ownership structure that’s friendly to those investors. For example, most outside investors prefer the stock structure of a corporation (or limited liability company) as opposed to a partnership. If you select the wrong ownership structure, you might expose yourself to unlimited personal liability for your company’s debts. Keep in mind that you should create your ownership structure BEFORE you enter into any agreements/contracts.
How You Can Avoid This Problem: Consider the following issues when deciding on what type of entity to start: what are the potential liabilities/risks? What are the anticipated tax benefits from being taxed as a partnership as opposed to a corporation? Do you intend to have outside investors? Do you anticipate selling your company in the future? Are you pursuing a risky business where you might be sued?
If you’re a sole proprietor, you are personally liable for your business debts. While this is generally the simplest form of ownership, it is also risky.
In a partnership, the partners can be personally liable for the debts of the business. One benefit of both sole proprietorship and partnership is that the income/loss from the business flows directly to you (the corporation doesn’t pay a separate corporate tax).
To insulate yourself from legal risk, you can form a corporation. Corporations have the most demanding record-keeping requirements and are subject to a separate corporate tax (in additional to your personal liability for your share of the money distribute by the corporation). As long as you follow all corporate formalities (hold periodic meetings, keep good corporate records, etc.) you’ll generally insulate yourself from personal liability for the debts of your company. Because of the expense involved in maintaining corporate records, many small businesses don’t use the corporate ownership structure (although many startups do – because that structure often makes it easier to sell the company).
You can get the tax benefits of a partnership and the legal protection benefits of a corporation by organizing as a limited liability company (LLC). LLCs are subject to annual taxes or reporting fees (typically, hundreds of dollars) but have far fewer corporate records requirements than do corporations. After considering our own situation, we organized crowdSPRING as an LLC.
image credit:SplaTT
2. Lack of or Poor Organizational Documents. It’s not enough to decide on the right ownership structure for your business. If you decide on a structure that requires documentation – such as a corporation – you must follow the formalities and create/maintain such documents.
Why This Is A Problem: If you don’t have solid organizational documents or fail to follow corporate formalities (such as for a corporation), you expose yourself to personal risk because courts may “pierce the corporate veil” and find you personally liable if they believe that the corporation wasn’t properly established or maintained. You also will lose credibility before your investors if they believe you don’t know how to properly maintain your entity.
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Tags: law, legal, mistake, small business, smallbiz, startup
Posted in business, crowdsourcing, How To, start-up tips, Strategy | 15 Comments »
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
FREE e-book: Contracts for Software Developers Who Hate Contracts – http://bit.ly/devcontracts
FREE e-book: Contracts for Designers Who Hate Contracts – http://bit.ly/contracts4designers
How 20 popular websites looked when they launched – http://bit.ly/b5pSn
13 Adobe Illustrator CS4 Reference Books for Your Shelf – http://bit.ly/jiCqR
10 Rules and Resources for Better Design Feedback – http://bit.ly/b7EWZ
23 Inspirational Photoshop Tutorials For Creating Impressive Web Layouts – http://bit.ly/jN8wb
25 Examples of Web 2.0 and Traditional Design Rules Coming Together – http://ow.ly/nUua
Tutorial: How to do a incredible Cosmic poster design with Photoshop – http://ow.ly/nUve
How-To Minimize Load Time for Fast User Experience – http://bit.ly/BpJ2Y
30 Examples of Watercolor Effect, 10 Watercolor Brushes For Web Design – http://ow.ly/nRwh
Tutorial: How to create word-based art from photos – http://bit.ly/4EtCDn
Over 45 Excellent Examples Of Retro Typography, Design And Illustration – http://bit.ly/52I6i
56 Absolutely Brilliant and Intriguing Photoshop Video Tutorials – http://bit.ly/Njn1T
Illustrating the Creative Process with Koldo Barroso – http://ow.ly/o4dy
Design for Startups: The Aesthetics of Web Apps in 6 Questions – http://bit.ly/3noTNc
55+ Seriously Useful Front End Web Developer Cheat Sheets – http://ff.im/7EfoZ
(more…)
Tags: crowdspring, design, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, leadership, links, pr, public relations, small business, smallbiz, social media, startup, twitter
Posted in Awesomeness, business, community, crowdsourcing, design, How To, inspiration, Interviews, marketing, Reviews, social media, start-up tips, Strategy, Technology | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
I never fully understood, until co-founding crowdSPRING, the challenges of operating a small business. There’s a lot to do but so little time to accomplish everything.
Here are five practical tips from my own experience with crowdSPRING that you can implement today to increase sales and profits for your small business:
1. Evaluate What’s Working And What Isn’t. Wasted time could be a small business owner’s worst enemy. Your time is limited but you have a great deal to accomplish every day. It’s OK to have occasional unproductive days, but most successful small businesses figure out what works and what doesn’t – and focus on the things that work for them.
For example, it’s entirely possible that a huge amount of your effort is spent on daily activities that aren’t contributing to building your brand, your sales/profits or accomplishing the other meaningful goals you’ve set for your business.
Some small business owners are so protective of their accounting, for example, that they’ll resist the need to bring in a part-time accountant to help them to maintain their financial records. While this appears to be prudent – after all, you’re saving the cost of paying a part-time accountant – such decisions turn out to be very short-sighted for many businesses. If you’re running a solo business, you could be focused on sales during the hours you devote to accounting. Or you can be working to improve your product or service.
How You Can Start Today: Start by listing on a sheet of paper – or in an electronic document – all of the tasks you do on a regular basis (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly). Do your best to break these tasks into logical areas, such as sales, accounting, marketing, inventory, etc. Second, assign times to each task. How long does it take you to pay your bills every week/month? If you have to maintain inventory, how long does it take you to review your inventory and order replacement inventory? Do this for each task to begin to understand the time you are spending on each activity. Third, assess whether each activity is important. You’d be surprised how many things we all do during a normal day that add little value to our business. Once you understand the importance of each activity, rank the activities (or logical areas) to better understand where YOU should be focusing. If you’re like me, you’ll find plenty of activities that are only modestly important – but those activities sometimes take the most amount of time to accomplish. Determine whether those activities are sufficiently important to continue – or whether you need to find someone else (part-time or full-time) to help you with those activities. We all have areas in which we excel. And we all have areas in which we don’t. Focus on the areas where you bring the most value to your business and find the right people to fill the gaps in areas you don’t. If you focus on the things that work, you’ll be more efficient and productive, and you’ll see meaningful impact to your bottom line.
image credit: wpwend42
2. Experiment With Hyper-Local Advertising on Facebook. Most small business owners don’t know that in March of this year, Facebook made some very powerful upgrades to its social network. Those upgrades are especially important to small business owners because it’s now possible to target customers based on the language they speak and where they live/work. This means that a bakery can now advertise specifically to people who live within a certain mile radius of the bakery. A language tutor can advertise to families who speak Russian or Chinese – within a 10 mile radius – to target families that may want to hire a tutor for their kids.
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Tags: competition, crowdspring, facebook, marketing, small business, smallbiz, Strategy
Posted in business, How To, marketing, start-up tips, Strategy | 5 Comments »
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
Hi, crowdSPRINGers!
We, the development team, have been working hard to get crowdSPRING 2.0 ready for release, and haven’t had much time to interact with the community, except to take a break once in a while to see what exciting projects are posted, and see some inspiring creative work. But, just to keep us from being forgotten (we need to be fed and watered at least once a day), here’s a quick update from the dev garage.
The bottom line is that things are looking very good and we’re all excited about this release. We’re now hammering down the last few engineering and testing tasks, and expect to be ready in about a month. What will happen then is that overnight we’ll be utterly transforming crowdSPRING’s software base. The new tech will allow for higher availability, performance, and will make it much easier for us to implement features and tools that you, crowdSPRING users, want.
The engineering task is significant, and has involved contributions from 8 programmers. Right now, we have three people working full-time on the final stretch: John and I on the backend data layers, and Chris mastering the HTML, CSS and JavaScript wizardry, and making sure it runs on all supported browsers and platforms. How much does Chris love IE6? A lot.
The entire site and all its plumbing has been rewritten from scratch. We’ve essentially reverse engineered crowdSPRING 1.0′s data structure, which is based on a generic content management system, and created in its place a database tailored exactly to crowdSPRING’s needs. It’s like replacing your fleet of giant battle walruses with a small band of highly trained assault dolphins.* On top of that, we have a user interface built in the Python programming language, clustered and served through a load balancer.
The construction is mostly done. We’re working hard now on getting all the current site’s data into the new site, while maintaining integrity. It’s straightforward but painstaking work, as we want to make sure that no project, no entry, no portfolio item is lost. Another big task is testing, making sure that all features work as they’re supposed to, and that they can handle busy loads. Those of you have been using crowdSPRING for a while know that it’s not trivial: things like the project wrapup have complex workflows that need to be carefully tested. We’ve also implemented entirely new backends for search and notification, requiring their own special fine-tuning.
If you haven’t had enough geekery yet, here are some more factoids about our development process:
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Django provides most of the plumbing between data and user interface. We have some criticisms of it, but overall find it incredibly productive.
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We’re agile, but flexible, too. Developers are given the freedom to work in the style they find most productive, and coordination is constant.
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Most of our development work is done in Ubuntu, installed on MacBooks. We deploy on a mix of Ubuntu and Red Hat.
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We’re doing cool stuff with Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services.
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John likes good soup.
That’ll do for now. Ross is giving me the evil eye, mumbling something about him paying me to code, not to write blog entries. Ross in a bad mood is like an attack of robot oysters on a shoal of war anemone. [NOTE: Ross's revenge - a picture of Tal upside down. YES - that is Tal in the photo above]
So, back to work for me (I’m working on migrating the wrapup comments to the new system). For my next entry, I hope to show you some pretty graphs about our performance and scalability. Graphs are hot.
Yours,
Tal
* Remember Darwin the Dolphin?
Tags: crowdspring, django, ec2, s3, ubuntu
Posted in community, Technology | 4 Comments »
