start-up tips

Small Business Pinterest Starter Guide

Ross | May 16th, 2012

Are you wondering how you can leverage Pinterest for your small business? Pinterest is currently one of the hotest websites. For some businesses, Pinterest is delivering more user trafic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. For those of you who haven’t heard of Pinterest, here’s a brief summary: Pinterest is a free social sharing site [...]

Read full post »

Growing Your Small Business Using Social Media: The Facts

Ross | May 9th, 2012

We’re previously written about ways that small businesses are using social media, how businesses can leverage social media to deliver customer service, and the innovative ways some businesses use social media. There’s no clear consensus about social commerce and whether businesses should invest marketing dollars in social media. For example, Forrester Research, last year, released [...]

Read full post »

Lean Marketing: Delivering Customer Service via Social Media

Mike | April 30th, 2012

We write often about the power of great customer service and share ideas for how to engage with customers. improve delivery, and analyze your performance in this crucial arena. There are reasonably priced tools aplenty which can help you provide better service to your customers: help-desk software like Zendesk, virtual call center services such as [...]

Read full post »

Crowdsourcing: a 7+7 Primer (Pt. 2)

Mike | January 23rd, 2012

Last week I posted the first part of this article on crowdsourcing strategies. In the post, I discussed some of the big-picture issues that I believe should be considered carefully when planning a crowdsourced project. Best practices for crowdsourcing require managers to first determine the best venue for their project, effective management of the process, [...]

Read full post »

Crowdsourcing: a 7+7 Primer (Pt. 1)

Mike | January 16th, 2012

We write often about small businesses and startups and lean approaches to marketing and other business functions. Mid- to large-size companies can also benefit from the lean methodology and one way to do so is by actively leveraging crowds of workers: designers, software engineers, testers, writers, customer support people, customers, market researchers, and dozens of [...]

Read full post »

What It’s Like To Be An Entrepreneur – Eboo Patel

Ross | January 4th, 2012

We’re thrilled to be part of a new web/TV reality series – Trep Life – giving audiences a unique, 360-degree view of what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur. Each episode focuses on one company or organization. The first episode featured our friends Matt Maloney and Mike Evans from Grub Hub – a terrific [...]

Read full post »

Small Business and Startups: End-of-Year Mishegoss, 2011 Version

Mike | December 12th, 2011

For those of you unfamiliar with Yiddish, the word ‘mishegoss’ is defined as craziness or senseless activity, and as small business-people we can certainly relate to that concept, particularly as the holidays loom and the year comes to an end. Of course, every small business is unique and every business owner has their own priorities for [...]

Read full post »

10 Habits of Highly Successful Freelancers

Ross | June 15th, 2011

The most successful freelancers are excellent communicators. Is it enough to have great communication skills to succeed as a freelancer? No. However, it’s nearly impossible to succeed as a freelancer without effective communication skills. We’ve seen many talented designers on crowdSPRING and elsewhere fail to grow successful freelance businesses because they were poor communicators. We’ve [...]

Read full post »

Book Review: Rework (by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson)

Ross | June 15th, 2010

I admire 37signals because they make simple, easy to use web applications and because of their unique perspective on business. Rework is a collection of short essays by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, focusing on doing less and embracing constraints. Jason Fried co-founded 37signals and David Heinemeier Hansson later joined the company as a [...]

Read full post »

Start-Up Tip: Leadership Is Not Management

Ross | August 24th, 2009

In the book Tribes by Seth Godin, Godin suggests that anyone, anywhere can be a leader. The one thing holding most people back is the fear of failure. Tribes is about making a choice – to lead or not to lead a group of people. Using real world examples, Godin tells stories about how famous [...]

Read full post »