Start ups
Start-up tips: 10 Tips For Evaluating Your Competitors
Ross | August 3rd, 2009If you’re working on a start-up or have an established company, there will come a time when you’ll need to evaluate your competitors. There are three components to a good competitive analysis: (1) defining the metrics and identifying the competitors you’re comparing, (2) gathering the data, and (3) the analysis. [NOTE: This post is a [...]
Contracts For Designers Who Hate Contracts
Ross | July 15th, 2009Every designer creates original work that is protected by copyright. Take the time to understand and protect your rights. Contracts For Designers Who Hate Contracts is a quick, 20 page read. Do you have any questions or suggestions for other topics you’d like to read about? Leave a comment…
Not Too Proud To Say “We’re Sorry”
Ross | June 5th, 2009We just went through one of the most humbling experiences for our company since we launched in May 2008. We experienced serious site performance problems. While our team (and numerous consultants on several continents) worked around the clock, it took us some time to identify the root causes of the problems and to fix them. [...]
Why Is The Site So Slow? My Eyes Are Glazing Over!
Ross | May 20th, 2009As I wrote in my post on May 7 – “Fessing Up To Our Mistakes” – we ran into problems earlier this month with scaling our application. That post has a great deal of detail about those problems, our early efforts to solve them, and the lessons we learned. We know that especially during the [...]
Fessing Up To Our Mistakes
Ross | May 7th, 2009We started working on crowdSPRING in the summer of 2006. We incorporated the company in May 2007 and launched the crowdSPRING marketplace in May 2008. We’ve learned many important lessons along the way. In some ways, our experience is typical of other start-ups. In other ways, it is not. I want to share some of [...]
Friday Fun Facts – Traffic Jam!
Mike | May 1st, 2009As a small business startup we spend a great deal of time looking at and analyzing data to help us drive strategy, make adjustments, and better understand our customers. We try hard to not be robotic in our response to numbers, but rather to let them inform our decisions and our direction. Here is the [...]
