Monday, September 21, 2009

The customer has a task, help them fulfill it..

Jeff Sexton's post spells it out pretty clearly,

prospective customers are task oriented – they have lives and they are not visiting your business because they are interested in you, or your company, or how you’d like to “position” yourselves within the industry. Your visitors have a problem and they are really only interested in whether or not you have a viable solution.

An entrepreneur's sole reason for existence is to provide that viable solution.

Dine out for a cause this week

It is time to do something positive in a sea of discontent. It is time for the Great American Dine Out

Thursday, September 3, 2009

The investor paradox

Go it alone or bring on investors is an age old quandary. Avoid investors if you can however they are a necessary evil at times.

Nolan Bushnell's article highlights the battle

Start-ups are by their nature messy. Management will make mistakes, markets will be slower to take shape than you anticipated, and the technology will be buggy. In a bootstrapped company, you can survive because your expenses are low and you are accountable to no one but yourself. But in a funded company, you must demonstrate to your investors that you are making progress even as cash flow continues to be negative for a much longer time, requiring added rounds of investment.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Cloudy summer in the city:

Wow with depressions, decreases traffic counts, a tough cold winter in the forecast and now the lack of summer sunshine this old town really needs a party. Tom Skilling's article confirms what we already knew.

But perhaps one of this summers most lasting legacies was its lack of sunshine. Summer 2009 goes down in the books as the cloudiest on record. Never since sunshine records began 115 years ago has a June-through-August period hosted less of the possible sunshine. Sunshine is measured in minutes and the summer's total was 42,887 of the season's possible 80,626 minutes of sun, or 53 percent of possible sunshine -- 67 percent is considered normal.