Advisory Note: Trading is NOT Investing.
You cannot beat the market. Whether you’re an investor or an entreprenuer the market dictates where money is flowing. Follow the money. Find it, ride it, and get off. Here are some companies that are fighting the market, and getting trounced.
Nobody can predict the future, so trying to strategize and prognosticate what the next trend is, is foolish. The key is to adapt.
Running a startup isn’t easy. Who would’ve thought there was more to it than just the development of the product? There is a whole, complicated, legal side to running a business too. Since most startups begin in bootstrap mode we aren’t always fortunate to have a lawyer handle the boring and costly legalities.
Enter DocStoc.
Need a non-disclosure form? Check. Need a non-compete form? Check. Invoices? Check. Did I mention this is all free?
Use legal forms to protect your brand or your trademark. The resources are available to you, and spending a little time securing your product will go a long way.
You might build the most functional piece of software ever, but it’s not functional if nobody is using it. Think about that statement. If you can cure cancer, but nobody is using it, have you really cured anything at all?
Social media solves this problem with virility.
Integrating Twitter, Facebook, and E-Mail is a good sure fire way to promote the content on your application. Are you displaying some news? Let your users share it. Does your app give you vital statistics? Let your users share it.
The tools are there for building. Start thinking strategically and baking virility into your software batter. The more users are engaged and sharing, you inherently are building a passive marketing campaign - without the full force of a marketing team. Job well done.
I’m involved in a personal project where I’ve inexpensively offshored the tasks that are not within the range of my expertise. Here are some thoughts:
Offshoring is NOT always cost effective
There is an inherent notion amongst entreprenuers that offshoring tasks is cheap. This can be true, but the market does not lie when the average iPhone developer charges $150.00/hr.
Communication is absolutely vital
Working around the sun means you need to wake up at odd hours of the day (3AM skype calls) to get status reports, discuss features, and everything else that is project related. Failure to communicate will indefinitely result in a poor quality product, unless you really nailed your business requirements. Let’s get real though, 62% of IT projects fail before they are even completed for a reason.
Political risk will screw you over
China blocked access to popular social networking sites on May 2, 2009 to prevent a backlash on the 20th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square. My project has elements of social networking, which can’t be tested offshore anymore. Always have a backup plan because anything can go awry. Political risk is HUGE when you are working with countries outside of the US.
We all have great ideas and can come up with features, but lets face it if we don’t document the who’s and what’s nothing will get accomplished. Even in agile groups requirements are kept, albeit at a bare minimum as to-do lists (see iceberg lists).
Good entreprenuers out-task what they aren’t good at. Whether you are building a bridge or a software application making sure you nail your requirements is absolutely critical when working with outside vendors. They don’t know your business, they don’t care for your business. You need to provide them with detailed functional and non-functional requirements in order to get your product completed and out the door. Good requirements turns into a good products, which means customers are happy, and happy customers are your bread and butter.
If you don’t have the cash to buy books, or are just plain cheap you can still consume knowledge from best-selling authors. The trick is to subscribe to their blogs. Savvy authors will post the same content in their books but in free-form. Here are a few authors/bloggers to get you started:
I’m tired of registering my e-mail address to use a new web app or service. We live in a world where the majority of us are using Facebook, GMail, Yahoo, or Hotmail.
Startups that are creating their own authentication systems are re-inventing the wheel.
There are standard protocols like Facebook Connect, OAuth, OpenID and FriendConnect that will serve your purpose. Not only will you have authentication covered, but you instantly make your product “web 2.0” by allowing users to share content from your site via these protocols. Sharing is caring.
This post is long overdue:
Every engineer should know how to write a program. Every engineer should be able to write an Excel macro at the LEAST. Automation of your tasks is one of the most important things you can do for yourself because it frees up time, and as the age-old saying goes, “time is money”. I’m not saying you need to build a full blown web 2.0 application when all you’re doing is generating some reports, but if you can save time by eliminating a manual process, you are working smarter and saving dollars.
Delegation is the best way to do something you don’t want to. Managers do it all the time, and so can you. Delegate your manual calculations and reports to the computer. Programs are simply instructions meant to be followed. By boasting your productivity, over time, you will get a raise or a promotion and spend it however you please on geeky things.
For those of you who say “programming isn’t for me” you are wrong. As an engineer you are both analytical and methodical. Writing a program is a matter of thinking out loud and defining every step. Programming languages themselves are not complicated. You are simply learning the semantics of a language. Not only that, there is something called the application programming interface (API) which is the documentation on exactly how to use every aspect of the language. If English had an API I would be the modern-day Shakespeare. The true challenge lies in the definition of the problem, which should be natural to you after years of physics, math, and core discipline courses.
Lastly, you don’t even need to be Linus Torvalds at the workplace. In fact, as an engineer you can even settle to be a really bad programmer. Break all the rules and write sloppy code, as long as it works. Remember, you are basically creating a short term solution to a problem. I do encourage you though, to write clean and efficient code, because it can only help you in the long run.
You don’t want to be that guy doing a million things manually. To program or not to program, that is the question.
