startup hustle

Here is a great video that “sings” why there is not a tech bubble.

One type of advertising startups often pass on (if not ever used) is apparel. Creating t-shirts and distributing them is not only a strain on resources and money (if your lucky to have some), there is a lack of truly knowing the effectiveness.

I have stumbled across a site that I wish I had thought of and is a good marketing tool for startups. Startup Schwag is a company that creates “Schwag bags”. The bags contain at least one t-shirt with the logo of a startup and stickers of many other startups sent each month to subscribers. It cost under $20 for US deliveries.

Read the rest of this article »

I have been following YCombinator’s News section almost since its inception. I have seen the YC community in action; from the switch of “Startup News” to “Hacker News”, to the disappearance of nickb and his return. It is one of the best sites on the web for startup information. The members are passionate about the community they have built, the articles are often right on par and spam is kept to a minimum.

I recently noticed a shift of the material making its way to the front page. Almost a quarter of the Top 30 submissions were “Ask YC” questions (aka Ask HN and Ask PG). Instead of posting an article from the web, members ask each other startup advice. This is why YC News is a step above other article submission sites. Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz and Sphinn all have a dedicated community, but not the level of involvement and support that YC members provide.

At a time when sites are doing whatever they can to grow, Paul Graham and the YC community make an effort to keep the population small and focused. This allows the material on the site to remain at such a high level instead of bogging it down with volume. That in it self is a lesson to every founder on the site. Volume instead of quality is a common objective that startups focus on that led them down the wrong path from the beginning.

I have been against using twitter since its inception. The only basis for this was information overload. Do I really need another site to see what my friends are doing? Between MySpace, Facebook, personal blogs and countless IM services, I already know every move my friends make.

Last Friday one of the programmers at a startup I work at wanted to join twitter, and asked if I would join as well. I decided to do it and break my personal twitter ban. The first thing I noticed was many more people that I knew were using twitter than I thought. While only half of them were actually active, I was still stunned.

Read the rest of this article »