Do you have an idea for a great new web site or web service that helps solve a real problem or provides useful content or a helpful service? Do you want to move forward, but aren’t sure how to get started or if you even should? I discussed this question with Kevin Hale, co-founder of Wufoo, and asked him to explain how Wufoo came up with their idea and how they went from idea to actual product.

Kevin, who was involved in the original idea for Wufoo and how did it come about?

The company was founded by Chris and Ryan Campbell and myself. In 2003, I was doing some writing and design for a small division at a research university when I met Chris, who was doing some web application development there. Chris introduced me to his brother, Ryan, who at the time was still a student and writing all the database programming examples for his professor’s computer science textbook. For about a year, we talked constantly about how frustrating it was to build these really boring forms and databases for our employers, who failed to appreciate how much tedious work was involved just to create something simple as a contact form or an online survey.

I think we can all relate to similar frustrations we encounter in our jobs, and many times, though we think of helpful solutions, it’s difficult to get past just talking about it, and actually get started on building something. How long did it take between when you had the idea until you began to take action on it and how much decision making went into deciding it was a good enough idea to proceed?

While we thought about the idea around 2005, we didn’t start writing the first lines of code until after we got accepted into Y Combinator in January 2006. We knew right away that it was a good idea, the trick was figuring out how to architect our time to give us the opportunity to just sit down, focus and build a prototype. While we started off on the bootstrapping route, it wasn’t until we got funding that we were able to work on it full time.

Many startup teams find themselves in the situation where they work a full time job while trying to build the startup, and they also have to bootstrap it as well. Do you have any advice to startup teams in this position?

Successful bootstrapping is all about discipline and stamina. Every scenario I’ve ever heard is some variation of coming home exhausted from regular work and figuring out how to muster additional energy to do more work. There’s no secrets from what I can remember from our own experience and from what I’ve seen others try. It pretty much sucks. Especially if you like anything else interesting in your life…like family, friends, hobbies, relationships, etc. My advice is that you remember your motivations and do what you can to stay positive. I honestly believe that if you figure out how to dedicate a solid few hours of work every single night to your side project, there’s no way it doesn’t manifest into something. It might not go exactly as planned, but something always happens. Oh, and document everything. People are voracious for the products of productive people. There is some wild fascination by all of humanity about those moments that show how things happen behind the scenes. That knowledge and more specifically that kind of sharing attracts not just an audience but potential fans—people with an intimate understanding of your process, justifications and roots. That’s invaluable.

What were the first steps of action you took once you decided you wanted to build Wufoo?

On the steps of the Austin Convention Center at SXSW Interactive 2005, all three of us were talking after a day of panels and we decided that there was absolutely nothing separating us from any other successful person at the conference. That’s when we decided to start a blog and that lead to a magazine that we charged for, to help us moonlight program at nights. Eventually, we got inspired, scored some seed funding through Y Combinator and built something that liberated us from the land of the cubicles.

It sounds like the first thing you had was confidence, which is something I find lacking in a lot of individuals who wish they could build a product or a service, but don’t feel they have what it takes. And yet, as you said, there really is very little in skills and experience that separate those who succeed from those who never start, other than the commitment to do so. You said you decided to start a blog first. Was that in order to build credibility, an audience, something else? How long did you run the blog before starting to build Wufoo?

All of the above. It’s not even our formula. We heard this strategy for the first time from Jason Fried of 37signals fame at a session at SXSW many years ago on doing big things with small teams. They started their relationships with their users with their blog Signal vs Noise long before they built Basecamp and we all know how that story is going (hint: well!). Anyway, we ran Particletree for about a year before we got into Y Combinator.

I know from experience that sometimes the most difficult part of getting started with an idea is choosing the name and the url for it, and some teams also have to decide what platform to build it on. At what point in the process did you choose the name and the url, and decide on the technology platform?

The name came up some time after a few weeks of coding. One of the people accepted into Y Combinator at the time was Beau Hartshorne, the creator of instantdomainsearch.com. He did all this crazy algorithmic domain name availability matching system and was able to give us a list of 5 letter domain names that were still available. We all went through the list and Wufoo just jumped out at me. I really liked it because it was a combo of two bands I really liked : Wu-Tang Clan and Foo Fighters. I kept saying over and over and eventually it stuck. The platform was based on what we knew well at the time from working on Particletree, our web development experiments blog at the time.

When during the process did you bring on other members to the team or involve other people to help you build a product ready for launch?

So we started writing the first lines of code in January 2006 and we launched later that summer in July of 2006. It was still just the founders then doing all the development. We did, at the time, outsource our server management to a boutique company based in San Francisco at the time called Bitpusher. They handled all of our infrastructure, hardware and networking needs since that wasn’t our strong suit. Because we were (and still are) a small team that desired to stay a small team, we didn’t hire for almost two years.

What are the advantages of staying small? What would you say to Founders and CEOs who want to hire a large team right away in order to speed toward the final product?

Honestly, best of luck to you. And I mean it. I don’t believe in the idea that there’s only one correct way to build a company. Companies that make a lot of revenue tend to be big companies. So if you want to make gobs of money, there’s a pretty strong correlation there. A few things that we like about staying small is the discipline it places on everyone to make the most of our resources to serve a large and growing audience of users, the very intimate and positive culture we’ve been able to develop that we’re very proud of, and because we are a company that offers a profit sharing plan with employees, the math works out in our favor if we keep it small.

Did the original idea go through many changes from what we see today?

The initial vision of Wufoo was actually as an ASP content manager with the ability to allow for unlimited inputs and reversible forms, which means they could be used for both backend management and public submission. Basically, the worst elevator pitch ever described. As we wised up, ASP turned into PHP and we tried to narrow our focus to form building.

What forces helped you to ‘wise up’? Was it bouncing your ideas off of others, or just you zeroing in on it as it came together?

Well, PHP was open source and therefore free and for a startup that’s a big thing. Plus, they have a great community that’s easily accessible and so that was also part of the calculations over a language like .NET. The form building angle actually came from Paul Graham, one of our investors who serves as one of the partners over at Y Combinator. What we kept describing required a lot of words and that’s terrible in a pitch situation. Since our focus was creating a UI to design the front end easier while we magically take care of the backend, it just made sense to distill it down to what makes sense from the user perspective. Content Managers, Database Application Creators, Spreadsheets and Form Builders are really all variations of the exact same concept and principles. How you choose to describe yourself is really a marketing angle and at that time, the space was ripe for something new in that category.

When and how did you decide on which features were necessary for the initial launch?

In the beginning we started off with this giant grocery list of all the features we could ever think could go into Wufoo. Fortunately, we had a very real deadline created by Y Combinator that required us to have some sort of working prototype to show off to a room full of investors in three months and so that kind of constraint resulted in us removing almost 50% of the features on that initial list right away. The next deadline we made for ourselves came out of wanting to give an exclusive to TechCrunch on launch on July 5, 2006. To reach that date, we paired down our ideas to the most basic things we could think of to get a user going from build form, view entries, edit entries, design styles and create reports. That came out to something like 30 features I think. That said, we weren’t super specific and were still over zealous about our ambitions and skills and so we actually had features on that initial 30 that we didn’t finish until just this year (4 years later!).

I think its very difficult for us founders when we are passionate about providing a solution to a problem to stay focused on the essentials. You mention that a hard deadline helped you stay focused and that reminds me of building PeepNote for the Rails Rumble. We had a very real deadline of 48 hrs from when we started, and throughout that time we continued to drop features that weren’t as important. We were very aware that some product had to be launched by the end or we were out. I think deadlines like this can really help teams focus, but, not everyone is competing in a competition as we were, or given a deadline by investors as you were. Do you have any suggestions for startup teams who don’t have an externally forced deadline, but still need to resist the urge to add endless features, and take far too long to deliver a product?

You’re right, constraints in the form of deadlines really help people focus their energies down to the essentials. Not much advice to give if you’re having trouble with feature creep. Most people have some sort of ticking clock in place that’s usually tied to funds if not an event in time like meeting with a room full of investors. For people worried about cutting out too many features, I feel like you can always cut something down to one really well-executed feature. Many software ideas starts as such an embryo. I also don’t believe that software is ever truly “done” and so you can always take solace in the fact that users will always ask for more features and give you opportunities to expand upon your creation. I honestly believe waiting for the big launch is a silly idea especially in this age on the web. The life of your app only just begins when your users can have at it. To me, everything before that is just posturing and guesses.

What advice would you give to someone who has an idea and has decided they are willing to commit to staying with it and put in the needed time to make it happen. What are the most important next steps to take after the idea is there? What shouldn’t they do right away that maybe you see people get distracted by in the beginning?

Get it out there to real users. Critiques from other designers and developers are rarely accurate or helpful and so I think that desire to refine before launch is over expressed in most founders. If you’re planning to make money off the app directly (like with a freemium model) I highly recommend having that ready to go and out there with prices right at launch. There’s this great advice from Joe Kraus, the guy behind Excite and JotSpot, who emphasizes that you have to beta test your business model along with your software. What I don’t think people need to worry about a lot in the beginning is speculation. Lots of arguments happen in the beginning of most startups based on postulations, hypotheses and predictions. I find those discussions usually lead to wasted energy arguing about possibilities that can’t be proven at the time. I definitely prefer to worry about decisions based on realities and can end with some kind of action item that will lead to an answer. I think what you have to realize is that arguments like those arise out of a lack of information and when you can get to the point where you can use data and revenue to make decisions about direction and focus, those discussions are so much less stressful. I’m always recommending people staying away from the future and keeping themselves in the present by making sure that what they work on is accompanied with measurement and observation. This way, when questions about the future come up, they can extrapolate instead of postulate.

Great suggestions Kevin. Thank you for sharing your experience with us. The Internet startup community seems to be corner-stoned by some really helpful individuals, who truly want others to succeed and are willing to share their experience and lessons learned. I think that in the end, this helps others reach their dreams and accomplish their goals, and helps grow the Internet startup community to even larger numbers. Thanks for your time.

Kevin Hale is the Co-founder of Infinity Box Inc, a Y Combinator seeded company. His responsibilities include safe guarding and designing the user experience of their online HTML form builder, Wufoo, which was ranked by Jakob Nielson as one of the best application UIs of 2008. He also writes about interface design issues for the web development blog, Particletree and served as Editor-in-Chief of the web development magazine, Treehouse.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

In their own words:

TechCrunch Disrupt is a three-day, single-track conference and startup competition to immerse you in the debate about what’s changing in media and technology right now, what’s causing it and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real time. TechCrunch Disrupt gathers the leaders and innovators of the technology and media industries to give you deep insights into the creative destruction happening right now. The big changes. And the subtle trends.

Tablet computing. Smart phones. Real-time conversations. The geo-stream. The evolution of advertising. Rich media platforms. Software in the cloud. And social media. All of these things are connected, and are converging in different ways.

We’ll bring the experts together to talk about what’s next. And why.

***

There’s more than advice, guidance, and networking opportunity on offer. Over the three days emerging companies will be competing in the Startup Battlefield, showcasing their talents and new designs of both hardware and software. One of them will leave the conference with $50,000 to continue to grow, create and succeed in their field.

In the real startup battlefield, beyond the conference, things are constantly changing. TechCrunch Disrupt will immerse you in where media and technology are heading, how not only to make your company survive the changes, but how it can thrive by moving forward and being the change instead of being lost in the rush. At the event you will hear from some of the best in the business, who have been there and done it, and can help you to do it. Check out the confirmed speakers and secure a place by booking tickets here.

If you’re in New York City this weekend, before the Disrupt conference starts in full, check out the free TechCrunch Hack Day – being organised by Chad Dickerson (who held the first Hack Days at Yahoo, now CTO of Etsy), Daniel Raffel (Yahoo) and Tarikh Korula (Uncommon Projects) and Jonah Brucker-Cohen (Scrapyard Challenge). Work with others to create and build something new, hardward or software, and work long into the night to get the chance to present onstage to over 2,000 people. Registration for the Hack Day begins Saturday 22nd at 1pm, 570 Washington Street (between Houston and Clarkson Streets), 2nd floor, New York, NY 10014. Find more info on the Hack Day here.

Everyone can get something from the TechCrunch Disrupt. Be one of more than 1,000 innovators gaining market insight, developing new business, and moving forward with every change in the industry. Listen to executives from high-tech and media sectors speaking of the industry, but grab the opportunity to speak with them and network, developing new business ideas and being part of the latest thinking. Technologists will be seeing what the competition is up to. Startups will gain incredible exposure, with funders from all over the US, and find opportunities everywhere to take the next step. Disrupt will support your innovation. Investors will be there too, seeing the trends and products, getting in there before the competition does. New and exciting business and innovation will be exposed to press, bloggers and policy influences from every corner of the industry.

Dates & Times:
Saturday (tomorrow), May 22nd – Sunday, May 23rd, 2010: Hack Day (Registration begins Saturday, May 22nd at 1pm) 570 Washington Street (between Houston and Clarkson Streets), 2nd floor, New York, NY 10014

Monday, May 24: “What’s Going On?”

Tuesday, May 25: “How are Platforms and Content Evolving?”

Wednesday, May 26: “How do You Find Your Audience –and Make Money?”

Speakers include:

Tim Armstrong (CEO, AOL)
Nikesh Arora (President, Google)
Ron Conway (Founder, SV Angel)
Chris Cox (Vice President, Facebook)
Dennis Crowley (CEO, Foursquare)
Jack Dorsey (Founder, Square; Co-Founder, Twitter)
Eric Hippeau (CEO, Huffington Post)
Ben Horowitz (Partner, Andreessen Horowitz)
Vic Gundotra (Vice President, Google)
Frank Quattrone (Founder, Qatalyst)
Avner Ronen (CEO, Boxee)
Andrey Ternovskiy (CEO, ChatRoulette)
Fred Wilson (Partner, Union Square)

You can learn more about the TechCrunch Disrupt conference here.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

So in the spirit of success, Fuel Your Venture has created a list/directory of companies providing this unique type of funding and mentorship for the earliest stage start-ups.

Although populated with some amazing incubators, we see this directory as a work in progress.  If you know of a company we are missing, submit it as a comment or email us directly at editor@fuelyourventure.com, and we will add it to the list.

Ycombinator
Location	Mountain View, CA
Key People	Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris
Founded	2005
Focus	Software and web services
Cash Investment	$5,000 plus an additional $5,000 for each founder
Equity Stake	2-10%
Website	http://ycombinator.com/
Contact	info@ycombinator.com
Notes	Ycombinator is one of the earliest of the seed-stage incubators. Based out of Mountain View, CA, Ycombinator hosts two classes of companies each year. Companies must relocate to Mountain View for the three month duration of the program. Ycombinator provides office space and mentorship to participants of the program. The program culminates in an investor and demo day. Graduates of Ycombinator include Reddit, Loopt, Justin.tv, Scribd and Dropbox.

Techstars
Location	Boulder, Colorado; Boston, Massachusetts; and Seattle, Washington
Key People	David Cohen, Brad Feld, Jared Polis, David Brown, Shawn Broderick
Founded	2006
Focus	Technology oriented companies (web based and software)
Cash Investment	$6,000 per founder up to three founders
Equity Stake	6%
Website	http://techstars.org
Contact	info@techstars.org
Notes	TechStars was founded a year after Ycombinator. Companies must relocate to the Techstars location for the entire three month duration of the program. Past graduates include IntenseDebate, Socialthing, Brightkite, DailyBurn and ignighter. The program culminates in an investor and demo day. Over 70% of TechStars companies have had success outside of the program, either by raising outside funding or becoming profitable.

DreamIt Ventures
Location	Philadelphia, PA
Key People	David Bookspan, Michael Levinson, Steven Welch
Founded	2007
Focus	Any idea that can be developed into a product in three months
Cash Investment	$30,000
Equity Stake	6%
Website	http://www.dreamitventures.com/
Contact	info@dreamitventures.com
Notes	At the end of the program, companies pitch to potential investors at a demo day. Although younger than Ycombinator and TechStars, DreamIt has funded successful companies, including SCVNGR, NoteHall, and SeatGeek. Read our recent article about DreamIt for more detailed information.

Capital Factory
Location	Austin, TX
Key People	Josh Baer, Sam Decker, Bryan Menell
Founded	2009
Focus	Technology
Cash Investment	$20,000 in cash plus additional products and services valued at more than $20,000
Equity Stake	5%
Website	http://capitalfactory.com
Contact	http://twitter.com/capitalfactory
Notes	The program ends with a demo day in which companies pitch to potential investors. Previous classes included five companies, including PetsMD.com, SpareFoot.com, and Cubit planning.

Shotput Ventures
Location	Atlanta, GA
Key People	David Cummings, Sanjay Parekh, Allen Graber
Founded	2009
Focus	Capital-light web companies
Cash Investment	$6,000 per founder up to three founders
Equity Stake	5-10%
Website	http://www.shotputventures.com/
Contact	info@shotputventures.com
Notes	Shotput also provides mentoring and a demo day at the end of the program but doesn’t provide any office space. Shotput requires companies to relocate to Atlanta for the duration of the three month program.

LaunchBox Digital
Location	Washington, D.C.
Key People	Julius Genachowski, Sean Greene and John McKinley
Founded	2007
Focus	Technology oriented companies
Cash Investment	$15,000-20,000
Equity Stake	6%
Website	http://www.launchboxdigital.com/
Contact	theteam@launchboxdigital.com
Notes	LaunchBox provides office space, mentorship and a demo day at the end of the 12 week program. Participating companies are required to relocate to Washington, D.C. for the duration of the program. Previous graduates include JamLegend, TapMetrics and unblab.

BoomStartup
Location	Salt Lake City, UT
Key People	John Richards, Robb Kunz and Josh James
Founded	2010
Focus	Tech startups
Cash Investment	$15,000
Equity Stake	Not stated
Website	http://www.boomstartup.com/
Contact	http://www.boomstartup.com/?q=contact
Notes	BoomStartup is mentorship-driven. It provides office space in Salt Lake City as well as services to help startups. The incubator hosts a demo day in September for member companies to pitch to potential investors.

Springboard
Location	Cambridge, UK
Key People	Neil Davidson, Simon Galbraith and Amir Chaudhry
Founded	2009
Focus	Business-to-business software
Cash Investment	Varies
Equity Stake	None
Website	http://springboard.com/
Contact	amir.chaudhry@red-gate.com
Notes	Springboard is an ‘accidental’ incubator founded by Red Gate. Springboard provides mentorship and office space in Red Gate’s offices. Springboard doesn’t take any equity in the companies they support. Past participating companies include PagerDuty, TidePowered and MetaAlternative.

Excelerate
Location	Chicago, IL
Key People	Sam Yagan, Kapil Chaudhary, Kelli Rhee, Troy Henikoff
Founded	2010
Focus	None stated
Cash Investment	$15,000-20,000
Equity Stake	5%
Website	http://www.exceleratelabs.com/
Contact	http://www.exceleratelabs.com/contact/
Notes	Excelerate is a ‘bootcamp’ for startups and provides mentorship, office space in downtown Chicago and access to potential investors. Companies are required to relocate to Chicago for the duration of the 13 week program.

SproutBox
Location	Bloomington, IL
Key People	Marc Guyer, Mike Trotzke, Brad Wisler
Founded	2008
Focus	Web based applications
Cash Investment	$10,000-15,000
Equity Stake	25-40%
Website	http://sproutbox.com/
Contact	Phone: 888.417.9341
Notes	SproutBox is a development focused incubator. Sproutbox selects four companies a year to be a part of a 10 month program. SproutBox provides office space and services worth between $200,000-250,000 in order to ‘mitigate initial distractions’. Participants must relocate to Bloomington for a minimum of three months during the development phase. SproutBox provides access to potential investors at the end of the program.

NextStart
Location	Greenville, SC
Key People	Michael Mino, Kim Dawson, Kristie B. Byrum, Neil Grayson, Rick Heller, David Setzer, Peter Walschmidt, David Wyman, Robert Fletcher
Founded	2009
Focus	None stated
Cash Investment	$5,000 per team member ($10,000 maximum per company)
Equity Stake	5-10%
Website	http://www.nextstart.org/
Contact	Phone: 864.370.3038
Notes	NextStart is an incubator based in Greenville, South Carolina. The program provides mentorship and office space for the duration of the summer program. NextStart culminates in a demo day at which companies pitch to potential investors. The program takes between 5-10% equity.

GoodCompany Ventures
Location	Philadelphia, PA
Key People	Garrett Melby, Chris Bentley
Founded	2009
Focus	For-profit social enterprises
Cash Investment	$0
Equity Stake	0%
Website	http://www.goodcompanyventures.org/
Contact	http://www.goodcompanyventures.org/about/contact-us/
Notes	GoodCompany is an incubator that’s specifically focused on “socially conscious entrepreneurs who can make a difference.” GoodCompany doesn’t provide any money to participants and doesn’t take any equity, but it provides mentoring, support, and facilities. The incubator also facilitates a first investment round. Participants are required to attend weekly meetings at the GoodCompany offices in downtown Philadelphia. The program culminates in a demo day at which participating companies pitch to potential investors.

Betaspring
Location	Providence, RI
Key People	Allan Tear, Jack Templin, Owen Johnson
Founded	2009
Focus	Technology and design from web services to physical devices
Cash Investment	Average of $20k per team
Equity Stake	6-8%
Website	http://betaspring.com
Contact	info@betaspring.com
Notes	Competitive entrepreneurial teams from around the world come to Providence, RI, for our intensive twelve week program. During these twelve weeks, we help teams transform themselves into functional, fundable companies by providing mentorship, kickoff funding, and immersion in an intense startup community of like-minded entrepreneurs. At the end of the program teams have the opportunity to present their company to investors from the Boston, New York corridor during our Demo Day event.

Did we miss anyone?

We would like to make this a comprehensive resource for startup incubators everywhere.  If you have one to add to the list, please submit it to editor@fuelyourventure.com

We are looking for feedback

Have you worked with any of these incubators?  Have feedback? Share your experience below!

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

DreamIt is not unlike other localized incubators, such as Mountain View (CA) based Y Combinator and Boulder(CO)’s Techstars, which provide funding and essential services for early stage startups. Teams aren’t expected to have a business plan — only a great idea and a solid team. The program provides a team with up to $30,000 in startup capital, coaching from top mentors, complimentary legal and accounting services, connections to the startup community and office space in Philadelphia. At the end of the program, DreamIt hosts a Demo Day at which participating companies pitch to potential investors.

Although young — DreamIt funded its first class in 2008, with some graduates already achieving notable success. SCVNGR, a location-based gaming company, raised $4 million from Google Ventures and is already cash-flow positive after only a year; NoteHall, an online marketplace for college notes, was featured on ABC’s show ‘Shark Tank’ and received funding as a result; and SeatGeek, which forecasts sports and concert tickets, was a finalist at TechCrunch 50 and secured $500,000 in Series A funding.

“Our first two classes of DreamIt companies were exceptional,” said Mike Levinson, one of DreamIt’s founding partners. “We expect this year to be our best class yet. We will have more applicants than ever before, impressive new mentors and a more vibrant community of investors keeping an eye on our companies.”

Since the notable success of Y Combinator, incubators fitting the small seed funding, mentorship- and community-driven model are starting up all over the country. There are funds in San Francisco, Boulder, Philadelphia, Boston, Atlanta, Austin, and Salt Lake City, Utah to name just a few. This is an important step forward for the startup community. New incubators, increase the opportunity for startups to get funded and succeed, by providing a vital ingredient: connections. If the current trend holds, we should see a lot more of these popping up in other population centers over the next few years — and it’s only a matter of time before one appears in your backyard.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

It may sound silly, but when you look at the success rate of startup businesses you will realize that these fears are mostly justified. All company owners know they want to market and want to take their product or service to the masses, they just aren’t sure how best to do it. Luckily for them, the basic principles of marketing a new venture are easy and can be effectively done by anyone.

Build the Foundation First

Before looking to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website it is necessary that you build the website itself correctly; throwing up a pre-made Wordpress template will get you nowhere fast. The website’s goals must be defined, followed by proper organization of the content and user experience.

If your primary goal is to have your users sign-up or register you must concisely convey information that shows the visitor why your product or service is useful to them with clear calls to action that direct the user to a simple signup form. If your focus is on ecommerce, making it easier for the user to see, add, and purchase your items becomes the utmost priority while a blog or otherwise content-driven website would best benefit from optimized typography and readability. Your venture is unique and your website experience should reflect such.

Do Your Basic Keyword Research and Implement It

By implementing the most effective on-page SEO, search engines are able to properly list your website in their results pages and drive visitors interested in your market to you. Your first step is to read Google’s on-page SEO guide – this teaches the basics of SEO and allows you to comfortably implement a SEO strategy.

Using Google’s Keyword Research Tool, you can look up relevant keywords to your venture’s product, service, and industry. By analyzing interchangeable terms (e.g. “USB drives”, “flash drives”, and “thumb drives”), geographic keyword phrases (e.g. “USB Drives in Denver”) and the number of search queries the terms have had, you can define a series of appropriate keywords and phrases you wish to target. Then, by employing this research you can create keyword themed pages using the Title, Meta Description, Header Tags and Body Text to make those pages relevant for a term in the search engines; however, always remember that users come first and SEO second.

Learn Google Analytics

When running any online marketing campaigns it is essential to track what kind of traffic and conversions you are getting as a result. Take the time (or if you don’t have time, find someone) to properly setup Google Analytics for both your website and your marketing campaigns, then make use of UTM tags to track the ROI. Being able to say, “X campaign is working for us, but Y isn’t” is the single most valuable tool you can have when marketing; this keeps your costs down and your conversion rates up.

Start Engaging

With your website and analytics properly setup, you’re officially ready to start driving traffic. Many ventures’ first thought is, “Let’s do social media! We can brand ourselves and go viral! We’ll be huge!” but this is the wrong approach. In most cases, you do want to implement social media into your marketing campaign, but make sure you understand the following before starting:

• You do not control your brand, your customers do.
• Social media is about engagement, not the number of followers you have.
• “Branding” is not a quantitative measurement – measure actual ROI.

Furthermore, carefully select which social media avenues are most appropriate for your venture and focus on those. Some ventures will benefit from using anything and everything in the social sphere while maintaining a quality presence in them all, but most cant. The last thing you want is an empty presence where people are asking you questions but you are not there to respond.

Find Consumers with Twitter

Due to its versatility, Twitter is a wonderful medium for nearly anyone to begin their social media endeavors. After creating an account, you can utilize Twitter Search to search for the terms related to your venture and look for people using your competitors’ products. Send these people personalized messages informing them of your product or responding to their complaints about another product and how yours may be a better alternative. It sounds a bit cut-throat, but the click-through rates will prove that it is a viable technique (remember, measure with Google Analytics!).

Approach the Blogosphere

Find authors that have done write-ups on your competitors or round-ups of some of the best tools/services in your market and then approach them with your venture. Let them know that they may want to include you in their next round-up article or do a feature; you can even sweeten the deal by offering a promotion for their website’s visitors – make it valuable for them to mention you.

Let the Press Know

Services such as PR Web and PR NewsWire are wonderful, inexpensive ways to broadcast your press releases to thousands of quality news sites. If you aren’t comfortable with writing an effective press release, it may be best to hire someone since this is your big potential step into the limelight. Even if your release doesn’t get picked up by many journalists, a few quality articles that mention your product or service could be all it takes to start a fast-growing word-of-mouth campaign.

Endnote

As you can see in the aforementioned methods, you can effectively market your new venture without spending a great deal of time or money and it requires little to no expertise in marketing. The tools are widely available on the web for getting your marketing campaign off the ground; it’s simply a matter of using them properly. I hope this article has helped you and most of all, good luck!

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

How They Make Money

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

The CEO and Founder of FreshBooks, Mike McDerment, will be there to address various questions entrpreneuers, have through topics such as the following:

Building – your web app, your company, your team
Marketing – with and without dollars
Product management – so you know what’s right to build
Metrics – to track your progress
Financing – the who, what, when, where, why and how 5Ws of fund raising

With such valuable information being shared, you’d be crazy to miss it however FreshBooks understand that not all people can travel to attend such events so if you’d like to register your vote for them to send Mike to your city, you can – plain and simple!

You can get more information about where and when the events are along with a sneak peak of the talks over on FreshThinking – the blog by FreshBooks.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

Communication

Contacting all corners of the globe can be expensive and tiring if you’re a conventional telephone user. However thanks to VoIP (Voice-over IP) you can make international calls at a fraction of the price. What’s more, it’s all done through your computer meaning you can talk & type at the same time!

Make free calls to other Skype accounts along with paid subscriptions to call national and international numbers. A great service used by many millions!

A service designed with entrepreneurs in mind. A fully-functional virtual PBX allows you to use Grasshopper in your company to make and receive calls.

By using the Vonage Adapter, you can convert your phone into a VoIP phone making it easier and cheaper to make international calls - simple!

Project Management

If you’re running various projects at once you’ll understand that keeping on top of them can be difficult. With project management solutions such as the ones below, you can take control of your business and complete any important work on time.

An awesome web-based tool that allows you to manage projects, assign tasks, create milestones and targets.

A great project management tool with a clean interface and many features including time scheduling and calenders.

A web-based task manager designed specifically to go hand-in-hand with the 'Getting Things Done' methodology.

Invoicing

It’s normally a painstaking task requesting money from customers but with the many solutions available you can manage all your invoices online in a professional manner. Most services even offer templating and custom styles to make the invoice suit your business.

Perhaps the most renowned invoicing solution offering simple invoice templates that look both professional and legitimate.

SliQ Invoicing & Quotes offer professional invoices, personal quotation forms and credit notes helping you get paid on time!

Zoho Invoice offers multi-user support to collaborate on invoicing along with the ability to track expenses and accept payments online.

Accounting & Budgeting

Perhaps one of the most important parts of running a business is keeping accurate accounts and budgeting for the future to ensure you don’t run out of money. Keeping a record of everything in one central place is the key to all your accounting nightmares.

Priding themselves on being the 'world's easiest accounting system', Xero allows you to keep track of numerous things including banking, invoicing and reports.

An awesome, free service offering outstanding budgeting features along with automatic bookkeeping which gives you time to focus on other things.

An online bookkeeping tool completely free of charge with various features including taxation estimates. You can also export data to your computer!

With so many important tasks required to keep your business afloat – whether new or established – these tools really can help make things easier and reduce your workload. If you’ve got any suggestions for tools, resources & software that can be used to make an entrepreneurs life easier, please share them in the comments. I’d also appreciate feedback on whether you thought this list was useful and what sort of things you’d like to see in the future!

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

5 months later, they successfully raised $1.2 million in Series A funding which was led by DFJ Mercury and included various individual investments from the likes of David Cohen and Chris Sacca. I was fortunate to have a chance to chat with Micah and he was kind enough to share some of the details that led to their success and how it could be replicated.

Firstly, you managed to raise $18,000 of seed capital at Techstars, how important was that to Graphic.ly as a startup?

Techstars was invaluable to Graphic.ly. Kevin Mann, who had been working on this idea for a year or so, saw Techstars as his way to take the company to the next level. Kevin came to Boulder, CO from Middlesbrough, UK with his friend and lead developer. Then, and over the course of the summer, he met many new mentors, including myself.

Techstars enabled Kevin to accelerate his business in ways that he would not have been able to do on his own.

Just 5 months later, you succeeded in getting investment from a round of Series A funding, how will the $1.2million help you as a business?

For us, we were able to expand the team quickly, bringing in top talent on both sides of the ocean. In a little over a month, we launched a Windows Beta, were part of Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote, launched a Adobe AIR beta, and an iPhone app. We opened a private beta, and created some interesting partnerships. The funding was able to help accelerate that growth.

What are the plans for Graphic.ly in the near future – 1 year, 3 years?

Besides providing the best digital platform for comic book publishers, creators and readers? We are focused on just that. What will that mean in 1 year or 3 years? That we will spend a lot of time learning from our community about what its requirements are. We have already learned that the comics community is not a monolith of a certain type of user. Comics are reflected in everyone, and so we are focused on creating the best experience that everyone can enjoy.

That being said, my three year plan is to help creators and publishers understand the potential of the digital platform and truly maximize their efforts. The digital space allows for so many interesting applications of a creators work, I truly believe that creators who dive into digital and embrace the potential, will experience amazing success.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

Delegation is the assignment of authority and responsibility to another person usually from a superior to a subordinate. If done correctly, it can free up time for the superior to focus on more important tasks whilst knowing the less important yet still necessary tasks are being taken care of.

Effective delegation can be split up into a couple of steps and yields great results when practised well. Firstly, you need to decide who is appropriate to delegate to, if you have a span of control, it’ll be your direct subordinate(s). You should give them as much information as possible about the task, the deadline, what resources are available, any additional expectations etc. Secondly, arrange a mid-point meeting to check on progress, this allows you to ensure everything is on schedule and allows your subordinate(s) to raise any issues prior to the deadline.

The important thing to remember is don’t leave anything for assumption or misconception, be clear in every instruction and encourage questioning if your delegates are confused. In practising this simple method, you’ll give yourself more time to plan on moving your business forward as opposed to working on the production development, for example.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

Autocracy is the style in which the leader makes all the decisions and closely monitors and controls staff. They give one-way communication in the form of orders and don’t entertain any initiative from subordinates. The advantage of which allows for quick decision-making as no consultation to inferior employees is made, the obvious disadvantage is that employees can soon feel powerless and unmotivated resulting in a lack of effort and commitment.

Perhaps one of the most well-known autocratic leaders was Howell Raines who was Executive Editor of The New York Times from 2001 to 2003. He was cited as a ‘hard-charging’ person and was known for focusing all of The New York Times’ resources on stories that he considered to be important rather than taking input from employees.

If you’re not a fan of commanding your employees around but still want to make the decisions, taking a paternalistic approach could be more appropriate. As a paternalistic leader, you’d take a fatherly role in ensuring your employee’s social requirements are met to make sure they’re happy. Employees are consulted about issues and feedback or opinions are welcomed however the final decision will lie with leader. The advantage of this style is that employees feel motivated that they’re being consulted but they could be disappointed with the final outcome should it misalign with the feedback they gave. Paternalistic leadership fills the gap between autocracy and democracy and can be extremely productive if practiced correctly.

A democratic style of leadership is perhaps the most common in this day and age and is used in large corporations all the way down to small startups. Its main attribute is giving your employees the power and encouragement to make their own decisions and therefore requires putting all of your trust in them. It involves two-way communication between the leader and employees and can often mean more time spent on decision-making but allows the employee to know they have a direct impact on the business they work for.

In choosing a leadership style, you could see your business thrive with success or fail with misfortune. It’s vital that you make the right choice in order to keep your employees happy along with making the right decisions for your business.

Thanks to Scrape TV for the image.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

Getting noticed amongst the hundreds if not thousands of other startups can be hard work. There’s no clean-cut method but there are steps you can take to give yourself a fighting chance, without breaking the bank.

Thanks to great services such as Twitter and Facebook, it’s possible to expose your business to potentially hundreds of millions, for free. Twitter has become the foundation for startups to gain recognition and popularity, with the many success stories such as Etsy – who launched in 2005, joined Twitter in 2007 and now boasts over 1.2 million followers – it’s a proven method to get the word out.

If you’re going to promote by means of social media, make sure you’re proactive in doing so. There’s a plethora of business-like accounts on Twitter who regularly plug their services and products but don’t take the time to reply to feedback given by people. Monitor conversation about your brand, that way you can be in control and take advantage of the invaluable things being said about it.

There’s no right or wrong way to use your Twitter account but if it’s a business account, it goes without saying that you wouldn’t be sharing pictures of the rump steak you’re having for dinner. A good way of being noticed is to have special offers via Twitter if possible, a great example of this was LCN – a domain registrar like any other who had just joined Twitter, they had 10 weeks of offers to celebrate their 10^th birthday, word got out and they received almost 1000 new followers just from a simple promotional campaign.

So, social media is one thing but what about having your product/service featured in another blog?  Making contact with potential PR opportunities can be difficult but there are some things you can do to help your chances.

Capitalizing on PR Opportunities
Firstly, you need to look at your niche and look at the various blogs covering the same or similar topics. We’ll take running a new iPhone App Development company as an example, you wouldn’t go ahead and contact the big names such as TUAW and MacWorld etc. because chances are, their inboxes are filled with similar emails every day. It’d be more productive to contact smaller blogs to get covered, that way the likelihood of succeeding is increased.

Also, when emailing a blog requesting to be covered, try to avoid starting with ‘Dear Sir/Madam’, make the effort to find out the editor of the blog, or the appropriate name to address, you want to give the right impression from the outset. The whole idea of PR is to form meaningful relationships; if you’re going to generically address the contact then chances are your email could hit the trash before it’s been read.

So you’re actively promoting your service/product through social media and making customer relations along with seeking new PR opportunities, you’re pretty much set for an initial marketing burst, but that certainly isn’t the end of it. If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it. You need to create a marketing plan with in-depth information about how you’re going to go about spreading the word, each time you start a new campaign make sure you monitor it so you can see the results and make necessary adjustments to any plans based on the success or lack of success of a certain method.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture

• Links to Useful Resources and Downloads
• Links to Tutorials
• Links to Inspirational Work (*really good* work only please)
• Links to Articles

You can submit your links below using the form. They are generally approved within 24 hours.

Post from: Fuel Your Venture