It is true.

Most of the articles – lessons learnt, “10 things you can do to get X”, etc. – just like porn are pieces of content that make one excited and give a feeling of achieving something by reading other’s stories. But the truth is that these articles don’t add much value to a startup founder’s life (this blog post included.) You don’t accomplish anything by reading about other’s experiences other than getting few ideas which you may or may not remember when you are actually in that situation.

Some of you may disagree. You might provide a few instances when you read something related to entrepreneurship and it changed your life. Actually, I myself have got a lot of value out of reading the JFDI blog post by Mark Suster. There was a time (back in 2007) when I was obsessed with reading TechCrunch. I made sure I don’t miss ANY story posted on the blog (they used to write 5-6 posts back then). More recently, I have also been checking my Twitter stream, Hacker News and other sources often a day and spent a few hours reading Entreporn because it gave me insights into things and supposedly made me a lot more prepared to work on my startup.

You bet I was wrong.

These feel-good articles do add value, but the value added by reading these articles is far less than by actually doing things and putting that time & energy into your own startup. Once I started ignoring most of this content, my productivity level increased a lot. By choosing not to read all the interesting articles, I don’t feel like I am missing out on some great advice or some snazzy marketing tactics. I only read articles/blog posts that I come across at least 2-3 different sources without making much effort. This helps me clear out a lot of noise/fluff and get to the important content only.

For all those people reading this, try cuting down on Entreporn (like this one) for a week and notice the change in your startup’s productivity.

Got any other productivity ideas? Would love to know about them in comments below or HN.

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• Top 4 entrepreneurship podcasts for busy startup founders

1. Kevin Rose‘s Foundation is numero uno on my list because it is once a month 30-40 minute video. Each episode features a founder and their story. I have watched serial entrepreneurs to ones just starting out on the show. The show provides a lot of insights which may not be widely known in the industry.

   Subscription: Private Newsletter (Paid: $3.99 while writing this post). I don’t subscribe to the newsletter, but assume there is a lot more than the podcast. Kevin releases the podcast in the private newsletter earlier (30 days?) than its public (read free) release. If you are like me, you can subscribe to the podcast for free via itunes. It is also available on Vimeo (there are other personal videos too).

2. Second on my list is Mark Suster‘s This Week In Venture Capital. This is usually once a week podcast, 60-90 minutes with a guest varying from startup founders to investors. I like Mark’s candidness and actionable advice for startups and founders. If you don’t follow his blog or Twitter, you are missing out on some great advice.

   Subscription: iTunes or YouTube/TWI Website
   

3. Next is Jason Calacanis‘ podcast called This Week In Startups (TWiST). The frequency for this podcast is more than the previous two and varies from 2-4 episodes a week. The time for each episode also varies from about 40 minutes to 90 minutes. Usually the show brings in a founder of a startup as a guest and talk about their startup and tech industry in general. Jason is an amazing entertainer and media person, the way he advertises his sponsors is unique to the show and I haven’t seen anywhere else. Another innovative thing the show recently implemented is let interested people be part of the show. You can checkout TWiST List if you are interested to be producer of the show.

   Caveats: #1 Usually the show sticks to startups, but sometimes the episodes or certain sections of episodes talk about other things (such as bitcoin).
   #2 I believe once a week, the show runs an episode appropriately named “News RoundTable” where they invite tech industry experts and discuss the weekly tech news. There are nuggets of insights, but if you get your news from other sources like Twitter or TechMeme, you can skip these episodes.
   Subscription: iTunes or TWiSt website

4. Andrew Warner‘s Mixergy (Home of the ambitious upstart – this is something he says at the start of each interview #branding) is an amazing source of inspiration. The frequency of the new episodes is about 5/week with each episode about 50-90 minutes long. He usually brings in great founders who are either still working on their startups or already had success for a one on one interview. I am amazed at the things he persuades founders to talk about (revenue numbers, actual user numbers, etc.) and a lot of them do talk about specifics. Andrew goes in details and talk about specifics of ups and downs. This is a great example (scroll mid-page) of how Andrew got Rand Fishkin to talk about things he didn’t talk about in public before this interview. The only reason this is #4 on my list is because it generates about 5+ hours of content every week for me and due to lack of time I usually end up skimming through most of the interviews.

   Subscription: iTunes

I believe there are several other great resources that I missed in this list, but with the finite time I have and the things I have to do, this is a list that works great for me. Another resource that you can follow is my Trunkly account. I usually share 3-5 links a day via Twitter about startups, web and mobile technologies and sometimes funny (to me) links.

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• Entreporn – NSFW

While working on a startup you meet a lot of other people who are in the same boat or have passed through the phase you are in. At the same time you also meet a lot of people who haven’t heard of Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Convertible Debt, Pivot (maybe they did), MVP, AARRR, Lean Startup and the list goes on. I call these “regular” people or the sane ones. They could be your friends, neighbors, parents of your kids friends, mailman, teller at your bank and sometimes even your own family members.

When one of the “regulars” ask me about what I do, I start thinking about what version of my pitch do I tell them. I used to mention the current “solution” of the problem I was testing with my startup/product. Some times people questioned back about it and asked more details, but usually I got the “OK. Sounds good” response. I believe “OK. Sounds good” is the one of the worst answers to get from a person you are talking about your product. It is most likely think it is stupid or worse they didn’t get what you are doing.

One of the other things about telling “regulars” about the current “solution” you are experimenting is that it is an experiment and most likely will be replaced with another one in a few weeks, if not days. When you meet the same “regulars” again and talk about how you are doing this new experiment now, in their head they validate that you are a loser, you have no idea what you are doing and your product is going nowhere.

A lot of founders say that they don’t care about what people think or say about them or their product as long as they are on the right path and see progress. I disagree. Being a Founder/CEO your job is to make sure that from your grandma to your neighbor’s 5 year old boy should understand what you do to a basic level.

I started testing a few things with “regular” people about 3 weeks ago. I started talking to them about the problem (not the solution) I am trying to solve and in some cases I ask them even before telling what I do about how they find the products they want to buy. How did you know which camera to buy when you bought the last camera? Why did you buy your last camera? These questions are very relevant for RightBuy and help me understand the user’s thought process and current buying/researching habits. Talking about the problem helps me understand how many people have the problem vs. how many don’t even think it is an issue. Earlier, when I talked about what I am trying to solve the conversations went into silence because I talked to them about something they never saw, but something that I live 24/7.

Since then I have noticed a lot of people getting passionate about the problem and talking in detail how they wasted a lot of time and if they can use the application right now. There are also people I meet who haven’t experienced the problem or don’t consider it as a problem. Both kind of people help me understand who can be beta testers for the app and even evangelists.

I would love to hear other ways you talk and engage with consumers/customers who are not early adopters or tech savvy. What kind of questions do you ask them to get honest, constructive, actionable feedback?

Random Posts

The core copy and edit functionality looks really solid and works well. It finds all the images/css/js and other dependencies of the page and replaces them in the page and serves it up from their own S3 account. They have done a good job with the design as well.

As a user, I can think of times when I would want to use this service, but not as much as I use bit.ly. Most of the time when I share links, I don’t need to edit the pages.

As a content publisher, I am not too sure if I want users to use this. I understand that anyone can copy my content, edit it and host on their servers right now even without bo.lt. I believe bo.lt makes it easier for content publishers to lose control over the content. Any future changes to the original content will not be passed onto users with bo.lt.

According to TechCrunch: “…is content provider friendly in that Bo.lt still serves up a given page’s ads and analytics systems.” I haven’t tested the ads, but bo.lt does seem to append their own Google Analytics code to the existing GA code on the page. I am not sure how they work with other third-party or home-brewed analytics systems.

Another issue as a content provider is that bo.lt now competes with the original page for Search Engine rankings. For instance this page competes with  the original page without any reference to the original page. Currently, this whole model is breaking the web as we know it to multiple versions of almost same content with different URLs. Depending on how important getting indexed by Google is in their strategy, it can be easily fixed by either adding ‘noindex’ to bo.lt pages or even better adding a canonical tag to the original page. Perhaps, this is more of a reason for content publishers to have a rel canonical tag on their pages so that they get credited for their content.

It takes a lot of effort to change elements of a webpage on the fly and expect most of them to function as the original one. I think bo.lt is an impressive technology, but I am not too sure that they will be well received by publishers with their current model. I hope that they evolve and make it compelling for publishers to be comfortable with their product. They have raised $5 Million from Benchmark Capital.

Update 1: Brian Rutledge mentions that bo.lt seems to be moving rel=canonical tag into the body section, making it obsolete. However, that’s not what my experience was. Looks like a bug in bo.lt.

Update 2: I wanted to see if there is a way a bo.lt can be blocked to copy a website, same way crawlers can be excluded using robots.txt. I found that bo.lt does not look for robots.txt prior to grabbing a page. I looked through my apache logs and it never requested robots.txt today. Another problem is that they are faking the User Agent to be Firefox 3.6.4 (see image below). Whois on the IP address confirms it is owned by Boltnet, Inc. The only way to stop bo.lt from copying your pages is by banning IP address 199.204.84.2, until they change it.

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• What did BigAdda do to get delisted?

I am amazed how many people still use “hits” when talking about their website and even tech bloggers use them in their articles. It is not that the hits metrics is wrong, it is useless. It does not tell you anything about the actual usage of a website. I can always increase the number of hits by 10X my blog gets by adding 10 1px by 1px images in the footer. The number will sound really larger, but the usage of the website will be same.

Now that we know that the 2,200 – no – 22,000 hits Zuckerberg got in the movie The Social Network isn’t that impressive, let’s see how should we refer our traffic as.

I believe when most of the people these days talk about hits, they actually mean pageviews. As a tech startup founder or a tech blogger you need to know what is the difference between a pageview and  hits.

I consider “pageviews” as the lowest granular metric that you can talk about a website. It is better than hits, but still doesn’t tell you much about the user retention or engagement.

Here are some of the metrics that do tell something about your website:

• Visitors
• Unique Visitors
• Repeat Visitors
• Pages Per Visit
• Time Spent Per Visit
• Monthly Active Users
• Daily Active Users

All Tech bloggers and startup founders – Please stop using the word/metrics “hits“.

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• New Google Analytics

Sent at 9:46 AM on Wednesday
Neha: I cant create groups in google talk
thats the problem
gsharma: try pingdin
Neha: but it does not have web interface
does meebo have a download version?
gsharma: don’t think so
Neha: hmm
I want something which has both like google talk
and I can sort my list like AOL msger
gsharma: unfortunately there is nothing like that – company idea! Start one
Neha: lol I am not kidding
this is a brilliant idea
gsharma: neither am I
Neha: so can i leave job and start now

gsharma: or side proj to begin with
I am serious
I can help you out w/ planning etc.
Neha: ok will think
let me work now

Random Posts

Yesterday I was looking at The Resumator – a service that helps “Make Great Hiring Decisions Faster”. Wow, I always wanted to make great hiring decisions faster. I can “Discuss, rank and track job applicants efficiently with The Resumator.” sweet! I have already spent about 10-15 seconds on the site and I try to find how are they going to do all these great things for me? Do they have a pool of candidates that I can just send my job post to? How does it really work? I have seen several other companies trying to leverage social connections to source candidates and few other ones that host the job listing page and give me credits for passing resumes of candidates I don’t select. Is it like those? Filled with all these and a lot more questions, my eyes go down to a graphic on the page. Graphics are best, they tell you everything about a service within a few seconds. I start reading it.

The Resumator

I first publish the job, promote it, then grow my applicant pool and finally hire! This is great, but wait…wouldn’t I do this if I was using Craigslist or LinkedIn? Still not sure how and what they will help with. They have a bunch of text and links below, don’t really feel like reading it. Then I spot logos of a few companies I admire. This helped me not close the window, but give it another chance….I scroll up. I see the button ‘Request Demo’ bring my mouse to it and click it….praying that it is a label error and the click will lead me to a demo of the application. My worst nightmare comes alive when I see the dialog box asking for my name, job title, company email and phone number with a promise of scheduling with me a guided tour ASAP. People who know me also know how variable my ASAP is. Judging them by my own standards, I don’t think I want to take on that offer.

I then remembered that usually B2B startups have 2-3 other links in the header like plans & pricing, etc. I got lucky that I found a “Tour” link. On clicking that link, I see the same graphic as homepage (see above) and some text, I check my browser’s address bar to make sure if I actually clicked and landed on the tour page. I don’t know what to do….I click on the first heading which looks exactly like the other text hoping it is a link.

I get to this page. I click on the tiny screenshots, but guess what they are not clickable. They are there just to tease people. After reading the next line “Turn your resumes into a searchable database.” I feel like I have found the holy grail of the website. This was my aha! moment. I Scroll down a bit and read some stuff, try to click more teasing pictures and get another aha moment reading “Send personalized, automated messages.” It took more more than a minute to understand what a couple of things they offer. I am sure, there are more features hidden inside the page that I never got to.

I am not trying to pick on this specific company (which I actually did), but the intention here is to have this post as a reminder for me and others to make things easier for the end users. Now that I know a bit about theresumator and that other great companies use them, I’ll most likely end up using them. I do want to mention a couple of companies which I think do a kick ass job at product demos are InDinero and ChartBeat.

Do you know about other companies that either do good job with their sites or worse? Please post in the comments.

PS: We are hiring.

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• USA has Youtube, India has IndiaTube

Starting Up

Late last year I was toying with yet another idea and this time wanted to make it more than just a project. While I was talking with potential customers and friends, I met Gagan Biyani from Udemy. He had a lot of good things to say about Founder Institute (FI). I vaguely knew about FI via TechCrunch post that they wrote when it launched. I knew there were other incubators but wasn’t really planning to join one. I thought I knew about startups and wasn’t sure what value an incubator will add. However, I knew about one of my weaknesses – starting up. Reading about latest technologies, startups, meeting amazing people is all good but the hardest part of a startup is starting up (at least for me). There was something in Gagan’s recommendation to Founder Institute, it seemed more than a recommendation, something that truly came from heart.

I took a leap of faith and took the exam for FI about a day before the last day for submissions. I got in and met other 50ish people who were in a similar boat. First day Adeo Ressi mentioned in his unique style that starting a company is not that easy, it will take several years and based on statistics you are most likely to fail. He offered an additional $100 for people to drop off the session. That is when I decided that I have to get through this session. From that point onwards, the semester became a survival game.

Being the programmer/tech guy I underestimated the things required by a successful founder. Some of which are research, formal presentations, ability to clearly articulate your idea and most importantly building a company not an app. I realized that how my initial idea lacked the right team for it and that I most likely won’t prefer to work on that idea for several years if I had to.

I had another idea that I was passionate about it and started researching about it. FI creates “peer groups”, some of the members in my group were instrumental in making me think and work hard on solidifying the idea to be a meaningful company. I got harsh criticism from some of these mentors mostly about my presentation. At that time it wasn’t the happiest moment in my life, but it helped me evolve my whole presentation a lot. Thanks to the mentors, I am now happy to say that my presentation is 100X better (still needs work) than what I presented the first time.

On 23rd Feb 14 companies graduated from Founder Institute’s current batch and I am pleased to say that I along with 13 great founders survived and added a lot of value to our companies. Fortunately for us things don’t end here, but begin. Talking with other graduates from Founder Institute and my experience so far point that all the amazing people I connected with in FI and FI itself will add a lot more value to my company while its way to success. My friend and one of the graduating founders Brajeshwar has a great compilation of all the companies and lot more.

My company RightBuy is working on cool technology behind the scenes. Don’t forget to signup for our private alpha priority list. We are also looking for backend engineers.

Starting up is generally not easy and I believe founders do need a catalyst that can shorten the learning process by a lot. I would highly recommend Founder Institute as that catalyst.

Photo by State Library of Queensland, Australia, via Flickr

Random Posts

Plurk is ‘enhanced’ version of Twitter. IMO Twitter got popular because of it is really easy to use. In my busy life, I don’t have enough time to see what my Karma is or some complicated timelines. Twitter works for me because it is a free form short messaging. Back in the days when Twitter’s IM worked fine, I rarely logged on to the web interface.

I think Plurk makes things complicated and might features over done. Although it is great that they have all the major IM support. At this time Plurk looks like a great tool for teenagers (like myspace crowd). They’d love to collect Karma and get starred etc. I don’t see Obama lifestreaming on Plurk any time soon*. Or Jet Blue using it for customer service*.

Right now I am interested to see if this Python based messaging app be able to scale well, unlike Twitter.

* I’ve been wrong in the past.

PS: I am back from India.

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• When Hitler Tweets

It would be good to see other companies come out with innovative ways to create these bridges.

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• Cisco: Connecting People?