Business

Introduction

The following is a collection of resources related to managing a business.

News

• Killer Startups - Stay tuned in with the new businesses or get listed yourself.
• You Noodle - Discover new and rising start-ups.
• Mac Software Business Podcast - A good podcast to subscribe to learning how to run a business on a MacOS. Despite the fact that the podcasts focuses primarily on MacOS software, it is also good for any startup.
• MacBreak Tech - A good site to check out in general. I am linking to this site because the “Making Mac Your Business” podcast episode is definitely worth checking out.

Tips & Tricks

• Company Registration Choices - Determine if your company should be created as an LLC, S-Corp, partnership, etc.
• Get Creative With Your Domain Name
• Startup 101 - An article series on how to get up and running.
• 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website
• Nine Deadly Startup Diseases—and How to Cure Them by Daniel Tenner.
• Web 2.0 - A Strategy Guide.
• Freelance Contracts: Do’s And Don’ts
• What to Include In Your Design Contracts
• What Should Be Included In a Contract
• Writing Estimates - Tips on how to write proper estimates.
• Effective Strategy To Estimate Time For Your Design Projects - Another article on how to estimate your time properly.
• Three Steps to Building an Online Brand.
• Expenses You Don’t Think of When Starting a Business.
• Lessons learned from the hiring process.
• How First-Time Entrepreneurs Can Work with Investors
• How to Pitch to a VC or Angel - Another article on how to effectively communicate and sell your business to potential investors.
• What Should You Ask VCs?
• Perfect your Pitch - Learn how to talk to and sell your business idea to a potential venture capitalist.
• How Not to Get Screwed by VCs - If you get their attention then here are some tips on how not be taken to the cleaners by them.
• A Guide to Google Analytics and Useful Tools
• Perform Better With AdSense: The Ultimate Round-Up

Check List

The following is a rough check list for building a business around a web application.

1. Niche Evaluation - Understand and know the market you plan to enter.
2. Domain Name - Register a domain name and possibly variations of it.
3. Web Hosting - You need a good web hosting service that is reliable and can scale. Amazon’s EC2 computing might be worth considering.
4. Web Presence - Not only do you need a hosting service for the web application you are developing but you also need a personal blog where you can talk about the things you are passionate about (preferably a professional one using your real name), a micro-blog like Twitter, a blog as part of your web application so you can talk about news specific to the app, and a corporate blog to represent your the many aspects of your business.
5. Marketing - Establishing a web presence definitely helps but you also need to be involved with the community by posting comments on various web sites, helping out with open source projects, producing easy to understand podcasts and screencast demos, and displaying testimonials.
6. Documentation - Along with the marketing speak, it also helps to have well written documentation, context sensitive help, and F.A.Q. pages. Putting the effort into writing good doc should help reduce the number of repeat questions which allows you to get back to doing what you want to do most: write more code.
7. Site Analytics - It is a good idea to study the kind of traffic flowing in and out of your site. One way is to add Google Analytics or similar services.
8. Site Map - In order to be optimized for search engines, you’ll need a site map generated for the web crawlers out there.
9. Payment Processing - You’ll need to handle the processing of credit card payments and other financial transactions so make sure you understand the APIs and how to integrate them in your web application.
10. Source Control - You need to be able to version your software, patch it, etc and setting up a Subversion repository or using Git is a good idea.
11. Behavioral/Unit Testing - Practice Behavioral Driven Development (BDD) and Test Driven Development (TDD) in order to have as much automated test coverage as possible.
12. Continuous Integration - You’re app should automatically be rebuilding and retesting constantly during development so you know instantly when something is wrong.
13. Backups - A good rule of thumb is to have your data backed up in triplicate. A couple of hard drive solutions, like Drobo, would work best with the third being a secure store in the cloud (again Amazon S3 comes to mind).
14. Bug Tracking - You need to be able to track your bugs. Many people like Fog Bugz and even Trac. You can also use OmniFocus as a single-user, quick and dirty solution.
15. Accountant - Your going to need one to pay all those new taxes. You might have to hop around a couple of times until you find one that you really like.
16. Lawyer - You will need a lawyer for those tricky contracts, terms of service, licenses, etc but these guys are serious money drains. So know of one and keep him/her in the ready but only use when necessary.
17. Software Licenses - The software you buy had better be legit.
18. Security - Any information stored about the user of your software needs to be safe and secure. Knowing what the latest security issues are and how to prevent them is important.
19. Business Phone - You might want to have a 1-800 number in which people can get reach you at.
20. Business Email - Have a business emails for support, sales, etc.
21. Establish Partnerships - Make connections with businesses in your niche market that can help you as well as you being able to help them.

Books

• International Libel and Privacy Handbook: A Global Reference for Journalists, Publishers, Webmasters, and Lawyers, Second Edition - In case you want to protect yourself from being sued for words written about someone else in public.

Software/Services

• Google Local Business Center - Make it easier for people to find your business, know how to contact you, and learn about your customers in return.
• Thunder Thimble - A tool for tracking your brand in the social media.
• Crowd Science - “An analytics service that gives online publishers detailed and reliable reports on the demographics and attitudes of their audience.”
• Clicky - “A way to monitor, analyze, and react to your blog or web site’s traffic in real time.”
• PostRank - Gathers and analyzes socially enabled web site posts, comments, interactions, reach, etc. Can be used as a tool to analyze your own site or others.
• Woopra - A real-time site analytics tool.
• Proof HQ - Get feedback on design work with comment and markup support for simple collaboration.
• Get Sign Off - “Provides a mechanism for presenting your site designs, managing feedback and organising multiple versions of a design.”
• Backboard - Allows user to provide feedback, comments, notes, etc. on design including easy mark up tools for quick visual changes.
• Get Satisfaction - Allows you to focus on your product(s) and business while they provide customer support and feedback to you.
• User Voice - Another source for capturing user feedback for improving your product and building customer support.
• Tender - Aids in managing customer care, support, feedback, etc. so you can focus on what you do best.
• Feedback Army - Easily generate usability questionnaires for users of your site so they can provide targeted feedback.
• Five Second Test - Create a five second test for users to provide fast and simple design feedback that really caught their eye within this short window of time.
• Usabilla - “Offers a fast and simple way to collect feedback in any stage of the design process.
  Ask your users simple questions to collect valuable feedback and discover usability issues. Use our One-Click-Tasks to measure task performance. Users simply share their feedback by clicking anywhere on your website, mockup, sketch, or image. Measure time, collect points, and get valuable feedback with notes.”
• Biznik - Business network that claims to “not suck”.
• eBox - Aids in managing and administrating your corporate network with simplicity and ease-of-use in mind.
• Fair Software - Helps you get your business off the ground and running.
• Basecamp - Project management, collaboration, and tasking software.
• Scrum’d - Simple project management where you don’t have to focus on the tools but rather the tasks at hand. Uses agile development principals.
• ScrumPad - An Agile project management and collaboration tool that can manage requirements, bugs, impediments, test cases, etc.
• Campfire - Team chat and real-time collaboration.
• Clutterpad - Online project management and collaboration software that helps you get things done.
• Social Cast - Micro-blogging for the enterprise.
• SendGrid - Reliable email delivery for your business needs. It supports a REST API.
• Launchy - Provide and get feedback on new web sites.
• Rypple - Get feedback from personnel in a constructive and unobtrusive manner.
• PrintRunner - A service for printing high quality business cards.
• FreshBooks - Online service for managing all of your financial needs.
• Ronin - An invoicing service for you and your clients.
• Less Accounting - Save time by dropping QuickBooks and using a much easier to use app/service.
• Buy Sell Ads - A service to buy/sell ads with.
• Google Checkout - Adds the Google shopping cart to your site.
• Paypal - Adds the Paypal shopping cart to your site.
• Open Street Maps - A free and open source service for world mapping.
• Social Text - “Allows people to circulate information, ideas and updates in a targeted way with teammates, so they can move fast and take advantage of new opportunities. Capabilities include new tools for group productivity, microblogging channels, activity stream filtering and more.”
• uTest - “The world’s largest marketplace for software testing services. Through our global community of more than 20,000 QA professionals from 160+ countries, we provide software companies with a new way to test their web, mobile, gaming and desktop applications.”
• Status - “An open source microblogging platform that helps you share and connect in real-time within your own domain. With StatusNet you can encourage collaboration, build and engage your community, and be in command of your brand.”

Investors

• Google Ventures - An accelerator program to help bootstrap start-ups.
• Ambient Sound Investments - Provides long-term seed funding to start-ups.
• KickStarter - An interesting and alternative way to fund your startup.

Hiring

• Smart and Gets Down - Learn how to attract, hire, and retain top talent.

Resources

• The Indus Entreprenuers (TiE) - “Founded in 2000 to inspire, foster and support entrepreneurship in the Rocky Mountain region. Anyone starting or running a business or working within an entrepreneurial company will find immense value in the educational, networking, and mentoring opportunities available through TiE-Rockies.”
• Venture Maven - A resources of VCs to follow on Twitter.
• Business Card Star - A quick aid in getting a business card crafted until you can do something better.
• All-In-One Business Packs - A collection of templates, images, etc. that can help add polish to your Keynotes and Pages and help give you that professional look to what you do.
• Bit Gravity - A content delivery network for interactive broadcasting.
• On2 Flix Cloud - A web-based trans coding media server for reducing costs when it comes to encoding various forms of media.