Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Why You Can’t Get a Technical Co-Founder

Posted: 16 Apr 2014 07:00 AM PDT

One of the most frequently faced problems marketers and entrepreneurs in business face these days is the technical aspects of running an online business (or business heavily affected by online). And it totally makes sense, because now the nerds and their software are taking over the internet. Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Pinterest, Dropbox… all these companies were started by nerds who can program and pivot quickly.

I get asked this a lot: “how can I find a technical co-founder (or at least a senior level) programmer without paying him an arm and a leg?”. That’s a loaded question, because I personally am technical (I did most of the programming for my projects, including the PAR program) and yet, at the same time i don’t do day to day programming.

To that, I say this: “imagine yourself in THEIR shoes.”

Now, suppose you have an idea for some brand new software as a service idea. You think it’s revolutionary. You think it’s gonna make bazillions of dollars every year. You think you’re gonna be the new Salesforce Mark Benioff. Problem? You have nothing.

And that’s EXACTLY why no nerds are joining you. You offer NOTHING on the table. No talent, no marketing skills, no sales skill, and no money. So if you are taking zero risk in making your idea happen, what makes you think that they’re gonna take any risk in making it happen when it’s not even their “baby”?

Here are some practical ideas

1) Get customers lined up

Imagine if you were sales savvy enough to line up customers who are willing to give you cash for your idea. That validates the idea more than “I have a gut hunch that this is what’s needed”. Sure you might have to hustle, cold call, knock on some doors but at least it shows that you did something.

(If you just had the reaction ‘what? cold call? hustle? knock on doors? pssssh…’ , then yeah, you know why you have no customers.)

Prove to them that you’re going to do your part with sweat and blood, then they’ll show you what’s up. If you bring time to the table, that shows way more committment than just a rich guy who plunks down couple hundred thousand dollars. Remember, cash don’t work. People work.

These days, it doesn’t take much money to do this. You can build some squeeze, do an autoresponders, and do a webinar. That alone can test your idea very quickly against live customers.

2) Have a proof of concept & start driving traffic.

This isn’t as strong as having customers, but this is a HUGE start.

For example, did you know Groupon (a multi-billion dollar public company now) started out as ghetto wordpress site?

All we did was we took a WordPress Blog and we skimmed it to say Groupon and then every day we would do a new post with the points embedded. It was totally ghetto. We would sell t-shirts on the first version of Groupon. We'd say in the right up, 'This t-shirt will come in the color red, size large.

If you want a different color or size, email that to us.' We didn't have a form to add that stuff. We were just, it was so cobbled together. It was enough to prove the concept and show that it was something that people really liked. The actual coupon generation that we were doing was all FileMaker. We would run a script that would email the coupon PDF to people.

It got to the point where we'd sell 500 sushi coupons in a day and we'd send 500 PDFs to people with Apple Mail at the same time. Really the first, until July of the first year was just a scrambling to grab the tiger by the tail. It was trying to catch up and reasonable piece together a product.

Ghetto as hell. Not even automated. But once they proved that there was market, they raised a buttload of money (by the way, ain’t no smart investor gonna give you any money without traction) and hired engineers to do all this automation stuff.

Yeah, this means you have to understand online marketing & customer acquisition first.

3) Be persistent, but listen to feedbacks (from smart people)

Sometimes, your idea… SUCKS. It’s alright. Sometimes I have shitty ideas too. But the difference is between me and newbie entrepreneurs? I test them out.

For example, I saw an episode of Shark Tank where this girl comes out and says she’s going to innovate online dating by taking it offline with “anonymity” business cards.

I’m no Shark Tank groupy, but these guys are right. Her idea is STUPID. Taking something back 20-30 years is not innovation, but plain stupidity.

Imagine if you were in CD or DVD printing business in early 2000′s. You probably thought that you were a genius because disks were being phased out and large content files can only be distributed through these medium. Then boom.. internet speeds are like 10x’ing every year and even Netflix doesn’t do much volume in physical medium. If you closed your eyes and buried your head in the sand, telling yourself that your idea is STILL good.. are you still a genius?

If smart people are giving you objections, don’t just dismiss them as stupid. Take a hard look at your idea, but be flexible in your approach.

What about you?

Curious.. what other ideas or suggestions do you guys have for getting technical (or any) cofounder for your business idea? Write your thoughts in the comment box.

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Invest in a SSD When You Can - DailyBlogTips

Invest in a SSD When You Can

Posted: 15 Apr 2014 09:13 PM PDT

Some weeks ago I wrote a post mentioning two things I believe are worth investing in for your office or home office: a big monitor and a good chair.

Now I have a third item to add to that list: a SSD.

SSD stands for Solid-state drive. It’s basically a hard-drive with no moving mechanical parts. It uses integrated circuits to store data, much like a USB flash drive.

Last week my main hard-drive started to fail, and that’s when I started looking for a substitute. Initially I was considering a standard 500GB disk, but I figured two things:

1. I never use even half of the capacity of those drives
2. I am always looking for ways to speed up my computer

That’s when I decided that going with a SSD was a good idea. I purchased one with 120GB, which is enough for my needs. I loaded a fresh Linux install on it and within 30 minutes I was up and running again.

The boot time of my computer was reduced from 12 seconds or so to around 4 seconds. Not only that, programs launch faster, saving and deleting files is a lot faster and so on.

Overall it was a very nice improvement and a small investment, and that is why I wanted to recommend it. Whenever you have the chance make sure to switch to a SSD for your computer, it’s well worth it.

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How and Why Images Help Readers Engage with Your Blog Posts

Posted: 15 Apr 2014 09:49 AM PDT

This is a guest post from Joshua Danton Boyd.

I'm massive fan of cats. I even wrote an article about the ones living on my street and what you can learn about freelancing from them.

This also means that I study every lost cat poster I see just in case I can help.

I was walking to work the other day when I spotted one, but I paid no attention. Why? There was no picture. It was all text, just a title and a description of the cat.

It kind of shocked me that that was all it took for me to not acknowledge something I'd usually stop to stare at.

Even if your subject matter is interesting to people, if it lacks an image people will find it very easy to pass it by.

Pictures are massively important and this – of course – applies to blog posts. They encourage engagement and this is something every blog owner should be striving to increase.

importance-of-images

How can you ignore that? (Source)

If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them

A great indicator of this is the rise of Buzzfeed. A quick look at their homepage and this post, which went live a day before I wrote this, has already clocked up 1.1 million views, not to mention the 124,000 social interactions (that's only including Twitter and Facebook). No one can say that isn't impressive.

BuzzFeed is certainly image-centric, focusing on lists filled with pictures or GIFs accompanied by a witty comment.

(To see just how lacking in words Buzzfeed is, check out Buzzfeed Articles Without The GIFs.)

I'm not suggesting you reduce your blog to listicles … but this does show just how vital images are.

Of course, once you've attracted readers, you want them to stay on your page and actual read the work you've done. This is a whole other problem.

Readers Don't Read Blogs Like Books

reading-book

Not how things are done online. (Source)

There's a bit of science in looking at how people interact with articles. In this impressive piece, Martin Robbins writes, "Eye-tracking studies have revealed people don't simply read from beginning to end, but follow a distinct F-shaped pattern. On average, it seems people only read about 20% of the words on a page; spending only 4.4 seconds per 100 words."

In the end, getting people to read your posts is a bit like herding cats. They don't just follow the words they skim-read.

Images can help to break up this practice and focus the reader. With a long block of text it can be easy to lose interest, but images set up little checkpoints where we can refocus.

trees-flowers

Feel free to check your Twitter too. (Source)

Of course, images are vital for presenting data and representing ideas. Sticking in a nice looking graph to visualise some stats or embedding a location in Google Maps can work wonders in raising the quality of your piece. It gives your readers something to point to (and Pin!) as well. Image can convey information much quicker and more freely than words sometimes and it'd be foolish not to take advantage of this.

Images are also important for social media. As this garish infographic demonstrates, images will help encourage shares of your blog posts. While shares aren't the be all and end all we once though, they're still a positive thing and especially so when it comes to your SEO as well.

Watch Your Back

As a final warning, be careful you only use images that you're allowed to and that you include proper accreditation. You can find some great sources here.

So, add a bit of life to your posts, even the short ones. You'll soon see the benefits.

Bio: Joshua Danton Boyd is a copywriter for the online accountancy firm Crunch. He thinks images of cats are the best images.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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