Letters Remain

Category: entrepreneurship

  • Graduating into the Recession and What Next

    For recent graduates, those in their early 20’s and, well, almost everyone else, the job market at the moment is overwhelming bad. There’s hope, of course, and this interview between recent graduate and entrepreneur Alex J. Mann and Phila Lawyer discussing what it’s like graduating into one of the nastiest job markets in history is a good…

  • Developing a Web App on a Shoestring Budget

    As the title suggests—and the tips prove—this brief guide to getting a web app up-and-running on a small budget requires, well, a budget (as opposed to no budget and doing it all yourself). The steps: Create a clear wireframe model Outsource the development Use an open source content management system Start a design contest Leverage…

  • Harnessing Collective Intelligence Online

    The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ theory, as popularised by James Surowiecki’s 2004 book of the same name, is an important—if misunderstood—theory that has influenced a lot of recent online ventures that rely on social networks and collaboration to work intelligently. For those who want to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds for their own ventures,…

  • Microsoft, Google and Startups Compared

    After visiting both the Microsoft and Google campuses to discuss Stack Overflow (Google Tech Talk: Learning from StackOverflow.com), Joel Spolsky discusses the similarities and differences between the two corporations and his own small company. What I’ll probably remember most about the trip is what I learned about company culture and how it’s affected by scale. Giant corporations…

  • Don’t Implement Ideas, Solve Problems

    Taking inspiration from Paul Graham’s Ideas for Startups essay, Martin Zwilling offers some further thoughts—to wit, don’t start with an idea, start with a problem. Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, and there is no market for ideas.…

  • Entrepreneurs Not Learning From Mistakes

    Entrepreneurial failure is an integral part of eventual success and an important opportunity for learning, or so goes the conventional wisdom (hence in some part the quote—commonly attributed to Lisa Amos—that entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before success). Ignoring the anecdotal success-after-failure stories that stick in peoples’ minds, a team at Harvard Business School decided to…

  • In Defence of Branding

    By comparing and contrasting the “two worlds” of direct marketing and brand marketing, Andrew Chen discusses why metrics-driven marketing shouldn’t usurp that of ‘branding’. The nature of internet marketing makes it easy to have a highly accountable, metrics-driven view – but companies that are highly metrics driven easily overlook hard-to-measure issues like brand and user…

  • Frugality and Entrepreneurship

    Inc. Magazine has a (possibly too lengthy) profile, complete with the expected insights, of Paul Graham—author of Hackers and Painters, co-founder of Y Combinator, and all-round entrepreneurship guru. Cheap meals are, in a strange way, part of Y Combinator’s formula for start-up success. Graham wants founders to spend as little money as possible. Live cheaply…

  • Advice for Design and Life, from Milton Glaser

    Milton Glaser, the designer best known for creating the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo, offers ten pieces of advice from a life in design: You can only work for people that you like: “all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client”. If you have…

  • Advice from Hoehn’s Year

    One year after setting his personal goals Charlie Hoehn takes a look back at his achievements and offers some fantastic advice: Your friends who don’t care or are stupid will use Monster, CareerBuilder, and Craigslist (I was one of these stupid people for a few weeks). They will compete with hundreds of people for mediocre…