In the world of tech startups there is a common phenomenon: developer entrepreneurs who can write great apps, build slick sites and develop cool technology… but who forget that the work of finding and acquiring a paying customer is a whole separate discipline.  It’s what we often refer to as The Field of Dreams problem.  [...]

CNNMoney.com published an article on this week’s government report that states, over the past six months, the “22 banks that got the most help from the Treasury’s bailout programs cut their small business loan balances by a collective $10.5 billion.” The report goes on to highlight that over the past six months that TARP recipients [...]

In Marc Kramer‘s recent Forbes article titled, The 10 Questions You Should Never Stop Asking, the Wharton School professor identifies ten vital questions that all organizations should continue to ask themselves. Beyond being a very good list in and of itself, Kramer uses his past experience as a frustrated executive at a struggling (and ultimately [...]

In the American Express OPEN Forum article, Effective Word-of-Mouth is Made Not Born by Yvonne DiVita of Windsor Media Enterprises, the author discusses some tips to cultivating what is called “word of mouth marketing.” Aside from just being a reasonably trendy buzzphrase, word-of-mouth marketing is a marketing tactic designed to maximize the marketing leverage possible [...]

Recently on VentureBeat, author Jacob Brody reported on an entrepreneur’s Meetup in NYC where the founders of several successful startups discussed a common sales problem for small businesses: how to get larger, established organizations to take you seriously enough to be able to close a deal. It’s not surprising that this was such a hot [...]

As the old joke says, “There are two kinds of people in the world…” In my corner of the universe, there are those who love working in/with startups and those who don’t. Those to love it never question why someone else likes it. Those who have either never done it or who have low tolerance [...]

The former CMO of Jive Software, Sam Lawrence, spoke to a crowded room at Interactive Austin this morning. His message was on the lessons needed to specifically apply in order to make social media work in your business. How We Say What We Say One of the challenges social media evangelists face is based on [...]

This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and to ultimately [...]

People who did not meet me until at or around my 25th birthday would never believe it, but in school, I was the Queen of Slackers. Truly. School was too easy, too routine and I spent too long doing it to be able to breath new life into the experience. I could dodge classes, do [...]

I had a couple of discussions this week that got me thinking back to the early days of my career. Aside from leaving me feeling older than I care to think about, it did spark a pleasant memory or two that I’ve been mulling over since. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices [...]