Getting a side project acquired

More strategerizing.

Making money in OSS by working hard

Nice article about some strategy for OSS releases with paid add-ons.

Press releases using MTurk

Interesting process.

Software bootstrapping resources

Well.  A simple list of lists, really.

Definitive guide to project billing

Brennan Dunn with a nice article on billing.

Unbundling as business concept generator

The post itself is not all that interesting, but the concept is: take a large-audience service and "unbundle" part of it in a narrow specialization, and bam! you might have something you can run with.

Patio11 and rainy-day ideas for process improvements

Patrick always has good ideas about how to run a modern business. Here are some ideas for implementation when you have some time.

Getting massive traction

A little slideshow (port-mortem) about Limk and how they got traction before going for funding. Thought-provoking.

Spaced repetition

Here's a fantastically researched article on spaced repetition. It's so well-researched I'm going to try this myself, using Mnemosyne.

It would be interesting to find flashcard sets, like, everywhere and use them for domain frameworks or something. Unfortunately there are no prepared Mnemosyne sets for Hungarian.

It would be much *more* interesting to do some kind of gamification site.

Gamification of quant skills

It would be cool to explore gamification of quant programming skills in a tutorial website.

Business and revenue models

For some popular Internet destinations. This is good stuff!

Dark patterns: the Machine Zone

Ever spent three hours before bed zoning through pictures on Facebook or one more funny post on Reddit?  Sure you have. That's the Machine Zone, and it's kind of a human failure mode.

Forum/Twitter/email intermediary service

There are lots of people out there in public life (bloggers, game developers, etc.) who simply don't want to deal with obscenity-laden death threats on a daily basis. It wouldn't be that difficult to set up an intermediary service that would permit filtration of this stuff, perhaps coupled with law-enforcement reporting for anything credible.

It wouldn't necessarily even need to be that expensive.

This could kind of hook into a generalized social-media interface that could coordinate multiple services.

Zero to revenue in five weeks

Some kind of exploration support tool would be neat. Here's a quick little vignette about how this approach to online services can work.

Outbox

A service to pick up your mail and digitize/handle it for you, charging $4.95 a month in select markets. That's surprisingly low to me, since they actually go to your place with a key and get your mail (urban apartments) - not every day, though.  Still impressive.

That's easily clonable for any local market. Eventually the PO Box providers will surely also add that.

Some business links

I was researching terminology for a translation and hit a couple of links. Infoentrepreneurs.com is apparently the Quebecois mirror of a UK topic database about small business concepts.  And then Wifcon.com is a set of articles about American federal procurement for contractors.

This kind of stuff - and probably the contents of any reasonable business course (wasn't there a reading list for a "virtual MBA" I saw a couple of years ago?) - are grist for the mill for a semantic model of small business, which is what I'm zeroing in on here.

Education startups

Wise words about education startups.

Content organization technique

Here's a good notion for writing long-form journalism: start with a stub article, then keep expanding it with additional sections, always back-linking to the longer story. FastCoLabs is trying this under the rubric of "slow live blogging", which is a pretty entertaining way of putting it.  And I like it.  There are a lot of things that just work better this way, like my 2008 botnet spam project for example.

Opportunity: web curation

Yeah, yeah, I know.  People always talk about this.  But seriously - with the demise of Google Reader and the deemphasis of Alerts, this guy has put two and two together to realize that the big players don't actually like curation.  It's not drivable, it doesn't pop ads, and .. well, curation is for understanding, not money.  He links to a good little article on Facebook's extortion model, too.  Interesting stuff.

Corporate control is anathema to usability.

The takeaway: there's still a lot of need for curation tools.  If the big players don't like them, well, more opportunity to go around.

Acquisition = failure

An interesting take indeed.  I like it.

Freelance business ideas

And freelancing means services, and some services can be packaged.  Anyway, suggestions - good ones:

• Startup data/metrics analyst
• Full service blogger
• Podcaster
• Startup video producer

You know which one I like (data, data, data).

Metrics

They're what's for dinner.

Bad startup ideas

A clever mix-and-match startup idea generator.  It does make you think about characterization of business models, though.  Keywords are a start!

The components of business automation

So ... what is a business?  In other words, let's assume we want to automate a given business to the point that only strictly human activities are provided to humans - and wherever possible, those activities are assigned to cheap humans.  That sounds horrible when I put it that way, incidentally.  Let's say instead that I prefer to automate the boring and understandable parts of the business to permit the business owner to concentrate on the human aspects of it - interacting with customers and being creative.  It's the same thing, but man does it sound better.

But what does this actually look like?  What can we study of existing business management theory and practice that we can refactor into this system?

First, the overall structure of a given business is a business model.  The business model describes how customers are found, what customers pay for, and how customers are retained.  Steve Blank says the definition of a startup is an organization constituted in order to define, test, and iterate business models until one's found that works.  (There's no reason you couldn't just keep iterating and spinning off businesses ad infinitum, but most people stick with the initial business for a few years until they can sell it to others and either start over, start investing, or start vegetating.)

I should note here that a given organization can run multiple business models.  Sometimes these are dignified as separate cost centers, and sometimes they're informal.  There can certainly be revenue sources that consist of one-off deals that aren't particularly reproducible (although thought should be given to reproducing them - if one customer had a need that you could address, there's a good chance they're not unique).

So a business model defines a class of customers, a marketing strategy, and so on.  The specific actions taken to instantiate the business model are business processes.  Business processes are expressed in terms of workflow.  The resources used in a business process are provided by a business organization.

A business organization is often a legal entity (i.e. protected by law and with its own tax identification and so on).  It can also be informal, but experience shows that this is often a mistake, and certainly will create problems when the business starts to scale (I should note here that the goal of a business is generally to scale, that is, to increase the number of customers in order to maximize returns for a given amount of discovery).

The business organization also includes accounting, which is keeping track of the money and other resources provided by the business to run the business processes.  Note that the underlying business structures have a lot to do with how the accounting is performed - only a business entity can have a bank account, for example, and tracking what goes into and out of that account is what accounting is.

Accounting also keeps track of a lot of the other parts of business processes, especially the standard business processes that every business has - issuing invoices, doing payroll, filing tax forms, tracking orders.  A lot of this gets grouped into enterprise resource planning (ERP).

But there is a whole class of business process that has nothing to do with ERP; I think of these as "research", in other words, the processes devoted to finding and organizing information.  Most of these processes don't really seem to be very organized in the literature I've found so far; most discovery seems to be kept in people's heads or at best quadrille notebooks somewhere.  Given that business model iteration is research, though, I think it should be better defined.

Then there's the business plan.  The business plan is best thought of, I think, as being a snapshot of a given business model at a given point in time plus forecasts of what could happen to that model if you make a given change; its purpose is twofold.  First and foremost it's something to show investors as a basic summary of why they should give you money in order to make more money.  But it also represents research - putting a b-plan together forces you to ask questions.  Obviously, though, you should already be asking those questions all the time as part of your regular business model iteration process - because the questions are things like "how many customers probably meet these given criteria" and "how much money do I have".  Stuff you need to know.  Steve Blank contrasts business models and business plans here.

The financial part of a b-plan consists of your actual accounting figures plus your projections of how they could evolve, either if you continue the way you're going, or if you make a given change after the investor gives you X thousand dollars.  In other words, there are two kinds of business plan: there's the snapshot of what and how you're doing, and then there is something that should by all rights be called a differential b-plan that represents your forecast of return on a given specific investment.  Hm.  I guess that makes it a plan, yeah?  The snapshot is just a report.  Your annual statement, as it were - and if you have shareholders, you're required to do those anyway.  If you're just a startup, you're  your own shareholders, so it behooves you to give yourself that same information.

The more of that we can automate, the better off everyone is.  That's my goal.

Business plan templates

BizPlanDB.com is already kinda doing some of what I want to do here.  Kinda neat, really.

Robotics tutorial set

I envision a whole curriculum tailored towards self-study in robotics.  (Robotics because (1) I want to learn robotics myself, (2) most practical things don't have fantastic tutorials, (3) it's a hot topic and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.)

Wash, rinse, repeat for the other stuff I'm interested in, of course: statistics, machine learning, basic accounting, NLP.

Balanced

New payment processor Balanced can now use ATH against checking accounts.

Products people wish existed

Neat list.  I see a couple of interesting ones.

LCI Linux sysadmin certification

OK, so here's a set of skills I'd like to acquire: LPI certification. I've been half-assing sysadmin work since the 90's, and I suspect I actually know most of this stuff - but you know, it's all kinda vague.

Spaced repetition (earlier) would be perfect, here, and could also be formatted like an exam simulator (see which).  Questions could identify weak spots and indicate places where tutorial help is needed, and that brings in topic trees and gamification of tutorials (earlier). [IBM developerWorks has some tutorials to start from.]

To all that, add the fact (HNN, WSJ) and you have a compelling story.  Only thing missing is the money. Here are my top-of-head notions:

• Ads (duh) and donations
• Sell books on-site, sell ... other things on-site (i.e. better ads)
• In-depth things paid?  (I don't see how this wouldn't just be arbitrary)
• Sell the tutorial service for other subject matter.
• Offer corporate groups as a thing.

That's what I can think of immediately.  But this is a good overall thing to consider writing.

Cookie cutter for local retail

AlterNet thinks the days of big-box retail in America are drawing to a close, with K-Mart closing 200 stores and Radio Shack 500 in the near future.  If chains die, then local retail will have to return to the towns that big boxes sterilized - AlterNet sees that as young people opening up in currently vacant Main Street store fronts.

Could be.  I'll bite.  And those young people will need informational resources and a network for organization.  It's the 21st-century equivalent of a chain store; all the benefits of a chain without the soullless scale.

Coffee

Puerto Rican coffee is the coffee served at the Vatican.  Puerto Rican coffee was quite popular in Europe in the 19th century, until Hurricane San Ciriaco killed 3500 people on the island in 1899 and destroyed essentially all agriculture extant.

Shade-grown coffee is organically grown and environmentally extremely friendly; coffee bushes naturally prefer shade.  But shade-grown coffee consists of bushes scattered through the understudy of tropical rainforest.  It must be harvested by hand, so labor-intensive a process that it can only be done in the Third World for any price bearable for mass export.  This is the reason that Puerto Rican coffee never managed to rebuild after 1899.  Recent price supports by the government have only supported a switch to sun-grown coffee - an effort that has not been successful.

The technology isn't here yet, but robotic management of coffee (and other plants) in the forest understudy could possibly be cheaper than human labor, perhaps bringing Puerto Rican shade-grown coffee into a bearable price range - Puerto Rico does have a fairly well-developed technical sector that could provide maintenance and operating labor for robotic harvesters.

Longer-term, but in the end all the real money is from use of the land.

Three Jaguars

The Three Jaguars is a Web comic about how one artist runs her business, based on some LiveJournal posts she's made over the past couple of years.  It's utterly charming.

And rife with insight; here is her presentation of the roles each of the three subpersonalities plays in her life.

This is useful stuff!

What will users STOP doing?

An interesting and oft-neglected aspect of conceptualizing a product for yourself and for the prospective user: what will users stop doing when they start using it?

Storytelling

Storytelling engages the listener's brain to an extent unmatched by other forms of information.  We are storytelling animals.  This has a direct effect on business management and marketing.

Crisis management

Here's an interesting article about crisis management - when there's a true crisis, you need to drop procedure for the duration and move into emergency mode.  This is an interesting insight about how businesses actually sometimes need to work.

Workflow lets you keep your processes working to the extent truly required, so that's good.  But workflow should probably take crises into consideration as well.  Anyway, read it.

SaaS business model

Here's a couple of links [1] [2] to a guy who consults on the SaaS business model.  Since this is essentially what I want to do after I've automated the freelance translation industry, it behooves me to spend some time there.

More generally, the second link is talking about the "SaaS business architecture," and that's exactly one of the things I hope to explore.

Business models based on open source

For later reference.

Freemium

Nice article looking at freemium strategies.

Fix the machine: it will give you an advantage

Fortuitously, I ran across two nice articles about business processes yesterday.  One's by Aaron Swartz, "Fix the machine, not the people" and is just as insightful as he always was.  Part of his Raw Nerve series.

And then we have the bald statement that companies who support remote workers win against those who don't.  Why?  Better documentation and support of processes.  Makes sense!

Blogging strategy

Some lessons from running a tech blog.  Interesting.

MVP must include credit cards

Nice point.  Your MVP is taking credit card payments.

Etsy guy: Real-time analytics ain't all that

Whom the gods would destroy, they first give real-time analytics.  Very nice position post.

Where I'd differ, just a little, is analysis of incoming queries.  I'd like that to be as quick as possible, and since you're not really talking about statistics in this case, statistical significance isn't an issue.  All you want to do is see what kind of things people are interested in which lead them to your content; then you reverse-engineer it to address wider circles of people more specifically.

Data-driven support

The case for workflow as part of customer support.  Obvious points, but ... sometimes not so very obvious as all that.

How to write a BOM

A fascinating post series on specifying things for production at small industrial scale in China (or anywhere).  How It All Works.

Spaced repetition

Add spaced repetition to a lengthy (and configurable) set of very small programming challenges, and you have a programming teaching tool that would probably be pretty useful.

Derek Sivers on Anki for fact memorization.  [Anki] Refers to useful techniques for knowledge structuring for this purpose by Piotr Wozniak.

Probable time for basic system: a week.  For lesson construction: arbitrary - couple of months?

D-U-N-S numbers

A good trick for getting a D&B D-U-N-S number quickly for Apple's iStore.  This is the kind of thing a startup support service would do for you, tricks and all.

RiR: the Process Myth

From Rand's in Repose, a really nice article on how documented processes are intended to preserve the culture of a company, why engineers don't like them, how they should be ready to defend themselves, and so forth.  Good background on why process as she is wrote doesn't always work well for people even though they desperately need it above the level of - well, let's say above the level of zero people in the company.  My company is just me, and I still suffer from lack of process, which is why I'm automating.

But I think it's important to think hard about what process means, how it can be tied to its origin stories better, and how it can be integrated into the human more effectively.  I'm going to have to reread this article a few times.

Post from HBR on why business matters

Well.  They don't actually say why business matters so much as they baldly assert that it's the only thing that does matter.  Actually, from a philosophical viewpoint, there is a lot to scratch your head about in this article, but it's still thought-provoking, so read it.  (Their actual goal is marketing for business school students, I suppose.)

The business world is kind of strange, really.  As a more engineering kind of guy I can't help but be astonished at their self-important gushing, but then on the other hand, as the kind of guy who wishes he had more money, I can't deny that they have most of it.  I can't think of anything better than to automate their jobs out from under them.  (Yeah, I know it's already happening no matter what I do.)