Leanpub self-publishing

Since I'm kind of embroiled in writing book-like things lately, here's a way to monetize them on a really small-scale basis.  Worth a shot.

Business plans

This was the post to SP that made me think I was getting outside the box over there: an outline of a standard business plan.

Repurposing, a little

It's been bothering me for a while now that my Semantic Programming blog has some startup-type information in it.  So I'm moving all that over here - back dated to its original date of publication.

The idea of most of that is Startup::Declarative, a semantic domain for my Decl language that describes the structures of a startup business, its business processes, actions to be taken, strategies, and so on.  A full declarative specification for a business is, in fact, its business plan - in machine-readable form.

Since this blog is about startup ideas, I've decided it should be about startups in general. I may end up specifying some of the ideas formally or something, if it should ever get that far.

How to Build a Web Startup

Steve Blank has another distillation of the startup process.  I love this stuff!  It's like popcorn.

Business model development

The NY Times just published a fascinating article on a guy who sold reviews for ebooks on Amazon, B&N, and other venues.  It didn't last long (goes against Amazon's ToS) but at its peak he was drawing $28,000 a month.

I love reading about business hacks like that.

Here's an exercise for the reader (and for me, should I ever get the time) - design the business processes for that business, including any interface code for the various roles (reviewer, author, etc.) and the interface code to Amazon for submission and tracking of reviews.  (That latter should be done with Javascript in the reviewer's own browser.)

It should be brain dead easy to design and iterate a business of this nature.  Less than a day, at most, between idea and execution.  That's my goal.

Update: just realized I saw the same story in an NLP context last week: textual analysis to determine whether a review is false or not, with the same usual counterintuitive linguistic markers.

Adapting price points for SaaS

Patrick Mackenzie again, this time with an article about adapting price points in software as a service.  He's all about the autostartup.

Chemistry battle card game

Point 1: People evolved to commit a database of around 150 records to memory (among other things)[citation needed]. This was good for remembering local plants, or the people in your village, and now it's what makes it fun to collect baseball cards or play Pokemon.

Point 2: Supernormal stimuli drive evolved behavior to excessive extreme. Ask Zynga about this; gamification is the extraction of our community/economic stimuli to drive activities that aren't fun, but do pay Zynga.

Point 3: WildChord is harnessing gamification to teach you to play the guitar. And make them money, but I don't begrudge them that - the point is they're using supernormal stimuli and the mechanisms we're discovering lately to use them in order to reach goals set by the user, not just by the game maker.

Point 4: There are databases that are very useful to know.

Total: Chemistry battle cards for the win.

Now off to find out what I can about the design of battle card games. The name: 化学 (Kagaku). I'll bet you can even guess what that means.

(Elementeo is a competitor, kinda.)