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{ Category Archives } entrepreneurship

Why projects die

When I started Mementum, it took about 14 weeks to score my first piece of work. It was for about $250. But then 2 weeks after that I landed a real project… which led to another… and another… and now I (very luckily) have almost as much work flow as I can handle, without a [...]

Why Focus Matters to Me Right Now

The days here in Jersey City have been brutal lately. The day begins at 7am with a symphony of jack hammers restoring the area’s sidewalks for reasons unbeknownst to local residents. In a way it’s nice, though; the 3 or 4 hours proceeding it provide the small period of workable temperatures for those of us [...]

The problem is that convenient approaches rarely break through or generate extraordinary returns. (Seth)

Idea Value

“It’s important not to overstate the benefits of ideas,” he says. “Quite frankly, I know it’s kind of a romantic notion that you’re just going to have this one brilliant idea and then everything is going to be great. But the fact is that coming up with an idea is the least important part of [...]

“These new businesses are very energizing. We don’t ‘stick to the knitting’…I wouldn’t even know how to respond if someone said ‘Jeff, this isn’t the knitting.’ But we do make business decisions in a very deliberate way: we work backwards from customer needs, and we work forwards from our business skills.” (Jeff Bezos via O’Reilly) [...]

Bite off less than you can chew

To learn what it takes to do it all meant I had to first learn what “it all” is. I suppose I was also trying to prove to myself that I could do it. I made sure to choose an idea that was small enough for me to do alone and went with it. (Peldi [...]

Failure Hype

Rookie entrepreneurs are just as likely to succeed as experienced entrepreneurs with backgrounds consisting only of failure. Yes, failure tells you what doesn’t work, but “what doesn’t work” is a pretty big list. I wonder if any VC’s will take this to heart.

Stats that Don’t Matter

Also, don’t let the old “9 out of 10 new businesses fail” cloud your vision. It has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t market their product that has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t build a team that has nothing to do with you. If other people can’t price [...]

Ultra Light Start Up: An Example of Asking the Wrong Question

So I was sitting in the back of the lofty room, listening to a multitude of monetization inquiries at the Ultra Light Start Up group. The focus of this month’s meet up was “Online Video Monetization” and, as I suspected, a bunch of content creators were there asking how they could make money from their [...]

An Entrepreneur’s Choice

The way I see it, an entrepreneur has 1 of 2 choices when approaching a task that is new or outside her skill set. The first, and probably more popular choice, is to sweat it out yourself, trading your time for cost and speed. The second is to hire a consultant, freelancer, or service to [...]