Startups For the Rest of Us

Show Notes Dan & Ian of the Lifestyle Business Podcast (LBP)  Getting Things Done by David Allen Mastering the Rockafeller Habits by Verne Harnish Work the System by Sam Carpenter What works: Results based reporting on a weekly basis. Uninterrupted times of work. (creative work vs. grunt work) Buddy system Frequent touching base sessions in-person to ensure wires aren’t getting crossed. What you need: Flexibility in your working hours as a manager sliding time wigit Google calendar sync’d with everyone + google invitations Skype + gotomeeting SOD – Strategic Operating Document Strategic Objective Operating Principles Operating Procedures Examples Team Communication SOP Phone call rhythm, plan, and results. Weekly reports. TWBI, NWBI KPI Projects / Notes Boomerrang to reach inbox at same time. Example of what they look like. Open Projects with GTD Cues, ie: @ Friday Call. @ Waiting @ Elisa @ Dan Trancript Coming soon.

Mike and Rob outline eight ways to rehabilitate an existing application that you already own or have recently purchased.

Rob and Mike answer listener questions about how to sell an app, how to run a smoke test, mobile game marketing and more.

Rob and Mike discuss B to B marketing strategies for startups.

Rob and Mike discuss seven common launch mistakes that can ultimately doom your business.

Mike and Rob outline how to grow your business past employee zero.

Rob and Mike discuss how to solicit feedback from your customers as well as give an AuditShark update and answer a listener question.

Rob and Mike give updates on their products as well as answer listener questions about maintaining momentum and growth, when to hire employee number one, dealing with SaaS cancellations and more.

Rob and Mike answer listener questions about door to door customer development, courting feedback from customers, and more.

Mike and Rob layout the stages of team development. As well as steps from moving from a "I'm great" mentality to a "We are great" mentality.

Rob and Mike discuss the pros and cons of Proposition HN. This proposition was posted on ycombinator.

Show Notes Transcript [00:00] Mike: This is Startups for the Rest of Us: Episode 114. [00:03] Music [00:11] Mike: Welcome to Startups for the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you’ve built your first product or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Mike. [00:19] Rob: And I’m Rob. [00:20] Mike: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. How you doing this week, Rob? [00:24] Rob: I’m doing good. I feel like the new year is really starting to ramp up and people are back signing up for apps again and it’s exciting. [00:33] Mike: Yeah, I know what you mean. There’s a number of things that were on my list of things to get done last year that never did but they tended to be more of the clean up nature and I’ve starting to bang through those kind of get them off of my mind and off my plates so that I can work on other things. [00:46] Rob: Yeah, I had several of those as well. I also finally did my 2-day retreat just to do some thinking. You know, I walked like miles and miles a day and thought and looked at my goals for 2013 and how I wanted to accomplish those and what was going to take. And I looked both at for personal and professional and I just thought through them in-depth. I did mapped them out in quite a bit of detail in a bulleted list and then I put them in to my idea notebook where I’ll be referencing them throughout the year. It was a really good way to start the year actually. I recommend if you can…can take even just 24 hours and get away from kind of the hectic nature of your life to really sit down and think about what you want to accomplish in the year. I found it to be pretty valuable. [01:25] Mike: Cool. [01:25] Rob: How about you, what’s going on? [01:26] Mike: So, I’m in the middle of finalizing things for releasing AuditShark to someone of my early access customers next week and I plan on giving them to access to everything that’s been built so far. And I’ve touched based with the couple of them but not nearly as many as I would like to. So, that’s something I need to work on a little bit more but fortunately, the contractors that I have doing some of the development work, they’ve been just concentrating on the technical side of things which freeze up a lot of my time for all the marketing stuff and that’s going really well right now. I’m really happy with all that’s going on. Hopefully, the trend will continue and my previously stated goal, I was thinking about it last night of not doing code. I decided I have to retract that just because I enjoy doing code on occasion. I think kind of touching things on occasion as opposed to digging in and actually trying to solve some of the down or dirty problems. [02:19] Rob: Yeah, there’s a big difference between coding on major projects and just hacking your script out because I’m like you. I can’t get away from the code because I enjoy it too much. I really do love writing good code. It gives your mind a rest if you’re busy thinking about, you know, a lot of other stuff. So you just sit there and code for an hour or two can be pretty enjoyable. So, I’m with you. I don’t think I’ll ever get away from it and I don’t really, really have the desire to. But getting away from having to do it 10, 20, 30 hours a week, that’s definitely I can see that as an admirable goal. [02:50] Mike: Uh huh. [02:50] Rob: So, other stuff…other stuff that’s new with me, is with HitTail I have three small launches plan for the next probably 14 days. We have an info graphic that was ready in December and it’s about long tail SEO, trying to get some Twitter buzz and you know, wherever else it is, you do with an info graphic to generate some interest. And then we integrated with HubSpot which is a pretty big one for us. So, we’ll be talking to them trying to get the yeses, that integration marketing thing I keep talking about or it’s like you integrate with folk[...]

podcast, startups, entrepreneurship

Mike and Rob discuss Dave McClure's AARRR Startup Metric for Pirates method.

Mike and Rob answer listener questions about co-founders and equity, personal branding as well as give advice to a recent graduate and much much more... Listen to find out what wacky antics they get up to on this weeks installment of StartUps For The Rest Of Us