Orange is my favorite color
May 8, 2009

Business - Web/Internet | Trackback | del.icio.us | digg

None of these are new, but the fundamentals of being an entrepreneur or running a start up don’t really change. I’ve been reading these the last few days as well as re-reading Seth Godin’s “The Dip” and reflecting on how my startup is doing:

  • The erroneously named Web application autopsy is actually a recap of a SXSW panel looking at four different companies at four different stages. The interesting bit here is each company, Wufoo, Blinksale, Feedburner and RegOnline each shared some hard numbers from their operations.
  • From there I read through to Underbelly of a web app. We have a lot of this stuff already taken care of – the billing, customer service and other automation pieces that make the actual operations of a company manageable.
  • The link about stat tracking caught my eye and pointed to Joe Kraus’ Confessions of a startup addict. This is not new by any means but I realized that we weren’t doing a very good job of tracking revenue by customer so I dropped into Eclipse and threw together a Statistics Service for my app that will generate this data for me broken out by plan and date. Having metrics to gauge progress (and more importantly, motivate) is key to success but so easy to ignore.
  • Someone in one of these pages referenced StartupSchool.org, which is supposed to happen again in 2009. I found a link to videos of their talks which I’m going to watch this weekend for some inspiration.

Got any good business / startup / entrepreneurial readings? I also came across Bill Flagg’s blog when I went looking for more info about RegOnline and the guy who participated in the panel. It’s no surprise given my company is MotorsportReg.com that I would be interested in the success of RegOnline.com. I found Bill’s blog to be frighteningly similar to my own thoughts about the web, applications, customer service and so forth. We seem to read a lot of the same books as well but what I found valuable about his posts were the amount of actual data and insight he shared from RegOnline’s operations.

P.S., when are you no longer a “startup”? Time? Revenue? Ever?

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