Tony Wright dot com

One of the recent YCombinator dinners that we attended featured Joe Kraus (who founded Excite and then later JotSpot, which sold to Google).
Like all YC guests, Joe had piles of startup wisdom… One of the things that stuck out to me (which I’d never heard much) was when he said, “when we launched JotSpot […]

Evan Williams (founder of Twitter, fellow corn-fed midwesterner-turned-dotcommer, and someone I get to meet via YCombinator!) has a fabulous post on how to evaluate new product ideas. To sum up his excellent post, here is the matrix he came up with:
Tractability
Question: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
Obviousness
Question: Is […]

“”Marketing is a Tax You Pay for being Unremarkable”
Robert Stephens
Founder and Chief Inspector, The Geek Squad
While I think that’s a touch on the simple side, it rings pretty true. What would happen if all the people who were concentrating on advertising and PR instead started focusing on making the offering and/or the customer service […]

For many years as a consultant, when a small business said they wanted a site search engine, I was flummoxed. The best site search option was clearly Google, but it was ugly (you had very little control over the appearance of the search results) and, of course, laden with text ads. I generally […]

Tomorrow evening I’ll be speaking at the SeattleTechStartups meetup (starts at 6pm– click the link for details).
The topic will be “Bootstrap Marketing for Web Startups: SEO, SMM, and Viral Marketing“. For the uninitiated, that’s Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, and Viral Marketing.
If anyone has anything in particular they want me to chat […]

During my tenure at Jobster, I never got to do what I had set out to do with Jobby– create a tool that small and medium businesses could use to make hiring people less of a pain in the backside. I don’t blame Jobster a bit– with $48 million in venture capital, you have […]

I’m going out on a limb to say that the future of cold-calling (and unsolicited offers in general) is pretty bleak. Which gives me great joy.
On one hand, unsolicited sales is getting cheaper, easier and (for a while) more effective- volume is going up.
On the phone front… With powerful CRM systems, companies […]

One of my favorite “design” bloggers out there is Josh Porter of Bokardo. In his most recent article, Josh contends that “designers need a place at the strategy table because their work depends on and is a direct result of it. If it’s not already, realizing the business strategy of the organization in an […]

Facebook’s goals and your goals (as a Facebook user) are starting to get misaligned. And it’s only going to get worse. I’ll come back to this in a sec.
Alan (former VP at my previous employer) has left Facebook. He brings up a lot of cogent reasons why.
For myself, I am a bit […]

Brief note to let my dear readers know that we’ve set up a blog for RescueTime. Right not it’s not that active, but will eventually contain lots of interesting things that we can learn from our anonymous users. By asking them a few questions, we’ll be able to look at how productivity differs […]