Tony Wright dot com

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 […]

One of my brethren at YCombinator sent out a request to the 2008 Winter Founders list a request for information about design services for his startup. He and his co-founder, like many YC founders, are hackers.
In my career I’ve been a web designer (although I’m only moderately good at it), I’ve hired web designers […]

“”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 […]

I’ve posted a lot more detail and accompanying thoughts over at the RescueTime blog… To summarize:

RescueTime has been funded by YCombinator, one of the most prestigious seed-funding outfits that’s out there (in geek circles, anyways). If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a bit of info. YC was founded by Paul Graham […]

Every month, Marcello Calbucci diligently posts a list of Seattle Tech Startups sorted by their Alexa/Compete ratings (including details about their movement on the list). The November SSI is out! It’s a great resource and (quite honestly) exciting to see so many Seattle companies doing interesting things. And it’s gratifying to see […]

I’ve been running WordPress for this blog since the beginning. It’s a great platform. I’ve officially been drinking the Kool-Aid. I tell my friends about it. I heard Matt Mullenweg speak (at SXSW last year) and I rave about that.
So when it made sense for us to spin up a little […]

Awesome quote shamelessly pulled from TechCrunch (I’d link to their Crunchbase entry if I could), who shamelessly pulled it from Yossi Vardi, who shameless pulled it from Theodore Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done […]

In the last few weeks, I’ve had a rash of opportunities come my way via email (the majority of which were job opportunities from 3rd party recruiters, but there were also 2 different co-founding opportunities)… It occurred to me that politely responding to offers that were clearly a bad fit was fairly time consuming. […]

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 […]