So what has the potential to be the next online or mobile product sharing craze? Here are the contenders.

Svpply – Svpply is true social sharing, linking users through their Facebook and Twitter accounts. In addition to following the finds of favorite friends and businesses, visitors can also bookmark their own wishlist items from over 7,000 online retail sites.
Coolest feature: Unlike other social sharing sites that allow users to post non-retail links to items, Svpply eliminates the pesky inconvenience of coveting something un-buyable. A mouseover on any product on Svpply pulls up an informational bar with quick item details, including a direct link to buy.

Curisma – Tech product sharing site Curisma helps you channel your inner Kanye West, which is to say, someone with infinite resources, better taste and probably more insufferable than you. Curismatic users earn points and are ranked by the breadth and popularity of their product finds.
Coolest feature: Visitors to Curisma will find tons of must-have items that suddenly seem necessary to life itself – even if their actual function is not entirely clear.

Snapette – A location-driven iPhone app, Snapette is one part Instagram mixed with two parts Foursquare, and a little splash of Tumblr thrown in for good measure. Fashionably inclined users (or “Snapettes”) employ their mobile phones to take shots of favorite shopping finds and upload them for other Snapettes to discover.
Coolest feature: Snapette helps users easily track down where to find favorite brick-and-mortar items with Google Maps markers.

Mistash – Mistash is a “social product catalog,” or as I like to call it, “Pinterest for dudes.” Users “stash” shared photos instead of “pinning” them, and any questions about the target audience should be cleared up by the old timey mustache logo.
Coolest feature: In addition to bookmarking wishlist items and recently purchased products, users can share favorite products that they used to own, leading to some fun to read nostalgia posts.

Mlkshk –Functionality-wise Mlkshk could be considered the most similar to Pinterest out of the bunch, but with far less pearl clutching (remember when this image scandalized the Pinterest sweater set?). Shared images and videos tend to run more along the lines of the next hilarious internet meme instead of shabby chic cupcake wedding inspiration.
Coolest feature: An optional NSFW filter keeps the mood light and avoids viewing any potentially embarrassing product finds in the non-privacy of your cubicle.

What’s your pick for the next great social sharing or bookmarking site?

Image credit 

Mixergy

If you want the ultimate guide to entrepreneurship, Mixergy is the site for you. Mixergy founder Andrew Warner, a very successful entrepreneur himself, has interviewed over 600 successful entrepreneurs who posted over 45 entrepreneurship courses on Mixergy, which you can access for free or for a small monthly fee. Make sure to check out the Mixergy  “PR on a Budget” course from FeeFighters very own Stella Fayman.

AVC

NYC Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is one of very few VCs who actually blogs. His blog, A VC, offers thoughts on everything from women entrepreneurs to interesting products at conferences to how his own wife and daughter use technology to management advice for entrepreneurs and much more.

StartupLessonsLearned

The Lean Startup Movement pioneer Eric Ries writes about some great startup lessons he and other entrepreneurs learned on his blog, StartupLessonsLearned. Eric Ries is a big believer in testing your idea with the least possible work, and then improving your product based on data you get from your customers or pivoting quickly if your minimum viable product is not a success. If you’re interested in learning more about this type of more efficient and data-driven product testing for startups, make sure to also check out Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup.

Paul Graham

Paul Graham is one of the top influencers in Silicon Valley due to the popularity of his top startup incubator, Y Combinator, which invests a small amount of money into many startups who are mentored by top entrepreneurs and investors for 3 months while developing their startup and preparing it for VC funding. Paul Graham is a successful entrepreneur himself – he sold a company for millions of dollars in the 90s – and his experience with funding and mentoring over 380 top-notch startups over the years makes his essays a must-read for every startup founder. Also make sure to follow Hacker News, a very popular Y Combinator news aggregator for hackers.

Signal VS Noise

Chicago-based 37Signals, the succeful company behind the Signal VS Noise blog, always offers interesting and unique perspectives about business optimization in every area from user experience design to email marketing to productivity to deciding which features to include in the next iteration of your product. That’s right, I called it a business because unlike many Silicon Valley startups, 37Signals has always been about building useful products which they can charge money for. Take a look at their blog, and if you like their philosophy, I highly recommend reading their book Rework.

What is your favorite startup blog?

This is a guest post from Natasha Murashev, a former FBI agent turned Googler who is now learning Ruby on Rails and working on her own startup.

Photo Credit

According to Paul Graham, startup density is what saves startups in places like Silicon Valley, as it provides:

1. An environment that encourages startups
2. Chance meetings with helpful people
3. A social norm of optimism

Now, the idea that high startup density (a large number of startups relative to your city size), increases your startups’ chances of success isn’t groundbreaking.  In fact, the absolute belief in high startup density (HSD) is the reason why a lot of people leave places like Detroit and Cleveland to go to Chicago or San Francisco.  HSD is also the same reason why Brad Feld argues that Boulder is such a vibrant entrepreneurial community. The issue is though, that recent data suggests that living in a city with a higher startup density does not necessarily guarantee a higher rate of startup success.”

In order to test out the startup density idea, we used a cool website called Startup Data Trends, made by Bocoup and Atlas Ventures.  Startup Data Trends allows you to browse startups from the site AngelList and learn more about different cities, market segments, average valuations and amounts raised- like a Yahoo Finance for startups.  Using Startup Data Trends we can take a data driven look at the idea that startup hubs are the best place to be.  (Hint, the data seems to say they aren’t).

In the series of graphs below, we compare the success of startup hubs by using two metrics, as well as compare the startup density using two different measurements.  For the success of startup hubs, we used the average valuation and average money raised per startup by city.  While, to compare the size of the startup hubs, we used two different measurements: startup density, the number of startups per 100K residents, and the number of total startups per city. We chose the cities that had at least 150 data points for valuations, so places like Boulder didn’t quite qualify (sorry Brad).  Now, if Graham and Feld were right and HSD does lead to better startup success, the average valuation and average amount raised would decrease as the startup density goes from higher to lower.   However, you don’t see this trend- the success values consistently go up and down, and in no particular order.

Success of Startup Hubs by Startup Density
The following graphs show the success of different startup hubs in terms of average valuation and amount raised by startups, measured against the startup density (startups per 100K residents).
The far left of this graph is not surprising at all, as Silicon Valley has twice the startup density of it’s nearest competitor, Boston.  What is relatively surprising though, is how New York City and Chicago rank near the bottom in terms of density.  However, it seems many great new startups are coming out of these cities (Tumblr and GroupMe in NYC, Groupon and Grubhub in Chicago to name a few), while the startup density of Chicago and New York City is really decreased by the fact that these are huge cities with other stuff going on.
This is where the data really gets interesting, as the graph doesn’t show the expected answer of higher startup density leading to higher valuation, especially when you don’t count Silicon Valley.  Since the cities are ranked from highest startup density to smallest, you might expect the highest valuation on the left and the lowest on the right, however, this is not what you see.  For example, Boston and Atlanta have very high startup density, but have relatively lower valuations, while New York City has a relatively high valuation, but a low startup density.

Startup Hub success by Number of Startups in Each City
The following graphs show the success of different startup hubs in terms of average valuation and amount raised by startups, measured against the number of startups per city.

Just to make sure that our measurement of startup density isn’t to blame for the inconclusive evidence, we took a look at the number of startups per city.  The top five is as expected though it’s a bit interesting that Boston, a much smaller city, has more startups than Chicago, but I guess that is what happens when you get a high density of top research institutions.

In this last chart you can see the cities in order of most startups to least, and the measurements of success on the two y axises, average valuation and average amount raised.  Even when we change the measure of the startup hub from startup density to straight number of startups, you still don’t see the left to right downward slope that Brad Feld and Paul Graham might expect you to see. In fact, the data seems to be very inconsistent and it doesn’t seem to show that having more startups in a city leads to more startup success.

Overall, I agree that having more entrepreneurs around you is awesome, since entrepreneurs are generally fun, intelligent, encouraging people.  However, if you take away the fun of an environment of entrepreneurs, the data doesn’t seem to support the idea that higher startup density actually leads to more startup success.  So before you pack up your bags and join the flock down the yellow brick road to Silicon Valley, take a minute to consider whether or not you actually need to surround yourself with other startups, because the data seems to suggest your startup success doesn’t necessarily depend on your proximity to other like-minded individuals.

Full dataset in google docs

Image credit

It may seem like every single great domain in the world is taken (I mean, how do you describe some of these new startups with ridiculously misspelled or completely made up words as their brand name?), but that is a big misconception. There are plenty of great domains left, just waiting for you to register them. Here is how you find them…

Choosing Words

The first part of your domain searching journey should include plain brainstorming. Think of words that describe your product and write these down. These words should be specific enough so people know what your product is about, but also general enough so as your business expands (or if you do a slight pivot) and you start offering new, but related products, your domain name will still work.

‘FeeFighters’ is a great example of a brand name that is both specific and general at the same time. When you come to FeeFighters, you know it is specifically about saving money, but the name is flexible enough where FeeFighters can offer multiple products to help you save money (which they do).
Domize

If you have some domain names already in mind, check out domize. Domize is a really quick way to search for available .com, .org, .net, .biz, and .us domains. It has a very clean user interface, and is a lot more fun to work with than most of the domain registrars out there.

LeanDomainSearch

If you’ve come up with a few words that work well with your product, but need a little bit more help combining words to come up with a good domain, make sure to check out LeanDomainSearch.com. LeanDomainSearch is a new tool that finds available .com domains with specific key words. It is actually pretty addicting if you’re as obsessed with looking for domains as I am. You’ll be surprised by how many cool .com domains are still available.

.CO Domains

If you can’t find the right .com domain for your product, make sure to check out .co domains, which have recently become widely available for purchase. Big Brands such as Twitter (t.co), Overstock.com (o.co), Google (g.co), 500 Startups (500.co), Angel List (angel.co), and many more are already using .co domains.

Web 2.0 Domains

If all else fails, there are always plenty of Web 2.0 domains. Check out Web 2.0 domain generator tools like Dot-o-mator. The only issue with these type of domains is that they’re hard for your users to spell and remember.

You can also check out availability for non .com domains, with endings such as .ly (Lybian) or .am (this is what Instragr.am uses) – you can get pretty creative with these. However, the non .com endings might cost you a lot more and are subjects to the rules and regulations of a different country.

Feel free to share any other domain searching tools that you like and use in the comments!

Photo credit

1) Daily Deals- You knew this was coming. Once hailed the next Big Thing, more daily deal sites are folding recently than unused Groupons in your deal wallet. In fact, almost 800 daily deals closed down in the last 6 months of 2011 in the US. Ouch. If you’re in Asia, it’s even worse. More than 1,400 daily deal sites vanished in the same time period. The truth is, people just don’t care anymore…they are suffering from “deal fatigue” after buying hordes of daily deals which they creatively try to spend over time. If the big guys like Amazon and Google can’t make people care…you likely won’t be able to either.

2) Virtual Currency- BitCoin caused quite a stir in 2011. So much of a stir that soon the equivalent rate for 1 BitCoin became equivalent to almost $30 (bubble anyone?). The problem was that there was no certainty that governments wouldn’t outlaw bitcoins, nor do they avoid the simple laws of economics that govern supply and demand. To learn more about the rise (and fall) of bitcoin, click here. Let’s just say it’s safe to assume that starting a P2P currency is not a good move for 2012.

3) Mobile, Social Local Photo Sharing App- Need I say more? In 2011, there was an explosion of photo sharing apps, none so infamous as Color and well, we know how that turned out. With so many widely used alternatives…Instagram, Path, Hipstamatic, to name a few…Color did not give users a reason to switch.  Not even with $45 million in their pockets. Mobile, social local photo sharing apps have been done! There I said it…don’t go there.

Photo Credit

Imagine making a number of important purchasing decisions on your small business’s credit card with your current interest rate in mind, only to receive a notice from your credit card company shortly thereafter, informing you that your rate had been doubled for no reason. Seems like a money-wasting nightmare, but it’s actually the case for why small business owners must garner debt stability in the new business credit card environment.

Somewhere around 80% of small businesses use credit cards for funding purposes, according to a National Small Business Association survey, and while debt stability has been historically unattainable, a credit card law put into effect in February 2010 (the CARD Act) made it possible for those using personal credit cards. The law prohibits credit card companies from changing a cardholder’s interest rate for existing debt unless he is 60 or more days delinquent on payment.

Ok, but why should small business owners care if personal credit card users are the only ones who benefit from the legislation? For one simple reason: According to a Card Hub Business Credit Card Study all of the major credit card issuers consider small business owners to be personally liable for business
credit card use and send information about this use to their personal credit reports, which means it affects their personal credit scores. In other words, there’s no reason not to use a personal credit card for company spending.

However, there are indeed reasons to continue using business credit cards: enhanced expense tracking capabilities, the ability to set custom credit limits for employee cards, centralized company rewards earning, and more. So where does that leave you? Using a rewards business credit card for everyday expenses that are paid for in full within a single billing period and a personal 0% credit card for expenses that result in a revolving monthly balance.

Aside from garnering debt stability as well as a business credit card’s unique features, there are a number of reasons why a credit card strategy like the one laid out above is beneficial. First of all, it gets you the best possible overall credit card terms. There’s no one credit card that provides both the best rewards and the lowest rates, but those things are certainly attainable if you use two different cards. Secondly, it prevents you from losing money on interest as a result of not having a grace period for new purchases. While interest isn’t normally assessed on a credit card until after your payment is due, when
you’re revolving a balance, new purchases begin accruing interest immediately.

Ultimately, small business owners have to realize that things have changed since the CARD Act and that old myths, such as the belief that personal credit cards increase personal liability, must be overcome. There are simply too many up-and-coming companies out there today and times are too tough to let
yourself be held back by the lobbying efforts of credit card companies, which have thus far resulted in Congress only protecting consumers and not small business owners.

Photo credit

If you’re working in a startup, chances are the only project managements tool you have around is your whiteboard. The whiteboard is great for brainstorming ideas, but as your company continues to grow and you bring on more and more people, you might want to upgrade to a more formal web-based project managment tool.

At first, project management tools may sound intimidating, especially if you’ve ever worked in a corporation that has official project managers who are trained to use the insanely feature-rich Microsoft Projects, but luckily, there are more than a few tools out there that are much cheaper and easier to use.

Here is a list of 5 project management tools that will help you organize your team and substantially increase your team’s productivity.
1) Asana

Asana was started by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz whose vision is to fix how people collaborate on projects and work in teams. Asana is incredibly simple and intuitive to use and has a really nice three-window interface, so you can see your projects, tasks, and individual task details all on the same page. The best part about Asana is that it’s free for a group of up to 30 people, so you won’t have to break the bank to use this high-quality product.

2) Basecamp

Basecamp was started by the 37signals, a group of developers and designers who build their own simple feature-free project management tool after not being satisfied with the available options out there for their agency. They’ve decided to release Basecamp to the public, and it was an instant success (37signals is no longer an agency as they make more than enough money from their tools to support themselves). The key-word in there is “feature free” project management tool. If you’re looking for something that has a lot of specific features, Basecamp is not for you. 37signals is notorious for not listening to their customers when it comes to adding features. They like keeping their product as minimalist as possible and easy to use. Basecamp pricing ranges from free to $149/month based on the number of projects, and storage your team needs.

3) Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects has all the features you’ll ever need, including bug tracking, wikis, chat, document collaboration, time tracking, and a lot more. However, one of the things I personally like about Zoho Projects is that they make it really easy to hide these features if you don’t need them. For example, if you have a marketing project, you can get rid of the bug-tracking and wiki tab. So if your company is just starting out, but you plan to grow a lot in the future, Zoho Projects is a great tool to use, since you can hide the features you don’t need at first, and grow into them in the future versus Basecamp, which is great to use in the beginning, but you’re likely to outgrow it in the future. Zoho Projects pricing ranges from $20/month to much higher depending on which features and add-ons your team needs.

4) Pivotal Tracker

Pivotal Tracker is a project management tool created by development agency Pivotal Labs, who needed a custom tool for their agile software development technique. If you have more than a few developers at your startup and already practice agile software development, Pivotal Tracker might make your life a lot easier. Pivotal Tracker pricing starts at $7/month and goes up to $50/month based on the number of users, projects, and storage your team needs.

5) Unfuddle

Unfuddle combines the simple project management features of Basecamp with the very technical Git and Subversion hosting. If you have several developers working on the same project, git helps you keep track of the changes each developer makes and merge these changes into the main project while having a backup of the last version of code. Unfuddle pricing ranges from free to $99/month depending on how many users, projects, and storage your team needs.

As you can see, we are lucky enough to be living in an age where there are project management tools available for your team’s specific needs for both features and pricing. Only a few years ago, the only available option out there was Microsoft Projects. The above five are tools that I have used or heard good things about from other startups, but there are countless others, so let me know if you need help deciding on the right tool for your team.

Photo credit

I chose freeconferencecall because they were the first link on a google search (as it turns out, there are hundreds of these services out there). It works fine and I see no reason to upgrade, other than the intro that says “welcome to freeconferencecall.com,” which is sort of annoying. The nice thing is that I have a number I can use anytime and I don’t need to make a reservation to use it. So my first guess was that they offer this service for free by upselling to their premium version, but I haven’t once been upsold via email or anything to get the premium version of the account. So either they are terrible up-sellers or they are making money another way. It’s the latter here:

How it all works – Termination fees + Traffic pumping

Termination fees

The telecommunications act of 1996 allowed small rural phone companies to charge other larger phone companies a “termination fee” to access their lines. Basically, if you had a small phone company in Iowa or South Dakota, you could charge AT&T or Verizon when folks called into your area code. I have cell coverage via AT&T (unfortunately), so when I call a rural number in Iowa, AT&T has to pay a termination fee (which is actually billed per minute) to that provider in Iowa. The government allowed this to happen because small phone companies had high costs to throw up a line to that rural Iowa farmhouse, but they don’t make much money from it.

It used to be that you’d pay long distance rates depending on where you called, and you’d pay more to call those locations. In the past decade or so, with the onset of cellphones and flat-rate long distance plans, the phone companies just assumed that only a small percentage of people would actually call those numbers. The fees that AT&T and the larger companies pay the small companies are 10-20x more than the normal fees – termination rates range from .3 cents to 20 cents per minute. The rural companies get a great deal – the more calls that they take, the more money they make.

Traffic Pumping

More traffic = More $$$! So, they had a brilliant idea!

If they can get businesses with a lot of incoming calls, like conference calling companies, they could make a lot of money. So they started cutting deals with conference call companies, phonesex lines, etc. If the termination fee at a particular location was 8 cents, they could pay a conference bridge company 4 cents per minute and still make 4 cents on the call. Conference calling is relatively cheap to setup, so these companies are able to offer free service to customers like us and still make 4 cents per minute. It’s all about using more minutes… Freeconferencecall.com does ~20 million calls per month and it did $23million in revenues in 2010. So it’s a win-win-win right? Freeconferencecall wins, the conference callers win, the rural phone companies win, etc… Everyone, that is, except for the large phone companies. They are paying a ton of money to the small companies. AT&T estimated in 2007 that they were paying an additional $250 million to connect these calls.

My conference call yesterday between people in Chicago, Raleigh, and California was deliberately dialed through Iowa just so freeconferencecall.com could make money off the inflated rates regulations to rural phone companies, at the expense of the long distance companies. Lets say it cost our providers 8 cents a minute… the one hour call cost our providers a total of $19.20 (4 participantsx8cents*60mins)!

No surprise then, that the large telcos have been lobbying hard to get rid of this provision. AT&T & Google Voice are facing off in court about this issue. Google Voice does NOT allow you to make calls to these numbers… Wanna try? Call our freeconferencecall number at (605) 475-4000 from Google Voice or a Vonage number. It won’t connect you. Google Voice, as a VOIP solution isn’t required to connect you to every phoneline, as the traditional carriers are.

It is likely that the time of free conference calls are coming to a close, as the FCC has been actively talking about eliminating the arbitrage, and frankly, this is an obvious loophole.

TL;DR – Free Conference Calls aren’t really free. The costs for them are embedded in your phone bill because they are connected through rural phone stations that get paid (up to 20 cents/minute) via an outdated regulation.

Image By Andres Rueda

When we do this, we are guilty of the fundamental attribution error, a psychological theory that, when controlled, can greatly improve relationships both at work and at home. It might seem like a random post for a blog catering to startups, but I’ve personally found that awareness of this tendency has lowered my stress levels and made me a better entrepreneur. When you get really good, you notice when other people become guilty of making the error, and you see how embarrassing of a blooper it can be.

The idea is that when bad things happen to us, we are more likely to blame external factors. However, when bad things happen to others, we’re more likely to blame internal factors, such as their personality or dispositional tendencies. This leads us to view others in a negative light, while simultaneously expecting them to view us in a favorable light when something bad happens to us. Human nature…I know.

Here’s another way of putting it:

In other words, people have an unjustified tendency to assume that a person’s actions depend on what ‘kind’ of person that person is rather than on the social and environmental forces influencing the person.

The good thing about the fundamental attribution error is that when we learn to recognize it in practice, we can learn to control it. The biggest thing to do: cut people slack. In fact, Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project advises that recognition of the fundamental attribution error and the subsequent cutting of slack to people can be a strategy for achieving happiness. “ …Always cut people slack; always assume that their irritability, or unfriendliness, or absent-mindedness, neither reflects their true nature nor has anything to do with me. In brief, don’t take things personally.”

So if your next meeting is running late, catch up on some news and greet the person with a smile on your face and an open mind…you won’t regret it.

Image credit

What is it?

Location based marketing works by tracking opt-in consumer locations and then texting them information about nearby sales and promotions.  Imagine that you’re in the car looking for a place to eat, and you get a text telling you that the local sandwich shop is offering a two-for-one deal for the next hour.  Would that help you make your decision about where to eat?  Some marketers not only track a consumer’s location, they also incorporate time into the equation.  That helps them gauge which offers to send, because the two combined are used as a predictor of their intent to buy.  For instance, they wouldn’t likely send the sandwich deal if it were 3:30 in the afternoon.  Alistair Goodman, the CEO of Placecast estimates that by combining location and time, a business using the platform will rack up 2-10 times the amount of business that a generic text would.

How to Make it Work For You

Here are some tips that small business can use to get in on the game.

• Don’t force it.   Remember when everyone was talking about opt-in email and spam?  Well, it’s same type of scenario for location based marketing. You’ll have to convince your customers that there is value in giving up their locations and interests, and then persuade them to opt-in to your marketing scheme.  But never simply use their information without their permission—that will only create ill-will.  On the other hand, if a customer decides that they don’t want to participate in the program any more, make it easy for them to opt-out.  Creating a bunch of hoops for them to jump through will only frustrate them and create bad feelings for your business.
• Don’t share.  One of the key factors in getting people to sign up for your program is that they understand that you won’t sell their information to anyone else.  You’ll likely get offers, but remember that the benefits of a loyal customer, including repeat business and referrals, far outweigh any short-lived monetary gains you’ll get from selling your list.
• Offer Value.  No one wants to spend time reading endless texts that have little or no value to them.  Make sure that every text you send to your customers offers them some sort of value.  The best way to do this is to put yourself in their shoes.  What sort of information and deals would you want to receive, and what would cause you to push “delete?”

Just because location based marketing hasn’t made it big in the small business world yet, that doesn’t mean that it won’t.  Who knows, maybe your retail store will be one of the first in the upcoming movement?

Image credit