Although I’ve enjoyed the whiteboards at work, I’ve wanted to get a whiteboard for my apartment for some time. But the costs of buying a retail whiteboard are astronomical. An 8′ by 4′ whiteboard costs $239.99 at Office Depot. Not wanting to shell out $240 for basically a piece of poster board, I decided I would build one myself.

Fortunately, there are plenty of DIY whiteboard instructions on the web. You can go to your local hardware store (I went to Home Depot) and buy a cheap piece of showerboard, which is nearly identical to commercial whiteboard. Then it’s as simple as cutting some holes in the board and hanging it on your wall.

All together for the 8′ by 4′ showerboard, wall hangers, and nails was $25 — for a total savings of $214. It might not be pretty, but it gets the job done at a very cheap price. If I were furnishing office space for one of our startups, I’d buy a few of these showerboards and build floor to ceiling whiteboards.

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Instead of those 3 steps, I just type “m <movie name>” into my browser adress bar and hit enter and it takes me right to the search results on IMDB. Similarly, I type “a <product name>” to get results on Amazon. The trick is to create a bookmark that passes the “<movie name>” or “<product name>” text to the site you’re searching on.

To do this, visit your favorite site and search for something. For example, I searched for Donnie Darko on IMDB, which sent me to this URL:

http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Donnie%20Darko

Next, bookmark this page in your browser and then edit the bookmark properties. Change the keyword to the letter you want to use to search. I use “m” for IMDB and “a” for Amazon. Change the search terms (”Donnie%20Darko”) to “%s” like below.

Save the changes and you’re done. Now you can search using your bookmark. I can’t remember where I first learned this trick, but it has quickly become one of my favorites.

What tricks and hacks do you use to speed up your searches?

If you don’t know, meta tags are undisplayed lines of code in a web page that hold data like generator, description, and keywords. Here’s the meta tags for my blog.

I’ve added a “designer” tag, which tells you who designed it and how to find them. I plan to use this tag on all the sites I build going forward.

If everyone used this tag, figuring out who built a site would be as simple as viewing the site’s source code. Unfortunately, this tag is not yet widely used and until it is, I will still have to guess and do detective work to figure out who designed that site.

Do you ever wish you knew who designed a site?

SQLEditor makes it easy to design a database. You can quickly create tables, add fields, edit field attributes and determine relationships between tables. SQLEditor’s visual display helps you understand the relationships between your data.

For example, I’m building a simple, web-based task management app that makes it easy to manage to-do lists (more on this later). Here’s what the database design looks like.

As you can see, I have three tables (users, lists and todo) with various data fields and 1-to-many relations between users and lists, and lists and todo. That is, one user can have many lists and each list can have many to-dos on it.

After visually creating the database, SQLEditor can then export directly to a database or it can export SQL commands to a file. Here’s the SQL commands needed to create my database.

These commands could be written by hand, especially for simple databases like the one I’m using in this example. However, for large, complex databases, database design tools like SQLEditor are indespensable. They remove alot of the work in building databases for web apps.

What do you use to build your databases?

Team

Most people agree the most important ingredient in a startup is the team. I witnessed first-hand how important the team is. The Seed Stage Records (SSR) team was a diverse and talented group that generated a lot of great ideas for what SSR could become. But what ultimately killed SSR was the team’s lack of experience and leadership.

The founder, whom I really like and have a lot of respect for, didn’t have the leadership skills to step up and take control of the group, make tough strategic decisions, and drive the team to set and reach milestones. There were a few people with “strong personalities” that continually derailed the group and questioned its direction. The result was that the group spent most of the time endlessly debating features, pricing, and strategy.

While SSR was struggling to make decisions, I was checking in on other groups and lending my skills where needed. The groups that were making the most progress were composed of serial entrepreneurs, seasoned business execs, and developers that could deliver. The SSR team was talented but there was no one on the team that had experience building the platform and features SSR wanted to deliver. Instead of hustling to build an alpha version, the SSR team spent alot of time trying to figure if and how the product could be built.

Lessons Learned: Pick a startup based on the team not on the idea. Make sure the team has a good dynamic. Make sure the team is composed of people who can actually build the product.

Strategy

By late Saturday night it was apparent that SSR was struggling and desperately needed help. Lance Weatherby was nice enough to drop by shortly after midnight to hold an inspirational strategy session. After observing the group debate strategy, Lance stepped in and asked everyone to take out a sheet of paper and finish this sentence: “Seed Stage records is ____________.”

(Here’s a good template for doing this exercise.)

Lance then wrote down the answers on the whiteboard, which revealed that the team had very different ideas on what SSR should be. Lance led a few more exercises to help the team make a decision on what exactly SSR should do, what it would take to do it, and who would be responsible for the various parts.

Lance’s last minute intervention (thanks Lance!) made it apparent that the team had never agreed on strategy and value proposition. This caused much confusion and led to the stalemate debates that were preventing progress.

Lessons Learned: Decide on strategy and value proposition early on and make sure everyone is aware of and understands it.

Leadership

Lance’s intervention, which several SSR members noted was the highlight of their weekend, illustrated that SSR had a real lack of leadership. SSR needed someone to stand up, lead and make tough decisions that might upset some of the team.

As I tweeted Saturday afternoon, there’s a reason startups have CEOs: someone needs to have the authority to make difficult decisions. SSR was run more as a democracy where everyone had an equal voice. This is no way to run a startup and was the root of many problems.

In addition to needing a CEO who would make decisions, SSR needed other clearly defined roles. SSR needed a product manager, a project manager, a marketer, etc. Instead of assigning roles, team members jumped from task to task  which resulted in duplicate and unfinished work.

Lessons Learned: Leadership and roles are critical. Having a CEO who makes tough decisions and people with specific roles is a must.

While I am disappointed that SSR failed (some group members might move forward on the project), I am grateful for having had the opportunity to work with them, witness the problems and learn from the mistakes.

What are your thoughts about these lessons? What would you add?

Twitpay.me let’s you send payments via Twitter.

Closebuy.me is a location-based inventory search engine. Want a specific camera? CloseBuy.me will tell you who has it in stock and how close they are to you.

GivingTi.me enables entrepreneurs to help each other one hour at a time.

Jumbis generates single product sales websites that turns buyers into evangelists. Automatically.

Seed Stage Records invests in young musicians and helps them secure deals with a bigger record labels.

Reepli.com is a targeted social marketing effort focused on twitter and blog integration to allow companies to engage conversations.

Font Management

Once installed, Font Explorer X imports all your fonts and allows you to easily manage them. You can create font sets and activate and deactivate font sets. A font set is simply a collection of fonts. You can use font sets to organize your fonts by type (serif, sans-serif) by project (xxx website, yyy brochure) or by preference (favorites, less-used).

When you’re working on a project, you can create a project font set and then activate it and the fonts are immediately available in all your apps. When you’re done, just deactivate the font set an you no longer see those fonts in your apps.

Just like activating and deactivating sets, you can also activate/deactivate individual fonts. I went through my scaled-down collection and deactivated 284 of 647 fonts, most of which were fonts I rarely or never use. Deactivating these fonts led to decreased load times in Photoshop and Illustrator.

Font Selection

Font Explorer X allows you to preview how text renders in different fonts at the same time. You enter some text and choose the various fonts to compare, thus making it easy to find just the right font you are looking for.

Font Discovery

But what if you can’t find that perfect font? Well, Linotype, a huge font foundry, has tightly integrated their font store, allowing you to browse and purchase fonts inside the app.

Say you download a cool company brochure and you’d like to know what fonts they used. Font Explorer X’s “detect fonts in documents” feature will tell you. You can use it to discover the fonts used in rtf, eps, pdf, pages, key, and indd files.

While I like the discovery features of Font Explorer X, they have overlooked one important way to find fonts: scanning images. MyFonts has a great page where you can upload an image (or provide an image URL) and they will scan the image and tell you want fonts are in it. I frequently use this when I come across a webpage that has a cool font I’d like to buy.

The Verdict

Font Explorer X has made my design life much better. My apps are faster and I can easily manage and select fonts. As I mentioned above, I would really like to see an image scanner added to font discovery. Other than that, I have no complaints about this app and have really enjoyed using it. 4 out of 5 stars.

What do you use to manage your font collection?