17 mistakes startups make — the 100-word version [Silicon Valley Users Guide]: “In 1999 John Osher started Dr. John’s SpinBrush to sell a $5 electric toothbrush. In 2001, he sold the company to Procter & Gamble for $475 million. Here are his ‘17 mistakes start-ups make’ in 100 words.

Failing to spend enough time researching the business idea to see if it’s viable.
Miscalculating market size. Entrepreneurs say, ‘The market size is 50 million people. If I only sell to 2 percent, I’d be selling a million.’ But most products sell less than 1 percent.
Making a commitment on sales projections that were wrong. Created costs that require those projections to be met. Run out of money.
Overprojecting sales prospects.
Making cost projections that are too low.
Hiring too many people and spending too much.
Lacking a contingency plans.
Bringing in unnecessary partners.
Hiring for convenience rather than skill requirements.
Spending half their time doing something that represents 5 percent of their business.
Accepting that it’s ‘not possible’ too easily.
Focusing too much on volume and company size rather than profit.
Looking for somebody to tell you you’re right.
Lacking simplicity.
Lacking clarity of your long-term aim and business purpose.
Going after too many targets at once.
Lacking an exit strategy.”

(Via Valleywag.)

TuneCore Tells Us Where We Can Shove It: “As you can imagine, we didn�??t expect this kind of response from a simple email to their press group. If anyone out there actually represents TuneCore and is interested in having a civil conversation with us about the business, please contact us. Otherwise, we�??ll just go f** ourselves per Price�??s [ed note: the CEO] request.”

(Via TechCrunch.)

The dialog continues on the relevance of “press” releases. I have worked for firms where there was an artificial emphasis on sending out one press release per week. We even hired a consultant who was a marvel as spinning such useless tidbits such as “re-painting the parking spaces in the front lot” as a sign of business development.

On the other hand, my most successful effort was working with our agency as we launched an industry-leading technology. We created a campaign of planned editorial and analyst briefings and created a series of exclusives related to the release. When all was said and done, we achieved an almost simultaneous coverage with covers and articles by major editors/columnists over a 60-day period at launch.

The issue remains in balancing the need for attention with understanding what constitutes “news”. Today, you don’t have worry about print press only - but you can craft an excellent campaign building on alternate news streams (e.g. bloggers and podcasters.) But you need to still feed the machine and there is clearly an opportunity to redefine the traditional press release.

We battled this problem when working with banks - they wanted to the middle-name of your second aunt and that effectively made having others responsible for making changes on the account from accessing the data. That is great for personal accounts - not so great for corporate accounts where the individual responsible for the account might be gone tomorrow.

There needs to be a better way to ensure corporate access to accounts - and still provide security (I like the RSA keychain devices - still geographically limiting but works better than “Your favorite color?”)

Just get on with it - don’t load the entire stream again for me. I just left the site where I could read the feed in context, if I wanted to. I want to click and go.

[Sorry for the grumpiness - the gray skies here in the PNW must be getting to me!]

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