“Money is like gasoline during a road trip. You don’t want to run out of gas on your trip, but you’re not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn’t be about the money.”

– Tim O’Reilly

He does an amazing job describing many fundamentals of Business-to-Business software companies. It’s a must watch if your in the industry.

http://blip.tv/business-of-software/geoffrey-moore-at-business-of-software-2009-3333780

The Beginning

1 – Idea

An entrepreneur or small team identifies a need in the market. They believe it is underserved and that creates an interesting opportunity.

It all starts with the idea but where it begins has very little to do with where things will end.

2 – Looking For The Fit

When looking for the fit, the company is attempting to match this product with the potential user/client. Identifying this is critical to success and this is the stage that is the most difficult for most software products to get past.

3 – Achieved Product Market Fit

You know the product is here when you read “The top 3 products are A, B and C” in an article, and it’s named as one of those three.

When the market is at this point it is a very bad time to go head to head and launch a new product. These products are about to start the uphill climb and if your not on that top 3 list you are probably too late to the game.

Adding Fuel To The Fire

4 – Growth

Now it’s time for a land grab. Usually there will be one leader that takes the lion share of the market. The second and third places are allocated small shares and not much left past that.

The Growth Slows

5 – Consolidation

At some point the land grab will be over and the only way for growth is through acquisition. A few smaller players will be bought up and the landscape is left with a small number of large products.

At this point the products are larger, complex and there are well known industry leaders. The chances to catchup here are about 0%.

6 - Hitting the Plateau

Now that the products are large and are a fit for the target market there is not much room left for growth. The original “build” engineers have either all left or will soon be leaving. The product is now in maintenance mode and at this point the business plan is to maintain the customer base and keep costs down.

In many cases this phase of the product lifecycle can go on for years.

The Time To Strike

7 – Too Large To Change Direction

The benefit to having a large customer base is large profits but the issue is that all the customers require support. Also by this point the product has usually grown to a large code base. Now making a small enhancement there is a huge cost.

Product enhancements come slow and most of the time is spent maintaining the current customers.

8 – Can’t Be Everything to Everyone

The product is now the Swiss Army Knife of software in the industry. The codebase and feature set are huge and many features do not receive the focus they once did.

Also, now the costs of supporting this large foundation has required the price of the product to also rise.

9 – The Entrepreneurs Time To Strike

Now it’s time for the entrepreneurs to strike. Either technology has significantly changed the landscape or the incumbents have ignored the needs of a subset of their users. Either way, there is now a market opportunity.

Many times the incumbents have even known of this opportunity but can not move on it. This may be because it could jeopardize revenue from the current client base or may just not have been a large enough to get priority.

10 – Little Guys Move In

We have come full circle, an idea is formed and the search for market fit is started. The market is small and unimportant to the larger players. Since the new team is focusing on a smaller market, they are usually able to very specifically target them. Also, since the team is much smaller they are able to come in at a lower price.

Between highly targeted features and a much lower price, this new team is able to gain traction and hopefully the life cycle starts over again.

Image Credit

1. In the Posts section find your scheduled post
2. Use the Quick Edit (not Edit)
3. Change the Status to Published and change the Date to some date in the past
   1. Note: This uses server time which may be set different than your local time. It is best to go back atleast one day to ensure your actually in the “past”
   2. Note: This date is also your Published Date so keep it mind that it will also control the order that posts appear on the public site
4. Update the post and your all set.

Enjoy.

Paper Browser

Paper Browser 2

Web sketching template

iPhone App Wireframe Template

iPhone Wireframe Templates

iPad Application Sketch Template v1

Image Credit

1. Facebook’s Bias Against Newcomers

2. Facebook’s Catch-22

3. The Velvet Rope: “Top News”

4. “Most Recent” News Is Censored, Too

5. “Stalking” Your Friends Won’t Get You Noticed

6. Having Friends Who Stalk You WILL Help Your Popularity

7. Links Trump Status Updates

8. Photos and Videos Trump Links

9. The Power of Comments

10. Why Facebook Really is Like High School

Original post - How Facebook Decides What To Put In Your News Feed – These 10 Secrets Reveal All

This is a must follow list for all entrepreneurs in the technology space.

Mixergy

http://mixergy.com/

This Week In Startups – TWIST

http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/

Gary Vaynerchuk

http://garyvaynerchuk.com/

the Frank Peters Show

http://www.thefrankpetersshow.com/

This Week In Tech – TWIT

http://twit.tv/twit

Marketing Over Coffee

http://www.marketingovercoffee.com/

HubSpot TV

http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing-podcast/ [iTunes]

Venture Voice

http://www.venturevoice.com/

Venture Cast

http://ventureblog.com/ [iTunes]

37signals Podcast

http://37signals.com/podcast

The Web 2.0 Show

http://web20show.com/

Startups for the Rest of Us

[Update - Thanks to Frank in the comments]

http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ [iTunes]

Please leave comments with any suggestions of additional podcasts that should to be on this list.

[Image credit]

All first time entrepreneurs goes threw these delusions. We are all scared of people stealing our ideas but the truth is that ideas are worth nothing. It all comes down to your experience in the market. You’re going after and the execution behind that idea. Your experience determines your success of how well you’re going to execute it.

Ideas are worth nothing, its the level of execution behind your ability to execute with the right timing, the right people and the right amount of revenue, but please don’t let this scare you, follow your gut, and pursuit it with passion, go out and tell people about your idea. You need to get concrete feedback from others.

If you find that its already in the market and other business’s to compete with don’t be disappointed. That’s great, which means you have a market you can go after. Remember you need competition to motivate yourself to be better and be able to innovate in your market.

So please do be a favor go out, network with others and tell them about your ideas and draw as much feedback as possible.

Guest blog post by Keven Dones of Labortopia

When creating a page, the first thing to check is where it will rank once it hits the search engines. The following 6 steps will show you how:

1 – Make a list of all possible keywords

Brain storm lists of all possible keywords that may be relevant to your business. Try to figure out what possible searches someone would be typing into a search engine and would like to find your content at the other end. You’re not trying any sort of linkbait here. What the goal is here is to picture someone saying “I was searching for XYZ and I came across the perfect site.”

This is the time to get far out and come up with words and phrases that your competition may have not. It is true that the more out there you go the less search traffic there will be but, the less traffic, the less competition for these keywords. If your just starting out, there is a good chance that you don’t command the authority to rank for the top keywords. In that case it’s best to start with some search terms that are a bit out there, have less traffic, but you’ll be able to totally own.

2 – Check PageRank (PR) using Google Toolbar

Once you install the toolbar in your FireFox browser, you may have to enable the PageRank feature. To do this you can simply:

Adjust Google Toolbar Options (blue wrench on the far right) -> Tools -> check off PageRank -> Save

Now that this is complete, you will start to see a small green bar up on the toolbar for each page you go to. If you mouse over this bar you will see the numeric PageRank (ie 5/10). Each page on your site will have a unique PageRank assigned to it. Normally internal pages have a lower PR than your front page. If your site (at least the first page) has less than a PR3 your going to need some link-building work before you can rank for many search terms.

There are many arguments out there that the Google Toolbar is no longer a useful tool for checking PageRank. My responses to that would be

1. Since we don’t know exactly how the search engines work this is more of an art than a science

2. It’s one of the best tools we currently have to figuring out page authority so I will keep using it until something better comes along

3- Check PageRank for your keywords

Now that you know the PR of your site, go back and figure out what you’re up against. Take all of the keywords that you came up with in step #1 and search for each in Google (feel free to use Yahoo, Bing, etc. but most of your search traffic will come from Google, so I recommend you start there). Make a list of the PR for the top 3 results that come back from Google for each search term.

This will give you a clue of the competition out there for this keyword(s). Keep in mind that if you are a lower PageRank, it is possible to beat out a higher ranked site using onpage SEO tactics. Just make sure that you are realistic, if your site is a PR1 you should not be attempting to go after PR8 sites.

You need to pick a set of search terms that will have an opportunity at coming up in the top three page results. That means for 99% of people trying to go after a term such as New York Lawyer is pretty much out of the question. Instead you should be trying to get much more specific, for instance Staten Island Medical Malpractice Lawyer.

4 – Check the overall search traffic with the Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

After you’ve completed step #3 you have the short list of SEO terms to target. Using the “Keyword Tool” you’ll be able to focus your efforts on the best choice. Out of all the terms that you can compete against, run them through the Keyword Tool. Sort the results by the “Global Monthly Search Volume” and that will give you a fair indication of how many searches there are each month for this term.

Now that you have these terms, and the amount of search traffic each of those terms have, it’s up to you to make the choice of what term(s) to optimize for.

5 – Highly optimize your content

You will find a great checklist at Google Ranking Factors – SEO Checklist of what Google weights each of these on page elements, but here are a few places to start.

- URLs
- Title tags
- Page descriptions
- page content
- H1, H2 and H3 tags
- Image alt tags

Now don’t go and stuff a lot of worthless keywords in each of these tags… Google does not like that and more importantly your users will not like it. Instead, just keep your terms in mind when building your content. For example, you make choose a title such as “Bob Smith – Staten Island Medical Malpractice Lawyer” instead of something less specific such as “Bob Smith – New York Law”.

See what we did above? You’re not stuffing keywords where they do not belong. Instead, be aware that the terms you use reflect what your page will be known for. Have a goal of the terms your optimizing for and keep that in mind while you’re crafting new content.

6 – Get links from other pages with high page rank (see step #2).

This may be the most important step that has been left for last… without inbound links, nothing else you do matters. The number of quality inbound links your page has, the higher your PageRank will be. Also, since the results are cumulative, the more high quality inbound links the better.

What is a high quality link?

A high quality link is a link from another authoritative page with the less outbound links, the less the better. For instance, normally if your site is the only external link on a PR4 page, that is better than being one of 1000 links on a page (a directory for instance) even if it’s a PR5.

Just off the record, I would not pass up the PR5 link but I am just saying that I would pick the PR4 if I had to choice.

How do I get inbound links?

Most of the time you’ll hear “Create remarkable content” and that will get you inbound links. It will usually involve publishing a blog, writing interesting articles, and getting people to link to you because of it. This is what inbound marketing is based on, and it’s honestly one of the best ways for building long term value.

Contacting site owners directly is another method of getting inbound links. This will have a lower chance of success in most cases but it is usually worth trying. To increases your odds of success, try to be sure the link will be mutually beneficial to both you and the other site owner. This will usually mean that your site will have to offer information or a product that is useful to the users of the site linking to you. Don’t just email random site owners but start with a small number of highly targeted emails.

Other methods are to simply buy your inbound links. Many directories, blogs and other small sites are willing to sell text links to your site. Just make sure that they do not include a nofollow tag. I believe this a gray area in search engine policies… Google has openly stated it is against their terms to buy links. At the same time preferential treatment is given to sites listed in pay-for-inclusion directories such as Yahoo! Directory. This is a gray area so use it at your own risk.

Keep in mind that as you do this, your PageRank will be increasing. This does not show up on the toolbar right away… updates to the public PR only take place about 4-5 times a year. This does mean that as your PR increases, you should go back to setup #2 and re-evaluate your list. Now that your site has become more creditable, your going to be able to go for the more popular search terms, so constantly be reviewing where you stand.

This is just a crash course in how to rank top in Google. Keep in mind that this subject is always changing and evolving so you will also have to.

Have these methods worked for you? If not, what have you done that has worked? Please let me know in the comments section.

Update #1

@petewailes has suggested the following link for additional research on what factors most effect your ranking. Thanks a lot Pete.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors