There you are! Where have you been?! Running late to the party aren’t you? Ok, well no sweat. Just pay attention. I know a guy. I’ll get ya in…

This “town” of two cities (Washington & Baltimore) is full of talented & bold entrepreneurs.   If you are a well-funded venture capitalist from out west, I am going to give it to you straight, “East Coast style.”  You would have to be a fool not to seriously consider this area for opportunities.

Let’s look at what your money has to contend with out west: you have sunshine, great surfing, snowy mountains, and lovely weather year round.   You have corporate tech campuses that look more like college dormitories. Trying to score the next Twitter in the Valley sounds like combing through a picked over fruit stand just before closing time.  Even if you find something “fresh,” it’s probably already been pawed at by your larger competitors. 

Here on the East Coast: there’s no skiing.   Our mountains are covered in ice. Don’t bother bringing your surfboards, either.  Our Capitol was built on a swamp, not the beach, for good reason — the Founding Fathers knew they needed to keep the wandering mind focused on getting things done.    

So just bring your laptops.  We have endless cube farms just over the Potomac River and plenty of wifi around town.   Because you know what we do for fun around here?  We WORK.  This is a town full of workaholics!

How are those West Coast portfolio burn out rates doing these days, btw? Not so “hawt” huh?    Tell you what, because I like you, I’ll fill you in on a little secret.  Come closer…I don’t want EVERYBODY to know…   

DC is full of diamonds in the rough. They’re surviving as lifestyle businesses, bootstrapped from the ground up, because the VC pool here doesn’t have a deep end.  These gems are hyper-focused on delivering products & services that are in demand, making a difference, and oh my gosh, this is the best part… some of them actually have paying customers. Yes! I know!  Who does that, right? 

But hey, slow your roll.  Don’t get too excited and start bringing all your VC friends to the party.  These Washington and Baltimore entrepreneurs are pretty tough.  They’ve been going at it without the Valley’s help just fine.  It’s not like they need your money to fund their next office foosball competition. If you want to play, you have to offer some fair deals or they’re just going to turn you down.   

So yes, Valley VCs, I’m speaking to you.  When you get sick and tired of burning off your cash on the next dollar mobile app of the week, do yourselves a favor and pay a visit to your nation’s Capitol. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The Small Business Trends newsletter I received this morning had little interesting tidbit regarding pricing by Andy Birol that sounded like similar advice you get when learning to play poker.

If you’ve ever played poker, you would quickly learn that the level of enthusiasm (or lack thereof) can be a big “tell” as to where your bet is in terms your opponent’s willingness to gamble with you.

Having invested in an expensive Texas Hold’em education myself, I think the analogy is pretty good up to a point. If there’s no negotiation process with your customers, you are probably far from a fair number for both parties. Yes, it is part art, part knowing your customer, and part knowing your market. And a bit like poker advice to a novice gambler, you should definitely get to know the game and the players before starting to play.

But this is business. And unlike poker, where the zero sum gain is what everyone is playing for, that’s not the case in this day and age of the pressures from social media & transparency on businesses.

If you want to stay in business for a long time, the best advice I know is that you have make sure there is a win for both sides in all negotiations. No one whether the customer or the provider should feel they’re not getting a fair exchange. You not only risk losing the relationship, you risk a bad deal being exposed to the public that could potentially affect your future business relationships.

So play as fair as you can, and you’ll do just fine.

February 16, 2010

Is Your Client Costing You Money?

Posted by Marla Tabaka at 4:00 PM

We’ve all done it…hung on to the client who makes unreasonable demands on our time and resources. We may hang on out of the fear of letting go of the revenue, or we may believe that the impossible client is going to change, so why not wait it out?

This is the client who often pays late or argues about the amount of the invoice. This client calls or emails more frequently than the rest and demands that you have an answer for him on the spot. She expects last minute changes and somehow has a direct line of communication to your stomach because it%u2019s always tied in knots when her number shows up on caller ID. This is the client who pays the least but expects as much, or more, than your top-paying clients. And just when you think you%u2019ve had enough and it%u2019s time to do something about it, this client%u2019s radar goes off and he says something really nice and tells you how much he appreciates you!

Listen up freelancers and startup entrepreneurs. All clients are not the same. Yes, I’ve said it. Having a bad client in the bunch is actually unfair to the rest of your well deserving clients, and knowing how to address problem clients is critical to your success.

Maria Tabaka covers how to go about diplomatically setting the rules so you can do you best work. And it’s definitely a skill you have to learn to apply judiciously, if you want to do good business here in Washington DC.

Technology certainly makes a lot of things easier; including being an idiot. Dr. Jim Taylor talks about how a technology has made it easier to indulge our impulsively bad behaviors. I agree with him in that mistakes and errors in judgment can be magnified with services like Twitter or Facebook.

But I am not so sure that it makes us any dumber or this is a “new age of idiocy”. I hate to say it, I think we’re all pretty dumb to begin with (or at least capable of doing pretty boneheaded stuff on occasion). It’s just that it simply use to be easier to hide it from each other and now no longer the case.

Before email, angrily written letters would sit on a desk until the writer got around to dropping it off at the post office. Maybe upon a bit reflection, they decided to best not send it… smart move? Perhaps… but they still wrote it.

Year 2010, we got instant messaging, videologs, BBM, and prodigious status updates. Plenty of easy-to-use-and-let-the-world-know how you REALLY feel about things.

Hey, if you consider yourself a bit of a hothead, well then simply avoid using Twitter or Facebook, right?

Well, what about those holiday party pictures someone took of you in unflattering contexts? Yes the ones that they did you the favor of uploading them into Facebook and tagged by your “friends” because they thought you were a hoot that night. Yes those pictures.

…and there it is, no one is safe from idiotic moments.

That fact is, we all already act like idiots sometimes, and it’s just a matter of time before some tags you. And in this town, where image is everything, I can’t wait until we all get tagged doing something stupid. Then maybe then we can all get over it, and move on to more important things.

Here’s a good list of things to check through this year regarding your career, your web presence, your social network(s), and even your desk. And if you missed it, check your web site’s copyright year!

I think it is time for some spring cleaning around here. Stay tuned. We’re going to be updating a few things around here.

An article on Twitter’s growth stats flatlining Ben Parr caught my attention. According to one Twitter stat, the number of unique visitors per month has dropped to a measly 1.45% growth. That is in December, Twitter got approximately 22.81 million uniques, down from 22.48 million the prior month.

Parr lists a few interesting reasons as to why it could be that Twitter has flatlined, but I think he missed one; Twitter has been overexposed in the media.

Forget Comscore & Quantcast numbers, we need to ask E-Poll guys to include “Twitter” when they do their next “Overexposed Celebrities” poll.

Is this really a big deal? Is this the end of Twitter?

No, not really. Kind of like the housing market bubble, when the media caught Twitter-mania, it artificially inflated the monthly usage stats. Now that everyone and their mother knows about Twitter, and it’s fallen of mainstream media’s new cycle (hey, they got Palin and McGwire to talk about now) I think the stats are simply slipping back to a baseline usage and growth.

Facebook by comparison grew almost 3% according to Compete, that is 1.5% or so more than Twitter.

Hey, how about that? IS that a big deal?

I guess to some (geeks) but not to me. Look, consider the fact that Facebook usage between July and August actually shrank, while Twitter’s usage grew, no one I knew was calling out the demise of Facebook.

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/twitter.com+facebook.com/

Along with Snuggies and the ShamWow, Twitter has gotten a little too much attention this past summer. But when the dust settles, Twitter is going to continue to grow steadily.

Louis Lazaris wrote this great article making a strong case against using those vertical navbars on your website. The above image shows eye tracking diagrams of users visiting various websites, and just like banner ads, you can see how the eye naturally avoids reading into those areas. They’re not even look at your vertical navbars! Note the last screen capture on the right is a Google search results page with no vertical navbars.

Like Lazaris explains, there are exceptions to the rule, but generally speaking, your primary form of navigation should be horizontal, with three to five elements to choose form. Less is more, if you want your website visitors to click through as well as digest the content you are providing, you need to get in the habit of teasing them and not just try to force everything front and center.

Are there exceptions? Absolutely. Vertical navbars are okay for simple lists or calls to action, contextualized as a secondary navigation. And as Lazaris points out, sometimes the exception is simply, “a client who insists on it.”

Why do designers still use vertical navbars? Most of the time is just an indicator of a novice designer that is lacking some fundamentals. We shouldn’t see the use of vertical navbars as site’s primary navigation if you except your website to be considered professional designed… unless of course, you really know what you’re doing.