The capitalization costs associated with your startup are something that should be well defined in your business plan.  Unfortunately, sometimes plans do not match reality.  That is why your capitalization plan is one of the most important aspects of your startup.  Now, if you’re bootstrapping, it’s not such a big deal.  But, if you’re building something serious, you have to account for planned and unplanned costs.  It’s a daunting task to say the least.

Most important, have a PLAN.  Not just the big picture.  You need a real business plan — spreadsheets and all.  Figure out QuickBooks — get training if you need it.  You’re a big picture person?  Too bad, the details are where it’s at.  Get comfortable with the idea that outside of being well-funded, you need to analyze every transaction in your business.  Your investors will definitely want to know what your profitability report looks like.  Know your books, period.  Now, some of that comes after capitalization, but the reality is you need a plan BEFORE you get to that point.  Plan as if.  Act as if.

I’ve consulted for businesses that have bootstrapped and financed and the singular conclusion I have drawn is that in both cases these businesses’ success hinged upon their level of organization and planning.  I know it sucks.  Just suck it up and do it.

There is a lot of hype surrounding registering a domain name that contains the keywords for your product or service.  I’ve had domains rich in my keywords and others bereft of any relevance at all.  The common wisdom is that you domain name doesn’t matter.  Having tried it both way, I disagree.

Yes, all the good names are taken unless you have a lot of cach lying around.  The good news is that you can still be creative and find good domains.  Hyphens are your friend.  Plurals are you friend.  And, of course, optimizing your pages will always yield better non-PPC results (i.e. search traffic).

I’d like to tell you that I’m going to keep you posted on my latest experiment, but honestly I’m too lazy to post all that much.  Stay optimistic, but not foolishly so.  There are still a ton of great domains to be had!  If you’ve found a great name and have made it work, let me know.  You don’t have to be specific, just share your experience in the comments below.

All that changed yesterday.  I never thought I would say this, but please leave me voice mail!  I just discovered a service called PhoneTag.  PhoneTag intercepts your voice mail (you actually transfer your voice mail service to them) then transcribes the message into text.  The service then emails the text of the message to you and attaches the original message as a WAV audio file if you really want to listen to it.

The best part is that it is crazy accurate.  I received a 40 second message this morning that was letter perfect including punctuation — very impressive.

PhoneTag offers a free 30 day trial membership then you have paid options thereafter.  You can choose from a per message fee of $0.35 each, a flat fee of $9,95 for 40 messages ($0.25 each if you go over) or $29.95 per month for unlimited messages.

Give them a try.  If you sign up using the links here you’ll get 30 days free.

Non competes can be daunting if you are asked to sign one.  Some things to keep in mind are how specific the agreement is and how long is the non compete in force.  Regardless of which side of the table you are on, you want to be specific when it comes to non compete agreements.  If you sign or write an agreement that is overly broad, it will be less likely the agreement will be enforceable.  I’ve signed a few that pretty much say, you agree not to compete with us in any respect for what we do today and anything we might imagine to do in the future.  It’s too broad and it won’t stand.  Non competes also won’t work if you are being asked to refrain from doing what you do for a living.  If you’re an electrician, for example, a non compete is not likely enforceable if you’re being asked to not do what you do for a living.  Now, say, you are an electrician that does a specific installation based on your employer’s proprietary method, that’s a different story.

The next thing to consider is how long your non compete is in force after you leave the company.  If you have highly specialized training or information this period can be as long as three or more years.  if you’re a generalist, I wouldn’t expect that period to last more than 6 months.  Remember, you may be required to sign a non compete as a condition of employment, but you can always try to negotiate its terms.

If you find you are being asked to sign a non compete, be sure to review it carefully and employ competent counsel for their opinion as well.  Don’t just sign this kind of document carte blanche.  Read it, understand the terms, negotiate better terms if possible and most important understand its enforceability in general and in your state in particular.  The peace of mind you’ll gain by going through these motions can be invaluable.

This week is off to a roaring start on all fronts.  I’m juggling three different initiatives and all have substantial momentum.  I wish I could share more, but at this point mum is the word indeed.

Today, I was looking through a contract from an agency that would not disclose their partner prior to the agreement’s execution.  Now, I’d never sign anything like this anyway.  You have to be super careful when it comes to warrants, reps and indemnities especially if you have a third party who is not party to your agreement. I’m not a lawyer, but my lawyer is and I wouldn’t even put something like this in front of her.

Here’s the fun part.  If you choose File -> Properties in say, Word or Excel, a document summary dialog box pops up.  In this case the original author (the undisclosed third party) was actually the author of the agreement.  Check it out:

Normally, that wouldn’t be all that important, but I was already in the middle of direct negotiations with that previously unknown party.  The point is, while I would have had to puke on the agreement in its current form, I saved myself a ton of time by walking away by using the old, “the economics aren’t right” excuse.  On the other hand, if I hadn’t been working with them directly, this would have enabled me to circumvent the agency.

This is really amatuer stuff.  There’s a ton of meta data attached to all kinds of files.  It pays to know where to look if you’re curious or if you want to erase it before sharing files/documents.

I went back through my AdWords campaign and made some adjustment pre-launch and lit the fuse today.  We’ll see how it works out tomorrow.  Right now, I’m running two ad group with about 30 keywords each.  I also have three ad variations set to do battle each ad group.  I’m not split testing my landing page just yet because the spend will be very low and I honestly need more time to get another version together.  The good news is I think the initial version will be fine on this one.  Nice to have a job where you’ve been creating and optimizing sites for years.  The bad news is I’ve never sold anything “real”.  This campaign is for a product rather than a service so getting my thinking straight going into it was pretty key to having the site right.

Once I get a better track on where I’m at I’ll share my failure success with you all.  Wish me luck!

What’s it do?  Simple, it aggregates all of your messages and attachments and presents them in a sidebar view so that it’s easy to keep organized.  Sick of cleaning out your inbox?  I was.  Now I don’t think I’ll even bother anymore.  Here’s the feature list:

• Fast email search
• Rankings, graphs and statistics about how you and your contacts use email
• Navigate email by people — who’s connected by email
• Threaded conversations — click a message and see the entire thread
• Looking for attachments to conversations?  Look no more — they’re right in the sidebar
• Phone number are extracted from email and appear in the sidebar
• And other stuff I haven’t even figure out yet

I had to call a contact to day and clicked on her email message.  Her phone number jumped right out at me.  I have 500+ contacts and finding a phone number can be a pain.  Not anymore.

Part of being productive and successful boils down to how you manage your time.  Software like xobni will definitely make me more productive when it comes to managing my email.  Now, let’s see if it can make me even more successful.  That would be a crazy trick!  Using Xobni?  Tell me what you think in the comments below.