Portfolio Rant

Around last fall, I started trading with an E*trade account to better understand other investors using Wikinvest.  Prior to that, I had spent some time positioning a 457 account, but nothing more than that. Just a few months into my time at Wikinvest, though, it was hard to not want to invest.  I’m constantly reading investment reports, finance blogs, news, and generally talking about the markets and investment ideas.  It was a perfect fit and, lucky for me, I decided to start my investment portfolio right around the time of one of the greatest stock market crashes ever.

Investing since Wall Street’s collapse in October (and then Geithner’s bobble in March) has its benefits.  With valuations seemingly at the lowest they’ve been in decades, it felt like a good time to be greedy (or as greedy one can be when purchasing 10-50 stocks at a time).

Investing has since fascinated me.  I’m in awe of the thought that, for $9.82, I can own part of American Express (it certainly helps that their dividends offset some of my credit card interest too) or Tata Motors for $4.42.  Ownership can be addictive, and I certainly throughout some of the markets lows.

Since this is an entirely new portfolio of mine, I have a long horizon.  Unless we go into a 1990s Japan-like slide, I’m assuming that a monkey could make money with a long-term investment just after the Oct 08 to March 09 fall.  That said, I’m certainly not willing to count on that, and after markets rose this spring and summer, I’m now looking for quality companies.

I like a good, low debt-to-equity / high ROA / low P/E combo if it’s to make it into my portfolio.  From all the opportunities out there, I start with sectors and regions and work my way down to companies.  I stay away from retail in the U.S., but I embrace it in India and China.  I like companies that build things, or build things that are used to build things, or transport things, or dispose of the wreckage from buildings things.  I like financial institutions — a few of them at least, the ones I haven’t heard much about on television.  Before I invest in a company, I look at recent earnings reports, annual reports, investment reports, and read news associated with the company.

The Investment Portfolio as Venture Capital

It’s not long into this process that I realize what it must take for a VC to part ways with several million dollars of their and their client’s money for an unproven idea and company, all the while knowing they can only, maybe, get the initial investment back in three to five years.  If they’re incredibly good and lucky, they’ll get that investment back with interest.  It’s no wonder it’s hard to get money from a VC.

I’ve found I have certain tendencies with my portfolio similar to a VC.  For my stable investment — the IRA — I’m less willing to risk an entire company’s collapse.  I focus on ETFs like ADRE or QQQQ that follow big emerging market and major technology companies, respectively.  On the other hand, I’ve come to think of my trading account as my “extra” savings where I can take chances.  It’s where I’m going to prove my investor worth.  I’m OK with it disappearing over night.  I’m willing to be risky with multiple small cap companies, looking for one explosive stock.  I spread those investments around; some work while others don’t.  I do what I can to be good and hope to get lucky.  Sometimes, it’s no wonder it’s so easy to get money from a VC.

Portfolios for Founders

The other part about running your own portfolio is — you learn to understand the levers for building your own business.  Create more value than you require.  Give away equity for cash; take on debt for cash.  Purchase people / space / machines.  Convince someone to give you more cash and continue the loop  It’s all there within your portfolio.  You expect management of your portfolio companies to control costs, increase their cash, and demonstrate health by increasing earnings, milestones, dividends, etc.  Management has to preach to employees and investors, alike, with probably a slightly different story for each.  It all sounds like start-up world to me (except those dividends, of course).

As an early founder, you’ll be stuck in the details of your business at all times.  Your investors won’t.  They’ll expect you to step back from the conversation about the misalignment of that button by 5px and figure out whether your market strategy is going to withstand this economy given your cash on hand.  They’ll want it in digestible figures and metrics.  Further, they’ll want you to put your thousands of hours a year into a half hour phone call and presentation.  They just want the basics — are you creating more value than you require?

It makes you understand both the weight of the founder and the risk a venture capital takes investing in a start-up.  Both parties are flying blind in this arrangement.  There’s no easily accessible “Sell” button like there is on my E*trade account, and a bankrupt start-up is worth even less than GM.  Investments are designed for a three to five year exit (at least) with only a hope and a prototype to go on.

Founders, it’s up to you to figure out the rest.  You should understand what your investors are going through (employees are investors too — but that requires another post).  Just remember to create more than you require.  Start from nothing and be willing to lose everything.  Create ownership.

Beyond that, you can go deeper into your expertise.  Learn how to effectively target your ad campaigns, reduce your CPCs for your online ads, or find free ways of advertising your site.  Measure what your users use most, build human-friendly URLs, write keyword rich content.  Start your Twitter campaign, Friendfeed account, and Facebook account — then, link them all.  Now, take all of the various ways I’ve just described, throw in all of the techniques I’m missing, mix and match, and, well, you’ve got innumerable ways to build traffic.

Please, please, just don’t use the automated email request for a link exchange with other sites as a way of building traffic.  Anyone that’s ever run a barely popular website has seen one of these things:

Hi

My name is NAME. I’ve just visited your website
enterventure.com and I was wondering if you’d be interested in
exchanging links with my website. I can offer you a HOME PAGE link back
from my Business and Marketing website which is WEBSITE URL HERE
with page rank #.

As mentioned, your link would be placed on the site HOME PAGE, not on
any “links” pages which may be buried in the site somewhere. I’m sure
this exchange would be benefitial for both of our sites, helping
towards increasing our visibility in search engines.

If you are interested, please add the following information to your
website and kindly let me know when it’s ready. I’ll do the same for
you in less than 24 hours, otherwise you can delete my link from your
site.

I’ve only recently begun receiving these emails at EnterVenture.com, but I’ve seen an almost bi-weekly message like this one while working at Wikinvest.  (Remember what that feedback email breakdown looked like.)  Quite honestly, I don’t know for sure that these messages don’t work (some people must buy into them or else they’d have died out by now); however, I’m fairly certain that any site worth it’s page rank isn’t going to respond to this message.  More importantly, if you’re relying on this stategy, or are relying on a “web consultant” employing this strategy, it’s very clear you’re fishing for an easy path to success where one simply doesn’t exist.  By virtue of using this strategy, you’ve already predicted your site’s future demise. 

There’s only one free lunch you’ll find at a startup — the one given to employees to keep them in the office working longer.

Where’s the feedback?

How hard is it to get meaningful feedback online?  I recently took a look through all of the feedback emails sent to Wikinvest

since I joined.  Without actually counting them, here’s the rough breakdown of emails in order of email “market share”:

1. Classes and Conference invitations
2. Complain letters to company executives (i.e., someone goes to the Honeywell page and writes a nasty feedback letter “to Honeywell” — only, Honeywell doesn’t get it, we do.)
3. Requests for link exchanges
4. Advertising / Partnership inquiries
5. Feedback of the Useless Variety (everything looks great!)
6. Feedback of the Useful Variety (complaints)

There’s no better feedback than complaints.  Of course, we all love the pat-on-the-back feedback email, but its’ the “what the hell’s wrong with you?  No one can read that font!” email that really gets us moving.  At Wikinvest, total feedback — both useless and useful — probably only equates to 5% of all emails to our feedback address.  To take a great example, today Wikinvest released a whole slew of new features, including a bit of press to go with it.  What sort of volume did we see in our feedback inbox?  We had five emails — despite the fact that traffic today was multiples higher than a typical day.

Despite the huge Get Satisfaction Feedback buttons that have been popping up all over the web, it seems like most often, feedback emails are anything but.  That first time you put up the feedback button, you think, “Hey, someone’s going to email us and tell us they love that widget 13 pixels above the comment box.  It’s much better than the 5 pixels we argued about for half an hour.”  Surprisingly enough, it doesn’t work that way.

So, how do sites actually get meaningful feedback from their users?

Analytics

There’s no better way to understand what your users do and don’t like data and analytics.  You can get an unlimited amount of information about your users if you know how to pimp out your Google Analytics the right now.  If you’re not going to tell us what you like and don’t like with your words, well, we’re just going to figure it out with your clicks.  The only problem with analytics, though, is that it only tells you what people like and don’t like.  The “why” people like and don’t like your service is up to you to figure out.  Maybe some of these other methods help…

Social Media

Like I said, after today’s Wikinvest launch, we saw four meaningful feedback emails; however, the TechCrunch article had 19 comments.  The Giga Om and Wall Street Journal articles had a few more.  On Twitter, the flood of Wikinvest references certainly helped too.  Users are talking about your site, they’re just not talking to you so you have to go out and find them.

Group Protest

This one’s exclusive to sites that allow it’s users to form groups around certain passions.  That’s right, I’m talking to you Facebook.  Who knew you were so lucky to have groups you could go to like, “The New New NEW Facebook Redesign Sucks — Boycott Facebook! — Oh wait, no, we actually like it now.”

Power Users

At Wikinvest, we’ve discovered a novel way of getting feedback from our users — talking to them!  On the phone even!  A group of power users helps propel Wikinvest’s content, but, almost more importantly, they’re invaluable to feedback about new products and features.  They tell us what we should and shouldn’t be doing, help fill in gaps in our team’s knowledge base, and often, they just know what they want better than we do.  You might call them consiglieres; oh wait, we do call them consiglieres.  Thanks guys!

For me, anything new starts with a brainstorm.  Almost everything I’ve ever written started as a brainstormed list and was later constructed into a complete thought.  As much as I’ve mentioned enjoying this in the past, in a way, I envy those people that can turn a blank page directly into to something well crafted and polished.  It certainly saves a few steps.

In college, my freshman year writing teacher once told me I was one of the most step-by-step writers she’d ever read.  I could apparently write (surprise to me), I wasn’t lacking things to say (less of a surprise), but I was just really, really sequential she told me.  (This woman had the dark, artsy grad student thing down pat.  I’m sure she didn’t know what to make of my engineering ass.)  My creativity simply comes at a different part in the process — the brainstorm’s where the fun is.  It’s putting together the puzzle from that brainstorm that’s logical sequential.

Anyways, here it is.  We’ll see how I put it all together.

Community

• Sustainability in your Community
• Eyeballs to Fingertips Ratio

Build systems, not products.

Feedback – get it every where you can

• Emails
• Webinar
• Power Users
• Coworkers

Revenue

• You need more
• Who has the pockets
• Traditional vs. Non Traditional

Operations

• Always getting better
• Document!
• Know when to fudge it.

Wikinvest – Working for a startup, analyzing conglomerates.

Changing Landscape

• Falling (failing) newspapers.
• Large institutions are out.  Little is in.
• Paying platforms – Mahalo, Facebook, iPhone
• Manager your own money

ADRE and QQQQ

Ownership

• Company Options
• Personal Investing

What’s Failure?  What’s success?

Your Network

• Casually
• Personally
• Network-ily

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m obsessed with finding ways to work faster and smarter.  I’ve talked about designing and brainstorming faster with my whiteboard and Balsamiq‘s mock up tool.  I spent over 600 words describing how I organize my email inbox, and I can’t wait for Ativiti to launch so I can share even more ideas about process.

Given all that, it’s no wonder I enjoy working for a startup.  From my experience, it’s the ultimate test in your ability to get a lot done in very little time.  There are always a million things you have to do.  There’s absolutely no way you can accomplish everything.  How do you figure out what gets done and what doesn’t?  When no one is telling you what to do, what’s the most important thing you should be doing?

From my experience with this and previous jobs, there’s the things you have to get done, no matter what, and then there’s everything else.

Things that have to get done, no matter what.

In most normal jobs, “the things that have to get done, no matter what” take up most of your time.  In a startup, though, these things are the least of your worries.  At a startup, the things that have to get done, no matter what, are the things that you’ve figured out already.  You know your payroll process.  You know your QA process.  Make them as fast as possible.  Make them take up 10% of your time.  You have to spend the rest of your days figuring out your new marketing strategy, the next product launch, the bug fix, and …

Everything else.

If 90% of your time is spent on everything else, what does that time look like?  How do you figure out the next most important thing for you to work on?  Your work has to constantly move a process forward, a contract forward, a task forward, the company forward.

Are you creating something new?

Working at a startup means you have the potential to create something new just about every day.  You can’t actually create something every day, but that’s the potential.  It takes a lot of prep work to create something new, especially to do so correctly.  Creating requires a process — brainstorm, refine, plan, build, refine — and with each step you’ll have to ask yourself the same question, what’s the most important thing I should be doing?

Are you doing something that will bring attention to your organization?

No news is bad news for a startup.  Find a way to get people talking about you.  There’s many ways to bring attention to your organization — create something new, improve your page rank, generate buzz on the blogosphere.  If you’re doing this, you’re always doing something important.

Are you creating something that’s lasting and replicable?

You’re creating something new.  We’ve established that.  You’re also creating something that may have to last.  You need to assess whether what you’re creating is a one-time activity or not.  Pulling a report is never a one-time activity.  Writing a feedback email isn’t either.  Obviously, this has to be balanced with a startup’s short-term need for speed and agility, but a little planning up front helps ensure longer term success.

Are you improving an existing process?

You’re taking a process from the person who first created it.  The problem is, you’re not someone who just takes a process as-is.  You want to question and improve it.  With enough people thinking like this you can quickly go from a guy writing a payroll check to an electronic, efficient direct deposit payroll system.  Be sure the time spent fixing your process justifies the effort, though.  If it takes several hours to reduce a back office process from three clicks to two, it might not be worth undertaking right now.  It might still be worth fixing, but not until a million other things are taken care of.

Are you developing something you can pass to another team?

You not only have to create things that can be passed to your own internal teams, you may need to make your work presentable to another team in your company or another company altogether.   You can’t simply give the administrative assistant a payroll task without re-explaining your process, highlighting any exceptions.  Your specification has to be written unambiguously in order for development to pick up where you leave off. What’s acceptable for internal team distribution often requires a new draft entirely for other teams.  Factor this extra effort into your planning.

Are you learning something new, something that you can re-use?

You know what you’re doing right now.  But do you know what you’re doing a year from now?  You should have an idea.  What will you need to know then that you don’t know now?  A few pilot programs now will make it easier for you to answer that question later.

Are you fixing something that’s broken?

Fixing something that’s broken helps make sure you’re not wasting time on things that don’t fit these criteria.  Remember what I said above, though, the effort mustn’t exceed the reward.

Finally, in this economy, there’s the most obvious question you should be asking yourself whenever you prioritize your work –

Is this going to make us any money?

Forget everything else.  If all else fails, focus on generating revenue.  In this economy, there’s nothing more important that you could be doing right now.

]]> http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/03/02/a-few-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-undertaking-anything-at-a-startup/feed/ 0 http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/03/02/a-few-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-undertaking-anything-at-a-startup/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/enterventure/~3/bmVW8c-9tlk/ http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/02/19/enter-venture-gets-personal/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:33:02 +0000 patrick http://enterventure.com/blog/?p=174 I’ve been working on a longer-than-usual post recently and have felt bogged down trying to get it done.  It likely wont be longer than my typical posts in terms of word count, but it’s certainly taking longer to research as I keep stumbling upon more useful information and more products I need to test out.  [...] I’ve been working on a longer-than-usual post recently and have felt bogged down trying to get it done.  It likely wont be longer than my typical posts in terms of word count, but it’s certainly taking longer to research as I keep stumbling upon more useful information and more products I need to test out.  Rather than keep Enter Venture idle any longer, I’m going to take this opportunity to make Enter Venture a little bit more personal.

So I was talking to my mother yesterday and…  (No, not that personal.)

Rather, this blog has been desperately lacking in the About page department since its inception.  Only recently did I even have an About page (which was an obvious mistake).  When I reworked the Enter Venture theme, one of the last things I did was to write the About page — it’s no easy task putting your life down into a few paragraphs.  In fact, it’s something I’ve tweaked up until the writing of this post.   So that begs the question, what do you think?

I’m Patrick Cushing, the lead (read: only) editor for Enter Venture.  I’m originally from Boston but now hang my hat in San Francisco because I’ve realized its much nicer to be able to visit the cold / snow rather than live in the cold / snow.

For an overly costly education (read: I’m still paying for it), I went to Columbia’s Engineering school and picked out the most interesting major I could find in Biomedical Imaging Engineering.  It was certainly interesting — how could brain images not be?  Four years later though, I realized I had little interest in things bio or medical and asked my then employer, D. E. Shaw, to send me to India to work with their software office.

In India, I began my education in all things web as a member of their Creative Services team. It was here that I found CSS / HTML to be much more enjoyable than brain image smoothing algorithms in Matlab.  I came to manage all things wiki at the India office and developed an affinity for trying to organize chaos.

After India, I sought something entirely different and found it with NYC Government as part of their Strategic Operations team working on their NYC Business Express project.  Working for NYC Government made me appreciate what it takes to build software in the enterprise — especially one where green screens still exist.  It was also the first time I felt like an adult, but I suspect wearing a suit every day will do that to anyone.

I’m currently working for Wikinvest on their Product and Marketing team where my days include everything from reaching out to bloggers, testing new products, writing & editing content, writing scripts to parse XML files, and helping to expand coverage internationally.

]]> http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/02/19/enter-venture-gets-personal/feed/ 4 http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/02/19/enter-venture-gets-personal/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/enterventure/~3/MqLAks97aQM/ http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/02/07/have-a-website-idea-make-it-real-with-balsamiqs-help/#comments Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:41:49 +0000 patrick http://enterventure.com/blog/?p=165 A few months ago, I wrote about my love for my whiteboard and how it was the best $75 I’d ever spent.  Back then, I had a large, 3′x4′ whiteboard that, along with brainstorming and keeping lists, allowed me to put together a fairly detailed website mock-up.  Since moving to San Francisco, however, I’ve had [...] A few months ago, I wrote about my love for my whiteboard and how it was the best $75 I’d ever spent.  Back then, I had a large, 3′x4′ whiteboard that, along with brainstorming and keeping lists, allowed me to put together a fairly detailed website mock-up.  Since moving to San Francisco, however, I’ve had to downsize my whiteboard, and I just can’t get into the same amount of detail with my smaller whiteboard as a result.

Then, I found Balsamiq Markups. Balsamiq Markups is like my whiteboard on steroids — yet, still much, much better than that.  Balsamiq is an Adobe AIR application that allows you to quickly prototype a site using common elements found on a web page like buttons, tabs, search, etc.  You can quickly and easily re-size elements, group them together, or lock them on the page.  (My whiteboard never did that.)

Balsamiq Mockups deftly combines a rough, hand-drawn sketch look with a smooth, Visio-like ability to arrange elements on a page.  For designers, this will save them from getting into Photoshop right away.  These mock-ups allow you to get a feel for space and alignment without needing to commit to color, design, or typography.  For everyone else, Balsamiq provides one of the easiest ways for you to get into the web design game too.  Developers can test out what they’re trying to build, product managers can test out new ideas — heck, even corporate executives can figure this thing out.

Because Balsamiq’s so easy to use, it’s a great tool for soliciting group UI discussion.  You can quickly iterate on an idea using multiple versions of a mock or by simply changing your design on the fly.  On top of all that, it’s actually fun to use.  When was the last time you picked up a new software product and said that?

To see for yourself, try out Balsamiq’s online demo.  You’ll quickly get sick of being told you’re using a demo, but you’ll also quickly find yourself feeling like you have the design skills of Steve Jobs.  For $79, you can have that feeling all you want with their full version.

As a blogger, I was granted a free license in exchange for an honest review (it meets my advertising tolerance level), so in that vein, here are a few things I think could be better:

1. The toolbar could use some improvement.  It takes up a substantial portion of the screen yet it seems like I’m always trying to find an element.  Sections labelled “Big” aren’t that helpful.  The issue’s alleviated by placing elements in multiple sections, but better labeling and smaller icons would certainly help.  Maybe a scrolling list with a single preview of the image?  I have ideas about this
2. The fade away toolbar that rests on the editing screen is also a bit tricky.  I often didn’t know what was hidden behind this section.  When it appears, it always seems to be in the way.  When I need something, I can’t always figure out where it is.  For example, clicking on the down arrow to bring up all icon options was not entirely intuitive.  I think there’s room for this to be in the top bar to save space on the editing screen and make it more visible.
3. Last, I’d say ditch the notebook look.  You don’t need to reinforce the fact that Balsamiq mirrors a sketch, and the notebook-on-a-web-page look feels very first generation blog to me.  Balsamiq couldn’t be further from first generation web and the rest of the editor should reflect that!

Thanks Balsamiq!

]]> http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/02/07/have-a-website-idea-make-it-real-with-balsamiqs-help/feed/ 2 http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/02/07/have-a-website-idea-make-it-real-with-balsamiqs-help/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/enterventure/~3/w1lWqKwky-k/ http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/01/29/6-reasons-to-puts-ads-on-your-site-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-revenue/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:38:45 +0000 patrick http://enterventure.com/blog/?p=164 Earlier this month, I reworked the Enter Venture theme a bit.  There’s now a top navigation, a few more pages, the columns are a bit wider, and the home page’s performance was improved. There are also wayyyy more ads on this blog. Online ads really bother some people.  They ruin the user experience and drive [...] Earlier this month, I reworked the Enter Venture theme a bit.  There’s now a top navigation, a few more pages, the columns are a bit wider, and the home page’s performance was improved.

There are also wayyyy more ads on this blog.

Online ads really bother some people.  They ruin the user experience and drive some people to using ad blockers.  I don’t think it has to be that way. I think don’t think of ads as a necessary necessary evil.  They’re a challenge.  We can create great ads that fill the side of a building, a page of a magazine, a bottlecap, a stamp.  Why not try to make online ads interesting? Where’s the next great 125×125 designer?

How can we make ads more useful for our users?  I’m not sure, but I’m playing around with ads on Enter Venture.  It has nothing to do with money because, well, there’s not yet enough to support my monthly coffee bill.  Instead, I’m adding ads to Enter Venture to figure ads out.  Here’s what I mean:

1. Designing with constraints

When you mock up a site, it’s easy to think about where you’ll place all of the top comment, category, and media goodies.  With ads, though, you have to figure out what you’re willing to sacrifice and where.  To make ads work, you certainly can’t hide them.  Ads teach you to organize with constraints.

2. Learn the lingo

CPC, CPM, and CPA are just the start of it.  You’ll want to get an idea for what a leader board is, why and when to use an ad network, and how to measure your success.  When you become big enough to sell your own ads, you’ll be glad to have made your mistakes early.

3. Understand your options

Ads are a bit like tattoos (or so I hear).  Once you’ve got one, you want another one.  Once you’ve got a single ad on your site, you’re going to start thinking about how to extract more revenue for less space.  You learn the difference between getting search ads from Chitika, affiliate revenue from Amazon, and direct ads from AdSense.  Your feed is all of a sudden ripe for the picking.  It’s not all banner ads and pop ups — know your options.

4.  A business or hobby?

Putting ads on your site will quickly tell you if you’re running a business or not.  Are you getting any closer to exceeding your blog’s expenses with your ad revenue?  How about paying yourself a salary?  No?  Yes? If not, blogging is your hobby.  (It’s my hobby).

5. Level of Tolerance

I feel similarly about learning advertising as a I do about learning to invest.  With just a little bit of real money, you change your mindset and learn things you just can’t simulate otherwise.  What’re you willing to do for ad revenue?  Are you going to write paid reviews?  Are there products you will not refer?  During the Prop 8 campaign, I saw a lot of “Yes on Prop 8″ ads online.  I definitely would have blocked that — just doesn’t meet my tolerance level.

6. Make it useful

There’s nothing advertised on Enter Venture that isn’t related to Enter Venture readers.  In fact, there’s nothing advertised that I don’t use myself.  I use both Highrise and InMotion hosting, and well, if Google wants to send people to GoBigNetwork, Business.com, and somewhere else to “Find Venture Capital”, I think that supports this blog too.

There it is.  Six reasons to add ads to your blog that have nothing to do with money.  The SEVENTH reason, though, that has everything to do with money.  It’s a recession, after all.  How else am I going to take care of that monthly coffee bill?

]]> http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/01/29/6-reasons-to-puts-ads-on-your-site-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-revenue/feed/ 3 http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/01/29/6-reasons-to-puts-ads-on-your-site-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-revenue/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/enterventure/~3/SWs9_MMTVio/ http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/01/21/gmails-tasks-complete-me-err-my-work-stream/#comments Wed, 21 Jan 2009 09:59:28 +0000 patrick http://enterventure.com/blog/?p=162 As I mentioned in my last post, I’m listening to feedback and getting back to writing about what I know and can share on Enter Venture.  While writing this post, in fact, I realized just how far I’d strayed from what it is I do best.  How on earth could I have never talked about [...] As I mentioned in my last post, I’m listening to feedback and getting back to writing about what I know and can share on Enter Venture.  While writing this post, in fact, I realized just how far I’d strayed from what it is I do best.  How on earth could I have never talked about my obsession with process?

I’m obsessed with process.  It’s impossible for me to work without thinking about how to turn 10 steps into 3, without figuring out how to do things faster, simpler.

Recently, I found something that made my process-obsessed self feel well documented, reproducible, and, well, whole.  Recently, I discovered Tasks for Gmail.  Tasks is an amazing but simple little feature you can find by digging into the Labs portion of your Gmail account.  It allows you to easily add a task, schedule it, and check it off with a fulfilling strike-through.  It rests in the bottom right portion of your Gmail window, and when you’re not using it, you can simply keep it minimized.  Tasks are also what finally brought my work stream full circle, and, Tasks have almost single-handedly rid me of my paper “habit”.

Before Tasks, I wrote all of my major To-Dos for the day in my notebook.  Each day, I would start from the top and work down the notebook completing tasks.  In the course of this, I would scratch things out, write notes in the margins, and generally make a mess out of each and every page.  Each night, I would list out what I hadn’t accomplished and include any additional tasks for the next day, prioritizing as I went.  The problem is, it was just a little too messy.  I was never a huge fan of the hand offs between my paper process and my email / work stream management.  I was wasting paper and ink with pages of scratched out, messy lists.

Along comes Tasks, and all of a sudden, I have a fully integrated process for managing both my micro tasks — email — and my macro tasks — things bigger than emails.  Check it out:

1. As emails come in, I have filters that organize and tag my emails based on either a work stream or specific project.
2. When I come in each morning, I review every piece of email until each ones has been read — I continue this throughout the day too by monitoring a FireFox tab with Gmail to see when it throws up a (1).
3. Emails that I can respond to immediately, I do.  If not, the item is starred and finds its way onto my task list.
4. Once the inbox is clear, I review my task list, add anything that’s missing, and prioritize.
5. Next, I work on tasks in my task list from top to bottom — stopping only to keep my inbox clear.
6. As I come to an item that is associated with a starred email, I address that email and remove the star.

Voila!  When my emails are done, my tasks are done.  When my tasks are done, my emails are done too.

There are all kinds of task management tools I could have chosen — just ask my friends at Ativiti about all of them.  What’s great about Tasks, though, is that I never had to think about it. It simply arrived and became a part of my day-to-day, all without requiring a single additional username and password, without another website to keep open, and, really, without much more functionality than a basic checklist.

It’s now a part of something bigger than itself.  It’s now a part of a process.

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]]> http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/01/21/gmails-tasks-complete-me-err-my-work-stream/feed/ 2 http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/01/21/gmails-tasks-complete-me-err-my-work-stream/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/enterventure/~3/iAKbZZ1uhiw/ http://enterventure.com/blog/2009/01/05/on-feedback-and-using-it-to-your-advantage/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:27:14 +0000 patrick http://enterventure.com/blog/?p=161 I’ve been struggling with the direction of Enter Venture for a few weeks now.  At it’s outset, Enter Venture was designed to be about new entrepreneurs, web applications, events, books, etc. — anything that would help make the entrepreneurial process more transparent. Recently, I’ve gotten away from that.  I’d gotten away from writing about tools [...] I’ve been struggling with the direction of Enter Venture for a few weeks now.  At it’s outset, Enter Venture was designed to be about new entrepreneurs, web applications, events, books, etc. — anything that would help make the entrepreneurial process more transparent.

Recently, I’ve gotten away from that.  I’d gotten away from writing about tools and entrepreneurial ideas, and I became focused on writing the international startup series.  Now, I’ve really enjoyed the international startup series, but it’s become much larger and takes up much more time than I originally intended. (And in these dire/crisis/trying times, )  I think the size of the series is a great measure of the sophistication of the international startup scene, but it was eating up precious time and keeping me from focusing on what Enter Venture is all about. (And in this time of economic crisis, we need to prioritize)

Now, a post about feedback, that’s what Enter Venture’s all about.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s been said before that being an entrepreneur is all about soliciting and applying feedback. Refining an idea into a business is a constant struggle between trying something new, assessing the outcome, and trying it again.

Whatever you’re doing, no one’s done it before — not the exact thing, in the exact space, at the exact time.  Every entrepreneurial experience is different.  Take some of my recent entrepreneur interview series posts — ZDONK is working to leverage their industry connections in a way most outsiders couldn’t, Ativiti is working by moonlighting, and Baveo is working off of equity, without funding.  All three of these companies approaches the business creation process differently.

At best, someone can relate to your experience.  Someone can relate to your startup and offer ideas for how you can improve.  Some will even criticize your idea and startup.  You might not like the ideas; you might not like the opinions.  The key to being an entrepreneur, though, is your ability to consider all of these opinions and create an advantage out of their feedback.

When I was recently discussing this and Enter Venture with Dennis of ZDONK, he said:

“To be honest, I’ve really enjoyed all your posts but never really got into the international startup series. It seemed like you were kind of investigating and making a list as opposed to really getting into a particular startup or particular software/tools you thought would be useful for a startup. They were definitely interesting but personally I just wasn’t as engaged as I’d been with your previous posts.”

There it was.  I had created the series to try something new, but after a while, it was all that I was doing and alienated at least one of my regular readers.  After Dennis’ feedback and a recent Quick Sprout post about improving your blog by creating that helps people, rather than reports the news. I realized I was writing my own form of news.

You can expect that to change with Enter Venture because I’m mindful of your feedback.  (Feel free to leave it in my newly-updated, Disqus comment system).  I want to get a bit more into the entrepreneurial process and talk about the tools I use and the processes I go through to manage this blog.  I’ve re-organized Enter Venture a bit so there’s even a preliminary Resources section with everything from the blogs I read to WordPress plugins I use, tools, etc.

The entrepreneur interviews will continue — but as a way to illuminate the entrepreneurial process, not as a way of reporting the news.  We’ll save the news for TechCrunch, and the entrepreneur-relevant, feedback-incorporating blog evolution for Enter Venture.

What do you think?

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