Updated Image: I snapped this gem in a public square in Sodermalm, Stockholm. I honestly thought it was Bruno for a minute, then realized it was just a cheap, but hilarious, imitation. It’s all about ‘exposure’.

The Hidden Secret of Successful Blogging

As you probably know, building a real following or reader base on your blog is all about authority and authenticity. These words are thrown around left and right by people writing how-to-blog posts. The kicker is that nobody seems to be addressing the real reason people’s blog grow.

Tim Ferriss recently posted a video of a talk he gave to the Wordcamp Conference that is based around the WordPress blogging platform. His talk was about how to write a killer blog without killing yourself. His talk was packed with extremely valuable tips to writing a better blog. An underlying theme Tim spoke to is that you don’t have to follow all of the “conventional rules” of blogging. Optimal post length, post topic, and post frequency has been debated since the beginning of blogging, but I would argue (and so would Tim) that these things don’t really matter in the process of growing your blogs following.

Put all the tips that you’ve ever read from Problogger, John Chow, or Tim Ferriss aside and let me break down the one thing that everyone avoids telling you that will absolutely lead to a successful blog. I’m not sure why this fact and (or secret) is so rarely discussed but it is proven over and over across the web.

How To Take Advantage of the Secret

STEP 1: DO SOMETHING

The secret is in action. In order to build a good blog you have to do (and accomplish) things in real life. You have to get out of your desk chair (theoretically speaking) and take intentional action towards a goal. You can write about kitchen knives, entrepreneurship, world travel, or sushi restaurants but you’re not going to be able to draw anyone’s interest without actually engaging in your topic.

Experience is the word that sums up the notion of this secret best. You must have experiences in order to successfully build a blog otherwise readers will quickly see through the fact that you’re not actually doing anything. Whatever your interests are, or whatever your blog is focusing on, you need to take action on that topic.

STEP 2: LEARN FROM IT

The next critical step is to learn from your experiences. This usually means you’ll have to make mistakes, which is fine, mistakes are awesome! But you have to realize where and why the mistake was made so that you may gain insight into your activity for your next run. Then apply your lesson, see if what you thought you learned was correct. Analytically test your assumptions. Make sure that when you complete action X you can answer these 3 questions.

1. I was successful/unsuccessful because of…?
2. I would be more successful/unsuccessful if I did…?
3. The cost of being successful/unsuccessful was/was not worth the reward because…?

Remember if you’re not truly learning anything from your experiences it’s foolish to attempt to teach someone else. Not only will you be little help to them you’ll expose the fact that you haven’t taken the time to learn from your own experiences. This will obviously harm your own credibility.

STEP 3: COMMUNICATE IT

If you read the first 2 steps and realized that you’re not actually doing anything interesting in your life then stop here and reread the first two steps of this post. I’m not here to tell you that you can’t just blog your thoughts on other peoples posts, but I am here to tell you that this strategy likely won’t get you a large following. Doing things offline and sharing the results of those action is the only way to grow a large blog following. Once you are actually doing things offline you may return to your computer and start to share your experiences. Now, it’s all about your ability to clearly and actionably communicate what you’ve accomplished in the real world.

You can communicate your actions in many different ways. Lists are popular because they are simple and they are easy to follow. A solid list explaining the right way to find a job in this economy, for example, can be used as a guide and is not open to much interpretation. Make sure that someone can clearly apply what they’ve learned from your post into their own practices so that they’re life improves. A great example of simply breaking down lessons into actionable steps is the blog ‘I Will Teach You To Be Rich‘ by Ramit Sethi. His ability to use easy, guide like, posts and easy to comprehend graphs not only helped him build his blog from nothing to over 200k readers, but also helped him sell a NY Times best selling personal finance book (by the same name). He uses experiments and test that he’s executed himself to teach you (and I) about the not so complicated complexities of personal finance.

Follow Ramit’s lead in communicating the basics…start with Step 1. From Ramit’s blog:

STEP 4: HELP OTHERS DO IT

This step may sound similar to Step 3 but it isn’t, this goes further. You can’t only write about what you learned, then live in the blog comments. Truly successful bloggers, with huge followings, don’t stop at the end of a post. They again take the help offline. If you write a blog about how newly engaged couple can register for wedding gifts better (then email me) then you should help newly engaged couples register in real life.

Not only will this real life interaction add significant credibility to your ability to be a value to the people you’re writing to/for, it will give you great new content. Do give-aways for free consulting that will drive readership. Your skills are now sought after and highly valued. You have an ability to use your experiences and really help other people. If there is one thing I’ve learned in giving a few talks about gaining credibility using the web, it’s the fact that people need help. There are so many different levels of peoples comprehension of any topic that there is no shortage of assistance and coaching to be given. Take it offline and help people out.

STEP 5: UNDERSTAND AND REPEAT THE PROCESS

Now that you know how to execute on your action, learn from what you’ve experienced, and clearly communicate your lessons learned in a way that truly adds value to other peoples lives, my recommendation is to go out and capitalize on this process. If your blogging is truly adding value to the reader, you will likely be able to take the contents of your blog post and turn them into a means of income generation (if you’re up for that). Ramit (in the example above) was able to capitalize by writing a book that has sold phenomenally well. Eric Ries of ‘Startup Lessons Learned‘ has gone on a speaking tour sharing methods and strategies of the “LEAN” startup. Take your skills offline not only to hone them but to capitalize on them!

Your blog following will now sky rocket, at least that’s the goal. Your posts will likely be less frequent (mine have been), but they will be significantly more valuable to your reader. The interaction you get in comments and emails and retweets, etc. will blow you away because people want to share valuable content to their Twitter followers and fellow bloggers. Your new, thought through, actionable posts will spread virally in ways you’ve never imaged before.

Best of luck and I look for to really learning from your next post. Please share a link in the comments below!

image via kthypryn

This is a guest post by social entrepreneur Bobby Srivastava. I’ve known Bobby since college and he’s been focused on the social services since then. Bobby was the founding COO of  a KIPP school, and heavily involved in CPY4Youth, College Summit, and the Taproot Foundation. His insights to what it takes to be a successful social entrepreneur are right on. As he humbly calls himself a “fly on the wall”, he’s much more hands on as a board member and founder than he’ll admit. He’s one of the guys who are making big things happen with little resources, and making the world a better place.

Enter Bobby…

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I’ve realized after working with so many individuals within the nonprofit sector that we have encountered an unprecedented era where individuals are not waiting around anymore to start ventures that will soon change the world. Social Entrepreneurship is booming – people are putting their dreams into action, and scouring the community and the world to try and find ways to add value.  People are leveraging their skills and talents to literally reverse some of the issues that we only seem to be talking every four years around election time – poverty, hunger, education, healthcare, etc.  Social Entrepreneurs started yesterday.  How do you do it?  Throughout my exposure working with colleagues from Teach for America, KIPP, College Summit, and The Taproot Foundation, I’ve noticed several consistent trends amongst these social enterprises that will consistently validate the success and failure of future social entrepreneurs.  This is less about me “imparting wisdom”, and more about me being a fly on the wall, watching amazing people do amazing things and being a part of the movement firsthand.  All of this has been fueled by the very few drivers below.

Passion and Belief

The truly successful social entrepreneurs do not simply embark on creating organizations that ‘do some good’.  They create enterprises based on their relentless belief that what they are doing will create social value for a large cohort of individuals, and they stick to this said belief to their very bones.  For example, KIPP existed as only two charter middle schools from 1995 to 2000. For five years, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin were relentless in the belief that through more time spent in the classroom and high quality instruction in low income areas, the achievement gap could be closed. No special sauce, just get in the classroom, keep the students there until 5pm, make them come in two weekends a month, and add in another three weeks in the summer.  They didn’t get caught up in expansion, and they couldn’t tweet in 1995. They simply built out their ideal school model where students in low income communities could get on a successful path to college; they rolled up their sleeves, and got straight up filthy.  In 2000, Don and Doris Fisher, the founders of Gap, Inc., stumbled upon these two cowboys in the impoverished areas of Houston and New York City, and couldn’t believe their energy and the success their very simple model was having.  Belief is toxic, and while KIPP existed as only two schools from 1995-2000, from 2000 to present day KIPP has now become the most successful charter school movement in the nation now on the verge of opening 100 schools nationwide through the initial support of the Fishers. KIPP leaders nationwide leverage their original belief and have delivered on staggering student achievement metrics by doing nothing more than rolling up their sleeves and crushing the misconception that students in low income communities cannot become smart, educated, and successful.  I know for a fact that if the Fishers did not find KIPP, another deep pocket would have so let us not play the ‘Well they got lucky’ card.  If anything, the Fishers are lucky to have been the ones to find them first.  KIPP has reached revolutionary heights where they have now halted finding cities to solicit expansion. KIPP has defined “reverse engineering” and now through a strictly defined RFP process, communities now must put together proposals for KIPP to come serve their students.  Financially, I’ll just say that game changers, particularly Bill Gates, are consistently throwing KIPP some major coin so their impact can continue to spread whereas KIPP first started out in overcrowded, steamy classrooms in wings of public schools.  It’s amazing how a nonprofit was able to shift the game like this. Passion and belief are unstoppable. (1 2 3)

Hustle

I’m always inspired by the relentless pursuit of accomplished athletes like Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Michael Phelps, and Michael Jordan.  These are people who multiple times over have achieved what their peers spend their entire career accomplishing once – ultimate victory. Why?  As much as you may think it is based on their talent, they will all tell you it is based on their work ethic.  It’s not enough to just believe in what you are doing and decide to work on it every now and again.  You have to hustle.  Once you determine what mission you believe in, whether its ending poverty, curing cancer, closing educational inequity, etc., hitch your wagon to the movement and hold on tight.  Social Your browser may not support display of this image. Entrepreneurship and the journey that comes with it is not going to be a bed of roses, but keep hustling. Once you decide to embark on doing more with your existence than your cubicle allows, you’ll realize that the world needs you.  While the world could definitely benefit from the intellectual contribution of people with graduate letters and certifications after their name, we really just need some hustlers with a vision.  People who are willing to work harder than ever, build relationships, share best practices, and continue to bank on their own belief, are the hustlers of the social capitalist community. At some point you have to walk out of the self-improvement section at Barnes and Noble, and start putting theory into practice.  Don’t wait until you feel like you are your ‘ideal’ self with an ‘ideal’ team behind you with ‘just the right amount of money’.  Take what tools you have, ask questions along the way, and get on with it.  Don’t waste a great idea because you didn’t feel like you possessed the resources to do it.  The community of game changers is waiting to support you.  Start yesterday.

Give Me Metrics, or Give Me Death

Read this section carefully, because this will make or break your success as a social entrepreneur.  You will never take your game to the next level if you cannot deliver on metrics. You will never secure funding, let alone community/global support if you cannot tell your story in the form of numbers.  It’s the same reason why most resumé specialists tell you to try and quantify your successes to give your previous contributions a framework.  Furthermore, if you secure some substantial cash, maybe $10,000 after some success, don’t throw the kitchen sink at your business model and add all these new nuts and bolts for the sake of having ‘infrastructure’.  Keep your Your browser may not support display of this image.organization as lean as possible and don’t wreck your model, because the only reason you may have secured money is what you WERE doing was successful and your supporters want you to enlarge your footprint.  If anything, you are in the perfect position to take advantage of this major component of SE success because unlike traditional entrepreneurs, you don’t have to rely on making the same pitch to venture capitalists and angel investors showing the one same metric that typical investors only care about – ROI.  As a social entrepreneur, you have a wealth of individuals, foundations, government entities, baby boomers, and other pockets of funding that can help your organization scale financially and strategically, and you can base it on so much more than just dollars and cents.  Show metrics in terms of individuals served, cost per individual, any achievement metrics in the value you’ve added versus your operational expenses, and people will start to hear you. You can even use web metrics to show that people are genuinely interested in your success.  If you build it, they will come. (1 2 3)

Human Capital

“You win with people.”  Woody Hayes got it right when he said this, and that’s why he won five national championships.  Google got it right when creating a work environment based only on passion that now solicits almost 1 million applications a year, and now is consistently one of the most admired companies in the world. I don’t need to spend a lot of time on this.  You can make facebook fan pages, twitter accounts, blogs, or whatever new age technical medium available to spread your word and brand your mission (albeit important tools), but if you sacrifice the development of yourself or the people around you that are indenturing themselves to the movement, this game is over. Ensure that people you are bringing on to help you are not just looking for work, but try and find those individuals:

1. Who are bringing skill sets that are better than your own in particular functions?
2. Who can be evangelists for you organization?  From jump, when you are in a position to scale your organization with additional personnel, you should want people who are drinking the Kool-Aid or at least willing to take a sip.

Make your staff/volunteers feel like they are in a place where they can not only contribute but continually have a stake in the movement.  Care about the people you bring on board just as much as you would the people whose lives you are trying to change. So the saying goes in the military, “Officers eat last.”

As much as this is not a holy grail, I can, however, say with certainty that the organizations I have been a part of have been successful from exercising these few drivers incredibly well.  Take the first step. Lives are waiting to be changed forever.

You can contact Bobby via twitter @bsrivastava, or in the comments below.

via carf

Vacation is important because…

Vacation, as the Europeans have discovered, is critical to ones ability to contribute effectively in the workplace. As I’m in Sweden this week and our project time lines are surely impacted by month long (or more) vacation schedules, I figured there would be no more appropriate time to write about vacations and the value of them.

Note: This trip is for business and not a vacation, however, I am spending a free weekend in Stockholm. A mini vacation I guess.

Although the “American way” seems to criticize the European vacation mentality, I think that it may be important to consider the value of extended breaks for multiple reasons.

1. Taking a break allows one to recollect their focus and return to work with a laser focus on their work.
2. A vacation allows one to recharge their batteries, release the pressures that can build at work, and return energized and excited.
3. Taking a vacation, perhaps a luxurious one, gives you a sense of reward and helps you to feel really good about giving 110% to your work.

Don’t focus on refocusing.

It’s important that when taking a vacation you don’t think ‘to much’ about work. Recently, there has been a big push towards the “stay-cation” or taking your vacation time at home. This is being encouraged due to conditions in the economy and also the green aspects of reducing your travel when vacationing. I am strongly against this. I believe that vacation is for getting away, seeing something new, and putting yourself in a different environment so that you can remove your thoughts from the norm and focus on something new.

Focusing on something new is the key to getting ‘mentally’ away. Using this time to focus on refocusing is counter productive. If you do this, you’re really still focused on work. You’re essentially trying to find a way to work better. I am a huge fan of continuously finding improvements in behavior and maximizing productivity but your vacation is not the appropriate time for that.

Lastly, although your away from work, I believe it is important to stay productive on vacation. If you stay in bed until noon everyday during your break and never really accomplish anything then you may be well rested but you’re going to feel like you’ve wasted your time away from work. Make sure to keep a busy schedule even on vacation so that you can look back to your time off and feel that you’ve made the most of it. When I’m on vacation I like to get up as early as the night before will logically allow :) and maximize the time I have to see new and interesting things. That’s why I love abroad travel so much, there are always new experiences to be had.

Finally get some rest.

To combat the maximize your time sentiment, it is important to get much needed rest on a vacation. Although it may seem impossible to satisfy both of these ideas, here is a solution: Early in your vacation it’s all good to maximize your day. During the beginning of your vacation, do what you want. Get up early, stay up late, and do it all in between, it’s fine. However, towards the end of your break it’s important to be conscious of the amount of rest that you’re allowing yourself. You want to return to work fresh, sharp, and at the top of your game!

For people who have trained themselves to operate on only a few 3-6 hours of sleep, you must be careful! I’m not going to tell you need to get 8 hours of sleep, I usually get about 6 until the weekend (then I binge sleep). However, you do need to be careful not to lose your ability to only sleep a few hours. If you take your 2 week or your 1 month vacation and sleep 10 hours a night, you will not be able to jump right back into your 4 hour plan without any affect. These habits are conditioned so you can potentially derail your sleep pattern during your vacation, so be careful.

The most fun, must energizing, and most rewarding aspect of my vacation is the time I get to spend with the people I care about. In August of 2007 my girlfriend, now fiance, and I went to Ireland for 2 weeks and drove the southern coast from Dublin to Galway and back. The trip put us in so many situations that challenged our relationship but made it so strong. One night we got to Cork and realized we did not have a hotel, B&B, or hostel booked. We ended up sleeping in a tiny Nissan Micra Sport all night…freezing. Yes, it sucked but the time we spent and laughs we shared together were priceless. If your spending time with the right people, it almost doesn’t matter what you do for your vacation time.

You earned it.

Finally, by taking a vacation, whether its 2 weeks or 8 (the French), you’ll be able to be proud of your time off. Knowing that I have a vacation coming up always helps me to drive towards it knowing that my hard work now will really make the off time sweet.

Because of the build up that comes with a vacation, I seriously recommend doing them big. Do something that you will remember. Don’t do the stay-cation at home, instead plan a trip to somewhere you’ve not been before that will create memories. It’s a big world out there so don’t do the same trip over and over. Explore!

When you come back to work you’ll be relaxed, re-focused, and rested. In short, you’ll be ready to kick ass. The time spent off will have a significant affect on your productivity and your contribution to your business. It will also have a profound affect on the relationships in your personal life. You’ll be able to relate with people from another part of the world and you’ll have common experiences shared with the people you traveled with.

Vacation is worth taking as an employee and it’s worth paying for as the employer. Vacations are all around valuable and necessary. I hope you enjoy yours!

I’ve been working in Uppsala, Sweden, about 45 minutes north of Stockholm, this week and have learned a few very valuable business lessons. I was lucky to have the opportunity to travel when most other travel opportunities have been cut, and I’ve really focused on making the most of the trip.

Coming into the week I wanted to focus on really investing myself fully into the deliverables that I’d committed to in order to justify the trip and also through building relationships that are critical in order to successfully execute on the project in the future. With those two focuses in mind, I’ve learned quite a lot and have, I think, succeeded in both.

Investing Yourself Emotionally

Many times, at home, I have so many different projects going that I struggle to focus on one thing at a time. With work priorities, project interests, family obligations, and finally lowest on the priority list, personal time, it becomes tough to balance and focus on any one of the tasks. This week, being away from home, I decided to completely remove myself and focus on work whole heatedly. The results have been phenomenal.

When you’re traveling for business you travel with people who you basically have one thing in common, work. This inevitably drives dinner conversation towards work topics and because of this I’ve been able to learn a lot. Being on the younger side of the group I’ve just listened and have been able to learn from others experiences. I’ve openly challenged ideas so that I can really get to the source of a particular issue and really extract the value from it. Without being pulled out of the normal flow of a day back home, and without being really focused on the work and issues at hand, I likely never would have had these conversations, nor learned so much from my colleagues. Sometimes it takes a bit of a shake up to create these situations.

By investing myself and focusing completely on work I’ve really maximized the the value of the trip. Both for the business and for myself. Now, with perfect weather in Sweden and the weekend approaching I plan to fully invest myself in the culture of Stockholm. I’m going mountain biking with a Swedish colleague on Saturday and hitting the Stockholm clubs on Saturday evening. If you’re not doing it all, your not doing enough!

Building Relationships to Get Things Done

Early in the week it was clear that there were major “perspective” differences in how to approach our project. We were unaligned and working towards similar goals without any collaboration. It was clear that a recalibration of focus was critical and the team needed to be rejuvenated. Working in IT it is often easy to become the claimed cause of a “business problem” when in reality we are here to help solve and avoid problems.

Instead of taking the defensive stand, I told the team, “we’ve got to align goals and make these relationships work for the good of the project and of the underlying business needs”. After significant back-and-forth sessions exchanging fairly opposing views, solutions were landed upon and I believe (only time will tell) that we, as a whole, came out on top. There was not a sense of win-or-lose, but more a feeling of joint progress and accomplishment. With stronger relationships now in place, we’ll be able to collaborate better when working over the phone and divide and concur tasks that would be fought over in the past.

Often times it seems that a solution may never be reached but usually people will come around. All it takes is the ability to bring similar goals to the surface. If you can create a similar goal and/or direction you can begin to move and work together in ways that you never could have in the past! You will surely enjoy the people you are working with more and in turn you will start to love your work. So often, it’s not the work that makes the process enjoyable, it’s the people that you interact with and the people that challenge you that make it fun!

Arrival

I arrived on the red-eye from Newark, NJ at 7:40am local time. My driver (it’s not as fancy as it sounds) was waiting and when I jumped in the cab the first thing he did was blow into a breathalyzer. I was thrown off by this but I appreciated the confidence I felt from his sobriety. The driver either spoke minimal English or he just didn’t like the looks of me, either is quite possible after getting about 3 hours of sleep on the flight. I won’t hold it against him.

During my 30-40 minute drive from Arlanda Airport out to Uppsala my initial reactions to Sweden are clean & green. It’s a beautiful country and everything seems brand new. From their automobiles, to their infrastructure, it’s seems “refreshed”. I expected the opposite. There is a lot of history here but it seems their has been a large investment in the country in recent years.

The People

Stockholm, in my observations, is a very affectionate city. There are couples everywhere and they sure don’t mind showing off their love for each other. My fiance calls it PDA (public display of affection) and the Swede’s love it! It makes traveling alone that much tougher and I really wish I could share these experiences with Mollstar.

Climate

I don’t think the weather could get any better than it was today. It was about 21c and the sun was shining. I was sitting in King’s Garden, in Norrmalm, people watching and I saw a baby waddle away from his parents by at least 100 meters. Then a group of random women grabbed the baby and walked him back to his parents, there was a real strong sense of community in what I saw. Very comforting.

Stockholm is absolutely packed with children and young families. What stood out to me is how involved the young fathers are. Coffee is part of the culture in Sweden, just as much as tea is part of the Chinese culture, and every coffee shop is packed with young fathers and their babies in stroller. Apparently, Sweden is one of the best places to be a women because of extremely balanced women’s rights and opportunities and the fact that the government instates what’s called, ‘The Daddy Quota”. This says that couples who have a baby must take a combined 450 days of paternity/maternity leave. Wow! Try that in The States :)

Style

In Stockholm, the fashion is loud, the jeans are tight, tattoos are extremely common, but the attitudes of the people are as calm and relaxed as any conservative city. This may change when the night clubs get going, I haven’t yet had that opportunity.

Grub

For dinner I ate at Bistro Berns in the Berzelii Park and had a phenomenal Fish & Shrimp Ragout w/ a table Rose. The seafood is what Stockholm is known for due to it’s proximity to the Baltic Sea and it didn’t disappoint.

First Day Summary

Overall, the first impressions of this city were great. It seems that it never gets crowded in Stockholm. It can be busy which usually adds to the atmosphere but I never saw bad crowds that would take away from an experience. The young family thing makes it a very appealing city. It’s hip because of the fact that it’s a very young city and the relaxed culture and focus on the quality of life is very obvious. Something Americans could definitely learn from.

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s brilliant book, Tribes, over the past week. One of Godin’s theories in the book, that I definitely buy into is the importance of carving a niche with your message. A Tribe by Godin’s definition is a tightly interacting group of people, bound by a special interest. His call to action is for “you” to be the leader of that tribe. It’s time for “you” to step up. He also notes, about tribes, that if they’re too broad they will be diluted and never really operate optimally, or have any real impact on the world. The leaders message, if broad, will be lost with all the other broad messages. It’s the same issue as we’ve all read about before on the web, the signal vs. noise paradox.

In order to avoid getting lost among the others, I thought it would be appropriate to define the types of individuals that I think have enjoyed THE DREAM IN ACTION so far. I never rule out any transitions or changes in focus as experiences, both yours and mine, change. “The only constant is change” so I think it would be foolish to say that this blog won’t.

Here are the types of folks I think would dig this stuff:

1. Mustard Seed Entrepreneurs

By ‘mustard seed entrepreneur’ (did I just coin this term?) I mean those who don’t necessarily have tons of experience running a company and may only have an idea the size of a mustard seed. This includes early stage startups, “we just launched” types, or those who have an idea but are not really sure how to make it something real. The key is that we’re still learning how to extract potential out of ideas with our actions.

There is value in everyone’s ideas and I want to encourage and aid people in the extraction of value from those ideas through deliberate action. I also want you to challenge me. If content gets stale, if action isn’t being taken towards what I want to achieve, or if something I say does not help you get closer to living the dream, then call me on it. The conversation will benefit us all.

2. Corporate Entrepreneurs

What I like about entrepreneurship is that it’s not just starting a business. It’s a sense of creating value from minimal resources. Entrepreneurship is a cousin of innovation, and innovation can be found, although sometimes not easily, within large corporations. Did you hear that? Entrepreneurs can be found within large corporations!

I work for a Fortune 3 and I fully consider myself an entrepreneur because I initiate change by challenging the status quo daily. Is it easy to be innovative within a giant? Maybe not, but it’s possible. In fact, your large corporation needs your innovative attitude; you are the exact individual that will keep your major corp a major corp. Without entrepreneurial behavior within a large corporation, that company will fail.

In fact, I think that normal entrepreneurs have a lot to learn from corporate entrepreneurs. Sure there are significant challenges faced by growing a company but I can speak first hand to the many challenges of making big changes within the grip of a major corporate structure. What I’d like to see here is both internal and external entrepreneurs joining forces to solve big, world changing problems.

3. People Searching for The Dream

Certain people, the lucky (and hard working ones) always talk about “loving what they do“, they often have experiences that everyone would envy. THE DREAM IN ACTION is about learning from those people, dissecting what they are saying, and executing on that so that you don’t hit snooze five times, but are excited to “crush it“!

I’m not there…yet. But we’re going to continue to analyze, hypothesize, and test the ‘how’s’ and the ‘whys’ until the secret is disclosed. Through a trial and error process, because that’s the only way I know how, I will continue to shoot for that end. Eventually, we’ll hit it, together. Won’t you join me?

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Posting Schedule

I’ve been playing around with the idea of having a set posting schedule. The purpose of this is two fold; first, it will help readers who want to come back on a regular basis for the best possible content I can deliver, and second, it will bring routine and schedule to my thought processes and my ability to fully extract value from my experiences and share them here.

As stated before, it would be foolish of me to think that this will never change, but for the foreseeable future I’d like to post with some regularity. Of course I’ll have to work around, family commitments, work commitments, self imposed writing schedules for the book/s I’m working on, and any advisory work that I have lined up for The Renliv Group. So, after talking with other bloggers in my community both physically and online, I’ve decide to post on Monday and Thursday with what I’ll call, full posts, and on the weekend with blurbs. These blurbs will be things like project updates, cool people I’ve met, or non dream chasing activities that I think are interesting enough to share (for other less post worthy thoughts check out my personal blog).

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My One Favor

I’m aware that I’ve not yet earned your trust and am possibly not yet worthy of your attention, but I’ll only ask only one favor of you. Please react. Whether you love a post and want to share it on Twitter, or Stumble it, or email to friends, OR if you hate it and want to ‘constructively’ call me out in the comments, either way is fine. I just ask that you let me know what you think so that we can improve, learn, and grow towards a more action filled dream.

image via inWaves

So, I’ve been focusing on both mastering and minimizing mistakes. Mistakes lead to a less “dreamy” lifestyle, the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve here. If you’ve been reading, you know that I recently closed my first startup, so I am excited to get back into a project. Before I sink dollars and time into ‘the next big thing’ I’ve created 4 simple rules for myself on what I will do before diving all the way in. Pay attention.

No, I’m not just going to ask my friends if they think it’s a good idea, I’m not just going to poll my twitter followers (although I do love you guys!), and I’m not just going to do one Google search (or Bing!) to find the obvious competition. I’m going to force myself to be analytical towards, and skeptical of, the opportunity in order to protect the downside and make sure the option has a runway.

Let me first explain why further precaution is necessary. When you ask a friend “would you buy this product?”, 80% of the time they’re going to say yes. They don’t want to disappoint you and people hate the word, No. Instead of asking ‘would’ you buy, ask them ‘to buy‘, right on the spot. You’ll have a much more accurate understanding of whether or not you have something of value. This is called dry testing and I’m going to try and become religious in using this & similar methods in the future when testing ideas. Here are the 4 must execute steps to how I’ll dry test:

Numero 1: Check out the competition (24 hours)

I’ll post more on market research later but for basic purposes of finding top searches use standard Google searches and Google’s keyword tool. Also, get on the “real time web” and search Twitter for your key words. Once I’ve analyzed my findings I’ll identify the top 3-5 terms and look at the sponsors in Google’s paid ads (look right). I’ll dive into the landing pages of each of these sites and locate the similarities between their pitches and come up with 2-3 ways that my pitch could be better than theirs.

1. Better Service or Quality (like Zappos)
2. Better Price (even if it’s a higher price)
3. Better Experience (make it sexy, see Virgin Group)

Numero 2: Get a site up, think basic (48 hours)

Next I’m going to launch the ‘test’ site that user will eventually be sent to through my ads. I’ll write a sales pitch describing the product, the uses of it, and focus on the value that it brings to the user. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here and I’ll use much of the existing content from competitors pitches but will be very careful not to plagiarize their content.

This sales pitch will be focus on on 4 things:

1. Getting their attention
2. Keeping them focused on the product
3. Getting them interested in a purchase
4. Asking them to purchase or a call to action

These sales pages, I’m sure you’ve seen them, can be very ‘hoaky’ but they do serve a purpose, funneling people through the above steps to make a sale. If they didn’t work, they wouldn’t exist. These pages are easy to get up and you can use services like Weebly or a even Wordpress to get them up. At then end I’ll make sure to have a “Buy Now” type button so that I can measure clickthroughs. Note, that it is important to have your own domain for this site and it should be descriptive of your product.

I won’t want to miss out on possible sales opportunities if the test does work and the product turns out to be a success, so I’m going to add a form that collects email address on the page after the “Buy Now” button. You don’t have to pay anything to collect this info. Services like Aweber, MailChimp, or Campaign Monitor can help setup a form to collect this info for free and will only charge you to send emails out to the people you collect. Other easy form options are Wufoo and Google Forms.

On the page after the “Buy Now” button you’ll need to explain why the product isn’t there! Try things like:

“We’re sorry the product is sold out”

“The product is almost ready, we’ll notify you when it is release.”

It’s very important to include Google Analytics on the page after the “Buy Now” button so that I can measure conversion rates. Without being able to gather accurate information the test is rendered worthless.

NOTE: It may take more time than stated per step without any technical skills, but these things are not difficult and most of the services I’ve mentioned have very detailed instructions on how to use their service. Just like it’s my job to get people to buy this ‘imaginary test’ product, it’s their job to make their service easy and useful.

Numero 3: Test product with AdWords (24 hours)

This is where the commitment and creativity enter into the test. I will have to spend money on this test, roughly $500 bucks, but the time and money saved is significantly larger than $500. While I definitely don’t consider my efforts in building my first startup, SocialDreamium, a complete failure, I wish I would have spent more time testing the demands of the market.

I signed up for an AdWords account and now I’ll start a campaign. I’ll create at least 2 ads, with highlighted differences so that I will know which works best when I actually begin advertising or building the business. This is where some strategic thinking and creativity really come into play. I’ll need to make sure that my ads hit the same goals that I hit with the sales pitch, only in a matter of seconds.

For my ads, following the standard Google text ad format, I’ll do my best to write an attention grabbing headline. Then I’ll back it up with a 70 character (half a tweet) description of the product. The first half of the description I’ll focus on the benefit of the product and the second half I’ll make the offer clear. Common key words can become expensive because of the competition so niche products will be more cost effective. I’ll set my CPC to $1 expecting to pay about half that per click so I’ll get roughly 1000 visitors out of my $500 budget, a safe sample size to judge my test.

Numero 4: Review, iterate, adapt test (144 hours)

Reviewing the test can be the worst, or most exciting part. How good is the product? How effective were my ads? Was the landing/sales page effective at funneling towards a purchase? There are so many factors that can come into play so a careful analysis of the data gathered through analytics is critical.

Before judging the test as a success or failure I’ll first consider:

1. Were my ads relevant enough? What were my competitors ads saying?
2. Was my sales page effective? Maybe the offer/guarantee wasn’t appropriate to the customers.
3. Or maybe my product idea just sucked.

Remember, discovering that my product sucked and that a business around that product idea won’t work is, believe it or not, a successful test. I will have just saved enormous amounts of time, money, and energy. The process of testing served it’s purpose.

Result

In total the process took about a week or 240 hours of time. I spent about $500 for advertising and $10 for a domain name (I have hosting). What I will have received is a head start on my businesses cost analysis & understanding my Cost-Per-Conversion is huge! This knowledge will help if I plan on pitching the idea to others (VCs, Angels, c0-founders), and it will help to determine the optimal cost of the product.

I should also state that this idea for testing a product or title is not my own. This strategy was first brought to my attention through Tim Ferriss and his book The Four Hour Work Week. His analytical approach to testing and determining results is extremely valuable and I hope that you learn as much as I have from him.

So, I’d love to hear how your tests have gone or what you plan on doing with this testing strategy. This is one of the best ways to minimize mistakes and make sure that a venture is worth chasing after before you sink to much time and money into it. Best of luck!

I would love any thoughts or reactions to these musing in the comments below! I hope all is well with you and that your actions are getting you closer and closer to living your dreams.

The BlogRollr Widget

If video isn’t your thing, here’s the deal, I’ve added the BlogRollr widget in the sidebar of THE DREAM IN ACTION. A blog roll is a list of blogs that I read and that continue to inspire me. My blog reading changes all the time because I’m always looking for new sources of challenging thoughts and new ways to learn so a dynamically populated list makes tons of sense.

Also, I really like the idea of being able to support other bloggers. I get an unbelievable amount of inspiration from many of the guys on this list.  Some of the best & most inspiring are Neil Patel’s QuickSprout blog & Fred Wilson’s AVC.com. In the BlogRollr widget you can see my all time most read, or click on the Recent tab to see what I’ve consumed lately. For example, I’ve been reading both Charlie Hoehn & Steffan Antonas a lot recently because their unique approaches to the changes on the web & in business. Check their blogs out and let me know what you think of the widget in the comments!

Update: The BlogRollr widget is a Firefox plugin and apparently does not display to those visiting the blog using Internet Explorer. My advice, don’t use IE, but I will reach out to the folks at BlogRollr to see what’s on the horizon to fix this issue. Thanks!

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New URL shortener, SU.PR

I’ve started using a new short URL service called SU.PR pronounced ’super’ built by the team at StumbleUpon. Using StumbleUpon has driven a lot of traffic to my site when I’ve used it in the past and I believe that this tool will do the same. The video above from Tim Ferriss talks about what SU.PR does and the benefits of using it.

For me the most interesting feature is the analytics that it provides into what your “optimal” tweet time (of the day) is, not to mention the “su.pr-ior” tracking they provide on the clicked links. Also, they allow you to promote the best posts from your blog. Pretty sweet.

Here are just a few things that the viewer of a su.pr link sees and why it’s really beneficial:

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The Perfect Twitter Business Model

I was watching This Week In Startups and Jason Calacanis mentioned an idea he had that was worth sharing. He said, (I para-phrase) what if Twitter were to insert it’s own affiliate ID to any Tweet that advertised a product? Or, at least on the major ecommerce sites; any Amazon link, or eBay link, or Zappos, etc. They would literally make a killing! It would not impose on the user experience and it would provide a significant revenue stream to a business most believe are desperate for a revenue stream. The subject of how Twitter will monetize their service has been a hot topic for months now, even though the only people who don’t seem worried about their monetization strategy is Ev & Biz.

I give Calacanis serious credit here because in my mind business models can the the most fascinating thing in business and this tops em’. In regards to ‘The Week in Startups’, I recommend checking it out. It’s a live show every Friday, that I normally watch recorded. The guests thus far have been very impressive & the topics/thoughts shared are anything but stale.

In October of 2008 I launched a company called SocialDreamium LLC. I started out doing social web consulting work and used the revenues from that to fund the development of our first product. I recruited a co-founder and development team in December 2008 and we “broke ground” on our product just before the New Year.

Now in late-May 2009 we’ve decided to shut down SocialDreamium and move on. What did we get out of the business? A much better understanding of the social web landscape and significant entrepreneurial lessons learned. As much as I don’t like writing this post, it’s extremely valuable for all of you who are, or will be, in the same boat. The startup road is a narrow and rough one to travel along, my only hope is that you will be smart enough to learn from my mistakes. We weren’t just unlucky, we screwed somethings up; below are many (but not all) of the top lessons I learned from the 8 months we devoted to SocialDreamium.

Project Management Is Not Fluff

This is an area where I’ve probably learned the most. When I started out with SocialDreamium I thought that this project would be completely different from any large project that I’ve managed at work. I thought that the PM style I execute at work was much different than the style required on a startup. Dumb. Project management is project management, and it is important for startups because at the core it’s about getting things done. Execution and using resources appropriately is the name of the game.

Deadlines became a large issue for SocialDreamium and a good project plan helps to manage risk. It helps keep open and responsible communication between team members and have a clear understanding of who is accountable for what. With a good project plan you will keep costs lower (mostly time) and work more effectively because of the plans inherent ability to prioritize your work. I will now take more time to plan and document the goals of each step. Milestones and deliverables to hit those milestones are critically important.

How to Handle A Miss

When starting up you better love mistakes because you’re going to make many of them, the key is learning from them. I made the mistake of not handling misses appropriately during the early stages of SocialDreamium and it hurt us in the long run. Because our team had such a steep learning curve in the early days we missed a few of our expected development deadlines. When these misses happened I got caught up in the details… Who was supposed to do this design? Why wasn’t this bug fixed? What do I need to do to help fix the issue? These were all good questions but not the one I should have been asking.

The question to ask yourself when you have a ‘miss’, is why. And, you ask yourself that question 5 times to get to the root cause. Say it with me now… Why, why, why, why, why? By asking why 5 times you’ll get to the root cause and be able to eliminate the cause of the miss. As you eliminate causes of misses you become efficient, quick, and a powerful team. Next time I’ll ask why much more often.

Communication Strategies

At SocialDreamium, even right off the bat, we were a global company. I was based in Milwaukee and my co-founder @davidabrahams was in Australia, along with our development team. Startups are difficult enough without this kind of geographic challenge. However, it worked in our favor because I did all my work on SocialDreamium after 6pm which is 9am the next day in Sydney.

Communication became an issue in my lack of schedule and consistency. Because both Dave and I had full time jobs outside of SocialDreamium it sometimes had to take a back seat, and this introduced variability into our communication schedule. I’ve now learned that having a consistent and scheduled communication strategy is super important. Until you get to the point that you’re talking everyday (and obsessed to the point you don’t want to talk about anything else) you should keep a strict schedule. Usually, if you’re making good progress 2 email conversations a week should suffice. However, email alone is not enough. You need to have another channel for daily updates. We used Basecamp for our project planning and communication and I would highly recommend that product, but like anything you have to use it to find the value from it.

Be Realistic About Team Core Competencies

Our team of developers was pretty strong. They could diagnose an issue fairly well and act on a solution. Where our team lacked skill was design. We could make things work but making them look pretty was tough for us. To be competitive and drive user adoption, interface design is mission critical. I should have spent more time researching (free material) on UI and layout.

To solve this issue before you have it, recruit appropriately. You wouldn’t hire college grads to consult CEO’s (or maybe you would) so don’t expect that you can do the design if you don’t have design skills. Make sure that you understand the needs of the business and product before you build your team. Another way to put this is, build your team around your product, not your product around your team.

Know Your Product and What Goes Into It

I didn’t understand the technology that was going into SocialDreamium. I still don’t. We decided to build REACH our flagship (but never launched) product in Microsoft .NET. Everything I read about .NET lead me to believe that it was old and that finding talented “social web-ish” developers would be difficult. I was reassured that there is a large development community for .NET and because .NET web development was our teams core competency we were in a good spot. To be honest with you, I still don’t know what the right answer to this was.

What I did learn is that if I’m going to try and start a company where we build houses, I better understand the wood, the brick and the morter. I need to understand what it takes to build a damn house even if I’m not the contractor. It’s absolutely my responsibility to understand the resources that are going to go into my product and business. I don’t expect to be a developer, but I sure do need to understand our information architecture and how one language over the other will affect speed of development, scalability, and anything else that will affect our business processes.

Can you really compete?

Don’t just make a 10/20/30 pitch listing your competition and think that that is enough. It’s not even close. This mistake, I think, is the largest one that Dave and I made in the process of starting SocialDreamium. We knew who our competitors were at the point of launch but we failed to think about who else might be our future competitors. We also failed to analyze if it was actually possible to accomplish what our competitors could accomplish with the resources we had. Startups compete with giants like Microsoft and yes, even Google all the time but sometimes you have to realistically look at the likelihood for success when your “out-resourced”.

The 2 issues were future unexpected competitors and being out resourced.

1. Our future competitor that was unexpected was Seesmic. They developed the Seesmic Desktop and I was honestly blown away. It was so much better than Tweetdeck (another known competitor) and it literally took the wind from our sales. They were extremely well funded, already had tons of press, and the launch was enormous. Their feature set match ours so closely that it was scary and it was our own fault for not being able to get something out sooner in order to compete.
2. Being out-resourced will always be an issue for startups. But in order to overcome this issue you need to make up for it in some other way. A new revenue model, a feature set that is extremely innovative, or a marketing campaign that can change the game (GoDaddy).

Be Honest with Your Passion

This is a lesson I learned without making a mistake. You have to ask yourself, why am I getting into this industry? Having passion for the industry allows you to understand it, grow within it, and be innovative and competitive. I love studying why and how people communicate. I enjoy trying out all the newest tools to do so, and I love taking one form of communication (Twitter) and translating that into other forms (in person).

When we started SocialDreamium our goal was to create a tool that allowed startup community managers to grow groups of people around a cause or a brand better than anything they’d ever used. We loved talking about how people use Twitter and Facebook and blogs to reach people and engage them. We had a solid understanding of the space and where it needed to go. We created a product POC that was killer and that could’ve been a game changer. Our issue was not our passion for the space, our issues lie in the above lessons learned.

I hope that you’ve learned something from my mistakes. Learning from others experiences is so important in entrepreneurship. Here is another great example of a startup post mortem that you can learn from. Don’t stop learning, and don’t stop daring to make mistakes.

image via PieterMusterd

Learning From Others

As I work on my “Lessons Learned” post after closing down SocialDreamium (post should be ready by Wednesday) there is one main lesson that sticks out above the rest. The one lesson that I couldn’t wait until Wednesday to post is the importance of learning from others experiences! As a first time company launcher I was green to so many pitfalls that I could potentially succumb to. What I attempted to do, and will continue to focus on, is learning from the mistakes of others.

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
- Otto von Bismarck

So, as I continue to focus on this, the next questions become, how do I know who to learn from? How do I access these individuals? And where can I converse with them in order to learn from their learnings?

Well there is this small tool on the world wide web called Twitter (come back from the earths core if you don’t know about it). Entrepreneurs, can finally be reached and because of the relative “new-ness” of Twitter they’re still accessible. Use this list below to reach out to people, ask questions, avoid future mistakes, and learn.

Entrepreneurs on Twitter

Name w/ blog link, rank change from blog order, @twitterhandle, position & company (twitter followers)

Update: For your benefit there have been a few add ons

*list ordered by follower count

1. Tim O’Reilly, +3 (@timoreilly) Founder / CEO of O’Reilly Media (525,728)
2. Jason Calacanis, +3 (@jasoncalacanis) CEO of Mahalo (68,583)
3. Chris Pirillo, +9 (@chrispirillo) Geek, Internet entrepreneur, hardware addict, et al (65,181)
4. Mark Cuban, +11 (@mcuban) Owner Dallas Mavericks; Founder Broadcast.com (59,888)
5. Jeff Pulver, +13 (@jeffpulver) VOIP entrepreneur (26,538)
6. Loic Le Meur, +20 (@loic) Founder / CEO Seesmic, Founder Le Web (26,499)
7. Dave McClure, +20  (@davemcclure) Serial entrepreneur now adviser (20,100)
8. Craig Newmark, +25 (@craignewmark) Craig from Craigslist (12,030)
9. Jason Fried, -6 (@jasonfried) 37signals co-founder Jason Fried (11,475)
10. David Heinemeier Hansson, -2 (@dhh) Co-founder 37signals (11,249)
11. Paul Stamatiou, +29 (@stammy) Founder / CEO @ Skribit (11,204)
12. Anil Dash, +25 (@anildash) Co-founder Six Apart (11,041)
13. Ross Mayfield, +7 (@ross) Co-founder / President of SocialText (10,970)
14. Joel Spolsky, -13 (@spolsky) Founder / CEO at Fog Creek Software (9,558)
15. Jason Shellen, +29 (@shellen) Founder / CEO at Plinky (7,555)
16. Dharmesh Shah, -6 (@dharmesh) Founder / CEO of HubSpot (7,102)
17. David Sifry, +6 (@dsifry) Founder / CEO at Technorati (6,713)
18. Caterina Fake, +18 (@caterina) Co-founder Flickr (6,595)
19. Andrew Chen, -3 (@anderw_chen) Serial entrepreneur (3,971)
20. Jonathan Schwartz, -13 (@SunCEOBlog) CEO at Sun (2,964)
21. Christopher Carfi, +9 (@ccarfi) Co-founder Cerado (2,820)
22. Eric Ries, +10 (@ericries) CTO and serial entrepreneur (2,639)
23. Ryan Kuder +0 (@ryankuder) Founder /Neighborsville.com (2,475)
24. Rahul Sood, +26 (@rahulsood) Founder VoodooPC (1,889)
25. Nivi Babak, -15 (@nivi) Entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs succeed (1,637)
26. TheFunded, -3 (@thefunded) Various C-level executives at startups (1,582)
27. Ryan Graves -0 (@ryangraves) Founder / The Renliv Group (1,525)
28. Ross Kimbarovsky -0 (@rosskimbarovsky) CEO / crowdSPRING
29. Benjamin Yoskovitz, -7 (@byosko) Founder / CEO StandoutJobs (1,477)
30. Rajesh Setty, +1 (@upbeatnow) Serial entrepreneur (1,405)
31. Dan Bricklin, -7 (@danb) VisiCalc co-creater (1,365)
32. Steve Blank, -5 (@sgblank) Retired serial entrepreneur now professor of entrepreneurship (1,304)
33. Prasad Thammineni, +23 (@pixily_CEO) Serial entrepreneur and founder at Pixily (1,246)
34. Mark Pincus, +26 (@markpinc) Serial entrepreneur / recovering VC (1,224)
35. Gabor Cselle, +9 (@gabor) A blog about email and startups (1,175)
36. James Hong, +6 (@jhong) Founder Hot or Not (1,111)
37. Tony Wright, +8 (@webright) Founder / CEO RescueTime (1,024)
38. Jana Eggers, +28 (@jeggers) CEO of SPRD.net AG (879)
39. David Cancel, +25 (@dcancel) Co-founder & CTO at Lookery.com (823)
40. Sean Ellis, +7 (@seanellis) Serial CMO / VP Marketing (818)
41. Daniel Tunkelang, +18 (@dtunkelang) Chief Scientist at Endeca (769)
42. Naval Ravikant, -30 (@naval) Entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs succeed (762)
43. Pito Salas, +27 (@pitosalas) Founder BlogBridge; former CTO eRoom (754)
44. Steve Barsh, +14 (@sbarsh) Serial enterpreneur / interim executive (561)
45. Barney Pell, +6 (@barneyp) CEO of Powerset (556)
46. Daniel Debow, -0 (@ddebow) CEO of Rypple
47. Laurent Feral-Pierssens, +34 (@lfp) Founder / CEO Silentale (532)
48. David Hauser, +30 (@dh) Co-founder ReturnPath; CEO Grasshopper (487)
49. Jonathan Mendez, -20 (@jonathanmendez) Serial entrepreneur, online ad expert (477)
50. Greg Reinacker, 0 (@gregr) Founder & CTO at NewsGator (477)
51. Joe Krauss, -13 (@jkraus) Entrepreneur (473)
52. Furqan Nazeeri, -13 (@altgate) Startups, venture capital & everything in between (428)
53. Jules Pieri, +24 (@julespieri) CEO at Daily Grommet (414)
54. Carson McComas, -36 (@carson) Entrepreneur (419)
55. Matt Blumberg, -13 (@mattblumberg) CEO @ ReturnPath (368)
56. Alan Meckler, +17 (@alanmeckler) CEO WebMediaBrands (351)
57. Dave Kellogg, -6 (@ramblingman) CEO of Mark Logic Corporation (349)
58. Various Entrepreneurs, +16 (@founding) Founder Institute (286)
59. Doug Levin, +13 (@dalev) Entrepreneur / former CEO at Black Duck Software (258)
60. Sim Simeonov, -4 (@simeons) Entrepreneur; recovering VC (248)
61. Andrew Payne, -3 (@payne92) Serial entrepreneur (240)
62. James Siminoff, -4 (@grid) Founder / CEO at PhoneTag (184)
63. Alain Raynaud, +3 (@alain94040) Founder FairSoftware (182)
64. Michael Gracie, (@michaelgracie) Serial COO / CTO (174)
65. Tom Keller, +15 (@tkeller) Founder & former CEO of Intense Debate (117)
66. Jay Jamison, +19 (@jeremiahjamison) Serial entrepreneur (100)
67. Bert Armijo, -12 (@barmijo) Co-founder & SVP at 3tera (81)
68. Charles Teague, +1 (@dragonstyle) Technologist-in-Residence at General Catalyst (59)
69. Jon Gillespie-Brown, +13 (@gillespiebrown) Serial entrepreneur (40)
70. Brian Shin, -2 (@briankshin) Founder / CEO at Visible Measures (14)

This list created by Furgan Nazeeri, much props.
http://www.altgate.com/blog/2009/06/entrepreneurs-on-twitter.html

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So, who else should we be following? Who has experience and advice that we can learn from? Please share in the comments!

image via antiguan