Delivering Happiness

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MariKate ordered a gift from Zappos on Thursday – regular shipping, and it arrived Friday. Literally less than 12 hours later! I’ve read Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (Zappo’s CEO) a couple years ago.  I’ve have always been impressed with Zappos famous customer service, and has been something I’ve tried to emulate through Purlem. I send out… Read more »

Niche 2 Win

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Dave McClure, an angel investor in San Francisco, recently wrote about a strategy called “Niche to Win.” First of all.. thank you Dave for being an investor while still keeping the best interests of the company in mind.  As I ranted in my post on Steve Blank’s video, the whole concept that startups need to have… Read more »

Entrepreneurial Seizures

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I have mentioned a couple of times before that  I often have to catch myself from having entrepreneurial seizures.  For whatever reason, new ideas can be so attractive to me that I just want to drop everything to pursue them. I have gotten into a good habit of setting goals in Omnifocus, and I forcing myself to… Read more »

Quant Based Marketing is a Pipe Dream

Posted by & filed under Business, Marketing.

Today I ran across the post “Quant Based Marketing for Start Ups” by Noah Kagan. Noah was the director of marketing and took Mint.com to over a million users in just 6 months. No doubt very impressive. (I’m also a big fan and avid user of Mint.com. I love the product) Noah says that Quant… Read more »

1,000 True Fans

Posted by & filed under Business, Lifestyle.

Matt Landau, a good friend of mine, recently shared a blog post with me called 1,000 True Fans.   The concept of 1,000 True Fans is that a “creator”  needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.  A short excerpt from the post… Young artists starting out in this digitally mediated world have another… Read more »

VIDEO: Real Men Don’t Do Lifestyle Businesses

Posted by & filed under Business, Lifestyle.

I’m trying to figure out if I should be offended by, or agree with this video. What I think Steve Blank is saying, is that “lifestyle businesses” and “small businesses” are synonymous.  Those that run lifestyle/small businesses are the “smart” ones because they actually have a life, but they are not startups. The difference, Steve… Read more »

A TAGFREE Business

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Read any business book and there likely going to tell you that you need to define the principals to run your business by.  In the E-myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber,  they call these “principals” your Primary Aim.  ”Your Primary Aim is your innermost driving force. It gives you a sense of direction and purpose. It motivates you… Read more »

Replace Planning with Action

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I’ve been on an idea kick lately. I’m not sure what it is, but I feel like I have 10 different ideas swimming through my head, and I think there all awesome! Before I started Purlem, I had a problem – I had entrepreneurial seizures all of the time. (Hats off to Michael Gerber from… Read more »

IDEA: Private Coffee Shops

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A few months ago I read Arik Hanson’s post - 7 tips for working out of coffee shops.  I commented on Arik’s post… Given the increasing popularity of coffee shop workers.. I have always thought it would be a good idea to create a “private” or “urban country club” type of coffee shop. Something in-between a… Read more »

Finding the Perfect Partner

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Last week we made some very large advancements to Purlem’s back-end.  In a nut-shell, Purlem is now setup so that a team of developers can work on the application at the same time in a secure environment. This is a HUGE milestone for Purlem –  allowing me to finally step away from being the sole developer,… Read more »