Maybe pictures of cats, maybe not.

 Sales and marketing has never been my strong suit. I've often felt like sales was a profession full of snakes who would try to sell anything to anyone in order to make a quick buck. Incredibly recently I have had my point of view radically reset. You see, the stereotypes aren't necessarily wrong, but they aren't about sales or marketing people: they're about con artists. Selling anything to anyone at any price you can isn't sales . No, no, that's just scamming, plain and simple. Sales is a complex beast. It's knowing what you can do, figuring out who needs it, and puzzling together just how you fit in. Good sales isn't just exchanging money for a product, it's building a relationship to provide something to someone who needs it. I'm going to switch gears here a bit and just talk about business people, generally. Often times, business leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Bowing and cow-towing to the almighty god-numbers of the stock market and laying

Brian Forth, founder & owner of Sitecrafting came to visit our class recently and talked to us about the realities of running a company. He told us his story, really, and I found it quite reassuring on the whole. Sitecrafting sounds like it started in much the way I'd like for my company to start: One man, one product, no venture capital, and whole lot of elbow grease. It seems like Brian started small, doing some web design for his friends and locals and slowly, bit by bit, built a foundation to stand on. Over the years his company has grown and his team has brought on a diverse pool of talent so Sitecrafting can create "digital experiences", as they call them.  I really enjoy the Sitecrafting story. It resonates, the idea that you can start something yourself and grow it out, bit by bit, and one day you'll notice this living, breathing, organism all around you that you've built.  To me, it's what a business should be. It's having an idea, forming a m

It feels like every name for a company is already taken. I had the idea to call it Windborne, but that is the name of a European band. Then I thought about Tailwind, which is the name of a CSS library. To my knowledge I could still call it either of those things but I'm worried about searchability for the future. To be fair, what people really need to be able to search for is product names so the company name can be a little more generic. For the time being I'm thinking I'll stick with Windborne, I just like the sound of it and it opens us up to a wonderful catch phrase: "It's smooth sailing from here". Perfect out the gate, I'm definitely not here because I already own the domain. In reality this is all still subject to change but it's a direction that I'm enjoying. For a while I thought about Strange & Interesting Software Design in tip of the hat to Little Shop but there is not a good domain for that . I reduced myself to considering ampersa

 I found our little talk with Erik Hanberg on Tuesday to be a little enlightening to the realities of business ownership and the uncertainties of income. I appreciated how Erik discussed over-reliance on a single partner and the possibility to draw to heavily on your business to support you personally when you don't have other income. Erik's business is one of the few where really he relies on himself and no employees to make things run, primarily. Writing books is no simple task, and writing books that explain the finer points of operating non-profit organizations in a way that people will welcome and understand is, I'm certain, ever more difficult than writing itself! At one point he showed us a chart of income over time with the different income sources color-coded, those peaks and valleys each representing a story. Sometimes victories, sometimes terrors. The prospect of running out of money is genuinely that, terrifying. When you're someone running your own business

I find myself conflicted over a mission statement for my company. It's something that needs to express mountains of meaning in molehills of space, which makes it deeply difficult! It bears asking a simple question: What do I want from my company, fundamentally? I think I want: To make people's lives easier To design solutions for people who may not otherwise get access to this kind of technology To create opportunities where few or none existed before To innovate and create novel solutions to unique problems in ways that really help people. Now how do I boil that down into a snappy mission statement? I've had a few thoughts, firstly: Our mission is to build software solutions for the communities that need them. Which is short and sweet, but I feel lacks impact and doesn't fully convey what I want here. Yes, I want to build solutions for people who need them but I also have a deep drive to design and create new things! I don't want to just build the same WordPress si

 Startup.com drove me completely insane. These people did not have it together, seemed to really only have half of a clue as to what they were doing and they brought together all of these people with this half baked idea and then failed. Catastrophically. Towards the beginning of the film there was a potential investor that our boys Kaleil and Tom had gone to go get some money from who told them they had a bad idea that wasn't going to be financially viable. After leaving Kaleil proceeds to say "this guy doesn't get it" but I must say: If after leaving an investment meeting you have to say "this guy doesn't get it" then perhaps you should reconsider your position. Maybe the idea is bad, maybe you presented it poorly. Either way your takeaway should be that you need to rethink and refine either your plan or approach before you move forward. Later on they're in a big meeting trying to get a huge investment and they literally had their lawyer on speake