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How To Stop Worrying About Building An Audience And Just Get Started

October 24, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Descending the summit ridge

Have you ever thought about starting some sort of venture and found yourself wishing that you had done it five years earlier? I certainly have, and I’m willing to bet that you have too. That’s what I  was thinking when I was in the process of starting this blog. I knew that growth would be slow and that it would be discouraging at times. I thought that if I had just started this blog five years ago when I first entertained the idea then I could potentially have a huge following by now and have surefire international fame and notoriety.

The best motivation I’ve found to combat the five year remorse is to just get started. If you don’t get started now then you could regret it five years from now, wishing that you had finally acted upon your idea. Just do it. If it’s going to take years to get where you want to go then there’s never a better time to start than the present.

Your Homework

What have you been putting off doing because it seems daunting or because you know that success is years away? Go ahead and put that idea into motion. Get started by doing something concrete that will help push the idea to fruition. Start that blog, contact that lead, just do something. Let me know what you’ve done in the comments.

Image credit: mikep on Flickr

Filed Under: Blogging, CEO, Entrepreneur, Features, Tips and Tools · Tagged With: , , , ,

Don’t Be Like Weather Reporters

August 27, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Every year during hurricane season we’re given an opportunity to learn a little bit about authenticity. TV weather reporters dream of the day they can cover a hurricane from some wind-ravaged location. Unfortunately, it appears that much of the time during their broadcasts they are intentionally exaggerating storm effects. The reporter will appear to be barely able to stand, having to lean into the wind to keep their footing… and then you see an 80-year old strolling by.

Inauthenticity Can Kill Your Reputation

Just ask the weather industry… They are hearing it from all angles since the end of the Irene’s threat.. Viewers feel inauthenticity. Media outside of the weather industry feel it too.

Similarly, your readers and customers can spot a fake from a mile away, so you have to continually strive for authenticity and trust.

Your Thoughts?

Have you ever learned a lesson the hard way related to authenticity?

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July’s Greatest Hits

August 3, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

At the beginning of each month I take a look back through my analytics and reveal the top 5 posts from the previous month. This is how I continue to manage the content I write about, and it’s likely to be of interest to some of my readers.

Here are the top posts from July.

1. Christmas in July, 10 Free Startup Ideas

2. Beginning CustDev for Bootstrappers

3. The Beauty of Recurring Revenue

4. Interview with Dirk Stevens of Wondergraphs

5. What’s Keeping Me Up at Night

Do you have any feedback on the content that I’m putting out? What would you like to see more or less of? Comments welcome.

Filed Under: Blogging, Misc · Tagged With: ,

What’s Keeping Me Up At Night

July 18, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

My wife and I are lucky enough to have a beautiful three-month old baby girl at home; that gives me ample time at night to think about business and changing the world. I tend to focus on issues within my company, but I also tend to think about global issues that we all face together. After getting the baby to sleep I tend to think very clearly about problems and sometimes have great insights about potential solutions.

Writing A Book

This is something that I’ve been working toward for a long time. This blog is part of the path. I tend to think a lot about what specific topic the book should cover. Should it be fiction or non-fiction? Should it be a business and marketing book or should it be something philosophical and mathematical (2 other passions of mine)? Recently I’ve been thinking that the book should be a detailed guide to startup your own bootstrapped startup.

SparkCDN

SparkCDN is one of the MediaLeaf companies and something that I’ve been working heavily on for a few years. What I’ve been struggling with lately is how to position the company in the market. Do we position Spark as a full-featured content delivery network or do we focus on one particular aspect, such as live event streaming? Content delivery is a large, crowded industry, so product positioning is critical.

Another Spark issue that I’ve been struggling with recently is the complete redesign that’s currently taking place. A lot of difficult design decisions have to be made that will directly affect the perceived value and it’s ultimate usability to our customers.

Google+ and Other Social Media

I’m always looking for new and creative ways to utilize social networks to help promote myself and my brands. That means thinking a lot about Google+ and the Facebook fan pages for my brands.

Global Issues

I’ve been thinking a lot about internet censorship lately. Governments are actively working out ways to filter (i.e. censor) internet content under the guise of intellectual property protection. This is a serious detriment to consumers and will ultimately stifle innovation. Read more about the PROTECT IP act.

What About You?

What’s keeping you up at night? Comments welcome.

 Image credit: Alice Hutchinson on Flickr

Filed Under: Blogging, CEO · Tagged With: , , ,

Christmas in July – 10 Free Startup Ideas

July 14, 2011 by · 5 Comments

counting days....

Our team at MediaLeaf is pretty small, so there are many, many ideas that we have that we know we’ll never get to. I figured I would do a public service post and just give 10 of these ideas away. These ideas are completely free and up for grabs. Some of them may have even been already attempted, but there isn’t any implementation popular enough for me to know about it. These are in no particular order.

  • Positive news aggregator. 99% (just my gut feel) of the news reported is negative. Positive news is a nice niche market.
  • Visual marketing email design app. The key here would be that designs could be exported to major email service providers.
  • In-depth email marketing analytics. Major email providers provide some basic analytics, but detailed reporting and A/B analysis could be extremely helpful.
  • Mobile app to take a daily picture of yourself. Would be able to show slideshows, flipbook-style animations of how you change over time. App would send notifications to remind you to take a daily picture.
  • Generic social profiles. Portable, pre-populated social network profiles for fictitious users. Useful for dev purposes on new social sites.
  • Hyper-local shopping. Mobile app to visually browse/search inventory at stores as you walk by. Promotions can help catch passers-by.
  • 3rd generation business directory. Aimed at online B2B companies. Would require being recommended by X number of users before being listed. Kind of like a curated list of popular B2B apps.
  • Weekly meal planner. Mobile app that would allow you to enter your favorite meals and help you decide how to plan your week’s meals.
  • Email reminder service. Would let you schedule recurring tasks to be emailed to you on a periodic basis. Would allow snoozing and reminding of tasks. Create recurring tasks simply by sending an email. Like followup.cc for recurring tasks.
  • Social media marketing conversation topics. Could be a private, paid mailing list. Each week would feature X number of conversation topics and advice.

Thoughts?

What do you think about the ideas listed? Interested in trying one or more of them? Have any others to add to the list?

Disclaimer: I bear no responsibility for the quality or viability of these ideas. It’s likely that a lot of people will see these same ideas, so if you see one you like then you should move on it quickly.

Image Credit: zophonias on Flickr

Filed Under: Blogging, CEO, Misc, Social, Tips and Tools · Tagged With: , , , ,

What jimlastinger.com is About

July 8, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Jim Lastinger

I blatantly stole this idea from Chris Brogan. Thanks Chris.

I haven’t clearly articulated what this site is about recently. Even more confusing is the fact that the blog’s focus has shifted a bit from when it first launched. JimLastinger.com is about me and what I do and think about on a daily basis as the CEO and Founder of several bootstrapped startups.

What I Write About

I write about things that I think other bootstrappers and startup founders will get value from. That isn’t always the case, but I like to think that as whole this blog is helpful. I write about a wide variety of topics, but I don’t have a schedule for which topics to write about when. Here’s a sampling of the topics that I’ve written about thus far.

Bootstrapping – I’m passionate about building businesses from the ground up without having to rely on others for funding. I’ve written about bootstrapping many times.

Social Media and Marketing – One of my job duties is handling social media and marketing for my companies, so I’m an omnivore consumer of social media marketing information. Each day I learn a little bit more. I’ll post my progress and learnings here.

Productivity – Being CEO of multiple startups comes with a tremendous workload. I’ve written about how I manage absurdly large workloads in the past and will continue to bring up new ideas and suggestions as I have them.

Finance – Financial management is the most crucial task that a bootstrapped CEO has, so it’s something that I write about frequently.

CustDev and LeanStartup - These started out being the focus of the blog, but I’ve moved in a different direction. These topics interest me greatly, and I use them daily here. I still plan to write about how I apply them to my companies.

Why You Should Read jimlastinger.com

If you are interested in what it’s really like to be involved in a small, bootstrapped startup then you’re in the right place. I write about what I do and learn on a daily basis, and occasionally I write about the things that I’m actually good at. You’ll get a lot of variety… I see and do a lot of different things on a daily basis, and that shows up here.

Your Thoughts?

Are you a first time reader or a regular? What do you want to see more of? What other blogs are you into at the moment? Comments appreciated.

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June’s Greatest Hits

July 1, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Logo Top 5 de las 5

I really try to do a good job of keeping up with how many readers I get for each post I put up. It’s important for me to keep learning about my audience (and my potential audiences) so that I can keep creating valuable, targeted content. Here are the articles that got the best response in June, sorted by number of readers.

1. 5 Practical Sources for Bootstrapping Funds

2. How To Make Money Online, Realistically

3. Why Square is the Most Disruptive Startup Ever

4. Utilizing Evangelists to Announce Promotions

5. The Filter Bubble is Overblown

Short and sweet post this time. Any thoughts on the content that I’m putting out? What would you like to see more or less of?

Photo credit: albertini on Flickr

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My Blogging Workflow

June 6, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

I thought it may be of some interest to other bloggers to know how I’ve been managing my blogging workflow and how it’s evolved since I started blogging back in February.

Wordpress

I use WordPress (with the Genesis WordPress platform) on my own domain, so I have full control of my site and the WP install. The first thing that I did was to install a few plugins that I find invaluable for helping me manage the plethora of partially written posts that I have. I use the Edit Flow plugin for several features: extra post statuses, a great calendar, and several other options for the editorial process. Edit Flow has replaced Editorial Calendar for me because Editorial Calendar became rather buggy after WP 3.1.

Here is my typical workflow:

  1. Choose a topic and save it as a pitch. I usually just put my idea as the post title and enter any additional thoughts in the post itself. This helps me quickly pick out articles I want to continue with as I browse through my list of pitches. I save the articles as a Pitch (from Edit Flow) instead of a draft so that I can keep them separate.
  2. Write article. When I get around to actually writing an article I change the status to Draft. This is also when I revise the post title match up more closely with where the post is heading now that text is finally being added.
  3. Add image. I typically only add one image to each post, and it’s usually just placed at the top of the post. It’s unusually difficult to find good images under a Creative Commons license to use in my blog posts. (There’s definitely room here for a new startup to solve this problem. There’s a freebie idea for you.) I currently use CompFight.com to search for images on Flickr. The interface is simply better for finding appropriate images than Flickr itself.
  4. Add metadata. This is the time to choose categories, enter tags, SEO data, excerpts, etc. Genesis does a good job of integrating the SEO fields (post title, post description, etc.) right in the post page, so it’s a standard part of my workflow now.
  5. Scheduling. Once everything else is finalized I will look through the calendar generated by Edit Flow to see when my post should go out. I try to base my scheduling based on the immediacy of the content (is it related to something in the news?), how many posts I’ve done on similar topics recently, etc. I try to mix up my topics and the types of posts I’m putting out as much as possible.

The workflow hasn’t changed much since the beginning except for the Edit Flow plugin. I realized early on that I need to have more statuses available than WordPress was giving me. There are several options out there for adding more statuses or creating custom ones, but the total package available with Edit Flow made it a clear choice for me.

What is your blogging workflow like? Is there something obvious that I’m missing or something that could help me? Comments welcome!

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