My new crazy idea: Startup time. Lauren’s thinking about starting a digital news organization in Porterville, California.
Tag Archives: startups
Painless Functional Specifications. Why you should write functional specs, according to Joel Spolsky. Excellent series from all the way back in year two triple zero. Read part two, part three and part four as well.
Why Startups Fail: An Analysis of Post-Mortems. Valuable insights and possibilities to consider.
Building the trunk, first. How Carbonmade made it to where it is today, and why it’s only 1% of what it will be in 5 years. (via Andrew Spittle)
How Facebook Ships Code. Brings new meaning to the phrase “developer-driven culture.”
Startup Lessons from Constant Contact. Average selling price of $37/month with 375k customers. Holy shit.
Equity research from the CoPress-era
For a friend, these are links I pulled together when researching CoPress’ equity split Fall 2009. Startup Equity Distribution Notice that I used the word allocation above. Allocated means not vested. In my mind all founders stock should have either a milestone or time based… Continue reading →
The Startup Diet. How to stay productive, healthy and feeling great on $4 per person per day.
Lesson: Transparency is tough
It was important to the journalists that we were a very open and transparent company. From the start, we tried to put as much information out there as we possibly could, and the most efficient way was to put every journalist we accepted onto a mailing list. However, this meant that our blunders and critical feedback were visible for all those journalists to see. Lots of them hadn’t started writing, we didn’t know them, and they had simply signed up, so we were always aware that our emails were semi-public. As a result, when we decided to close up shop, our closing down email was “leaked” to Poynter, leading to all sorts of speculation.
It takes a lot of time to be open like this, and a lot of effort to communicate effectively. The lesson here isn’t so much that we did it wrong, but that it’s difficult to do well.
Awesome postmortem. Reminds me that I still need to do a debrief on CoPress.
News entrepreneurship session at Digital Journalism Camp
Arrived a few minutes late to Digital Journalism Camp, organized by Abraham Hyatt, and these are my notes from the first session about news entrepreneurship in Portland. Steve Woodward and Carolyn Duncan, of the Portland Ten, led the session. Steve Woodward of Nozzl Media argues… Continue reading →