Category —
Entrepreneurship
Written by Paul on June 17th, 2010
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Chris Dixon makes an important point about not over-engineering your product in the early days:
Many products can be built much more quickly and cheaply by settling for good technology plus a bunch of hacks – human editing, partnerships, using 3rd party software – versus creating a perfect technology from scratch.
To this day, most of the work at MailFinch is still manual. Someone has to make sure a document gets printed, folded and stuffed into a …
Popularity: 2% [?]
Written by Paul on May 28th, 2010
Looking back at the recent growth of MailFinch, most of the success can be attributed to what the product can’t do. We do very few things but we do those things better than anyone else in the game and we make it drop-dead simple to get started. Now Thomas Thurston, a researcher and consultant based in Portland, Oregon, has come up with a formula that predicts startup success with an 85% accuracy …
Popularity: 4% [?]
Written by Paul on April 28th, 2010
A MailFinch customer introduced me to Andrew Warner of Mixergy fame and the rest, as they say, is history. Check out the interview if you’re interested in learning about how I built MailFinch from the ground up.
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Popularity: 1% [?]
Written by Paul on April 21st, 2010
I built the original version of MailFinch, an on-demand direct mail platform, in a few hours about six months ago. Today we’re sending a couple thousand letters a month and growing at a nice clip. Rather than give you hand-wavy advice about how you should do it, I’ll simply tell you how I did it.
MailFinch Product Roadmap
1) Core Product: Create Letter and Accept Money
- I wanted people to be able to upload a letter and send it.
- Before they actually
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Popularity: 2% [?]
Written by Paul on March 13th, 2009
UPDATE: Philtro was acquired by CityVoice in late 2009.
A few weeks ago, I opened up my RSS reader of choice (NetNewsWire, actually) to quickly scan the titles of the new posts available and mark the rest as “read” immediately. Total time spent: 5 minutes. Total value gained: 0. I needed to find a better way to filter my feeds or risk contuining this daily charade.
There’s no doubt that RSS (and Twitter) have become essential to the online …
Popularity: 1% [?]
Written by Paul on January 15th, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, I shared my thoughts on how to buy a small business. Since then, a number of people emailed me to ask how to actually run a small business. Easy enough!
First things first, running a “brick & mortar” business is much, much harder than anyone initially thinks. When I first took over my family’s construction company, I thought it was going to be a piece of cake. I mean, how hard can it be to …
Popularity: 1% [?]
Written by Paul on December 7th, 2008
For certain people, entrepreneurship is less about some high-tech idea put together by some college engineers and more about doing something tangible — like running a car wash or buying a bar. After all, what’s better than waking up and collecting cash from people that want to have their car cleaned every day or just want to hang out at your little dive bar?
Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that simple.
The economy is in shambles, real estate valuations are tanking and most …
Popularity: 1% [?]
Written by Paul on November 9th, 2008
I am constantly aware of people unhappy about certain aspects of their business. Some are understaffed and overwhelmed with the sheer number of things they need to do. Others go on and on about how the economy sucks, customers are harder to find or that they simply can’t find good people to work with. But – and this is a big “but” – they never actually get started. Chances are, you know people like this too.
The fact of the matter …
Popularity: 1% [?]
Written by Paul on September 17th, 2008
I was visiting my home, just outside of DC, this weekend and met a number of great folks involved in a wide range of industries. As I sit here on the ride back to San Francisco, I’ve been thinking about one particular entrepreneur that struck me because I still don’t know what he and his small business do, even after chatting for 20 minutes. (To protect the innocent, I won’t call him out publicly but I’m working with him privately …
Popularity: 1% [?]
Written by Paul on August 28th, 2008
The most common phrase I hear from entrepreneurs is, “Get me to the next level.” Within a few minutes of chatting with them, it’s usually very obvious that they have a very real feeling of being stuck.
What “the next level” actually is varies depending on who you talk to but the good news is many of the factors that block reaching it are surprisingly the same. …
Popularity: 1% [?]
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