Found+READ: Comments by Frank Young

Frank Young — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 05:50:29 GMT

A couple thoughts:

1) Requiring people to register to the blog just to leave a comment is EXTREMELY LAME. If you’re worried about spam, getter a better spam filter. Since you use WordPress for the majority of your web properties, I’m sure you can hire a solid programmer to write a plugin for you if you don’t feel that Akismet is up to task.

2) I think this was a cool first article. As a current purveyor of Hip Hop music on a daily basis, Dr. Dre is one of the few producers that gets a constant rotation in my iPod. The work he did on the new Young Buck CD is breath taking.

With that said, I do have a few annoyances with Dre and feel that because of these, it hurts him to be looked toward for inspiration in starting a business:

A) He’s a perfectionist, as you already mentioned. But I think sometimes that this actually HURTS him rather than helps. Rakim sat on Aftermath for nearly 6 years and the whole entire time that he was there we only got a few guest verses on other artists works. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but an artist with no music out doesn’t eat (read: make money). Sure Rakim has plenty of old-school music that he can perform, but the market that he’s trying to reach now doesn’t know that music. They want something new.

So I say all of that to say that sometimes, it’s just better to get the music (read: product) out there and improve upon it as you go. After all, nothing is perfect.

B) Tying into my first point about being a perfectionist is the idea of vapor-ware. Dre has been working on Detox so long that it is now considered vapor-ware among the Hip hop community. No product (music or otherwise) should ever take so long to come to fruition. Again, nothing is perfect…it never will be. Even when we deem an item to be classic, there is always going to be something about it that can be improved upon. If this wasn’t true, then why do we release multiple versions of products?

C) My last point deals with loyalty. Everyone knows the sordid details of Dre dropping Truth Hurts and The Game from Aftermath (I only include these two as they actually dropped solid, credible CDs). In my view, if you don’t exzibit any loyalty in the products that you put out, why should I exzibit any loyalty to you and keep spending my hard earned dollars on you and the products that you release? Loyalty in and among the people that you work with and the products that you release can be a strong motivator for workers to keep working and for others to develop partnerships with you. Loyalty goes a long way in the public perception and if you don’t give any, you’ll never get any.

In the end, Dre is still a great producer and business man. But IMHO, if he worked on fixing those couple of points, he could be THE GREATEST producer and business man.

Frank Young — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 02:49:45 GMT

It seems that with more and more consumers becoming ‘digitally aware’ that more men and women coming out of Law Schools across the country would think that Patent Law would be a nice area to specialize in. Especially if what you say about bigger firms working with small start-ups is true.

Frank Young — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 02:58:35 GMT

I think this would be an excellent article.

Frank Young — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 03:06:06 GMT

I think you should also include what the differences are between the various investors are. Also, what would be of interest to me is how to go about attracting investors and what to offer them when you literally have no profit coming in yet from the venture.

Using myself as an example, I need to drum up some investors to help fund my Web Design company to cover costs for things like Business cards, new equipment and software, legal filing [LLC], etc.

Since I work for and by myself and literally live from project to project, what can I offer to potential investors as compensation for their investment dollars? Do I offer a piece of the “company” even though I’m not “legal” yet? Do I offer a percentage on the money that I bring in per project (basically a dividend)? Etc., etc…......

I think readers would find this type of information helpful. I know I would….

Frank Young — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:42:48 GMT

Om,

I’m just now seeing that you aren’t using WordPress, but a different service entirely. For the most part it’s cool, but again I think needing to register just to leave a comment takes away from the spirit of the moment. Let’s say you came to my blog and read a post that you were compelled to comment on, but before doing so, you had to fill out a form and “register” with my blog first. In doing so, I may make you for get what you were going to write or make you lose the ferver in which you were going to comment by taking your attention elsewhere and then trying to return back to the original post as if you never left. As far as I know, Time Machines don’t exist (although I’m sure that Steve Jobs is working on iTime as we speak).

I’d also like to point out that (even though you can’t control this) there seems to be a disconnect between the services User Profile editor form and the blog from which a reader comes. When I was editing my profile, I noticed that once I was finshed, the form didn’t have a link to take me back to foundread.com; I had to re-type the URL just to get back here. That’s kinda not a good look to me. Again, I know that you’re just using a hosted service here, but you might want to speak to higher-ups to see if they could get that changed or no. It would make the whole experience of foundread.com much more fluid.