Found+READ: Comments by Tony Wright

Tony Wright — Thu, 03 May 2007 01:06:34 GMT

Good article. I tend to think that if a name is short and spelled-like-it’s-pronounced, that’s plenty good. When you look at a bunch of the dominant brands in the world, their names are (when you divorce them from the brand they’ve created) pretty weak. Microsoft, MacroMedia, Yahoo, Apple, etc.

Some further reading on the subject is over here:

http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/biz/how-to-name-your…

Tony Wright — Sat, 19 May 2007 03:43:33 GMT

Good cautionary tale.

A buy-sell agreement is a wonderful thing. The best (and simplest) buy-sell agreement that I’ve seen is basically this:

Party A wants to buy out Party B. The initiator (Party A) has to make a buyout offer. Party B has the OPTION of either accepting the offer or buying the shares of Party A (the initiator) at the offered price.

I’d also suggest a 3-6 month “test the waters” phase where both parties have a low-cost “out clause”...

One thing I’d also throw out. As an entrepreneur, you have to surrender some control if you want partners/ co-founders. If you aren’t willing to surrender/share control, be prepared to shell out more money and hire paid employees/contractors (who I’m sure will happily execute on your vision).

Tony Wright — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 07:10:21 GMT

Get a co-founder. It’s cheaper, you’ll get better quality work, and it’ll improve you as a founder.

Tony Wright — Wed, 23 May 2007 00:20:09 GMT

Yep—you’re talking about the First Mover Advantage… Which is only SOMETIMES true. Dodgeball preceded Twitter. Google attacked a well-established and crowded market. Adwords didn’t do much of anything Overture hadn’t been doing for years. The iPod was far from the first MP3 player.

It isn’t speed, it’s timing and quality of execution.

Tony Wright — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:20:43 GMT

Talk to a mess of people (preferably the target market for each idea) and ask them to sign up to use it/buy it today. If you need to (to communicate the idea) whip up some mockups/screenshots.

Then attack ONE idea based on how much people want it and/or are willing to pay for it.

Remember that no one wants to make someone feel bad, so your feedback will be skewed positive.

Here are some other bonus tie-breakers:

1) Go with the idea that people like to talk about. Something controversial or something that would play well (on an ongoing basis) on communities like Digg, Reddit, etc.

2) Take the idea that casts the widest search engine indexable net of content (SEO + lots of indexed pages = free traffic).

3) Take the idea that is searched for most out of the three. Go to Google trends and run through a few queries to see which are seems most popular (SEO + popular terms = free traffic).

4) Pick the one that doesn’t rely on targeted advertising as a business model.

5) Which idea could you get to market faster or cheaper?

6) Post the ideas somewhere (here?) and ask for responses/feedback. Please, please, don’t tell me that you don’t want to do this because the ideas are too good/clever and you’re afraid they’ll get stolen.

Tony Wright — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 23:01:41 GMT

Adbrite is a solid alternative to Google Adsense… Depending on your space, you also might consider affiliate marketing (something like http://www.popshops.com).

Tony Wright — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 07:48:48 GMT

Looking at the site, I’d focus on messaging before you focus on marketing (viral or otherwise). Spend some brain-cycles on messaging and usability (or better yet, seek the advice of someone who is good at that stuff—it’s hard to see the forest for the trees oftentimes for a founder).

Took me quite a bit of clicking and reading on your site before I understood what the site did (and I’m still not entirely sure I get it). That “Oh, I get it” moment has to be virtually instantaneous.

For viral marketing to work people have to be thinking, “My friends/readers will understand this and find it interesting as hell.”

Keep working on making it viral/interesting on a tiny scale (friends, family, forums, small blogs). Measure your bounce rate (Google that if you don’t know what it is), understand your funnel (how many of your visitors engage with site? Read a page or two? Contribute content? How long are people spending at the site?) talk to your users and ask the hard questions.

Show your app to 10 people who’ve never seen it before and ask them to explain the site to you after they’ve been there for 15 seconds.

Once you’re ready for a big marketing push (heck, maybe you still think you are) try googling the phrase “linkbait” and learn all you can about it.

Hope some of this helps!

Tony Wright — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:55:55 GMT

Uh, what?

There are plenty of non-profits out there and causes to support. If you really want to give back to the world, ad-free web sites isn’t really touching on the worst problems on this planet.

Other people have a stake in your company (friends, spouses, children, family, co-founders, angels, VCs, whatever) and you’ve made a promise that there would be financial success (or other types of prosperity) at the end of the rainbow.

Your responsibility is to pursue that. If you have a compromise between you and a financial windfall, you need to evaluate how that compromise will effect your stakeholders when COMPARED TO THE RISKS AND REWARDS OF THE ALTERNATIVE.

Taking the money might hurt the users in the short term, but if the pain is acute enough someone else will respond and build what they want.

In the meantime, you can spend your time doing REAL good.

Tony Wright — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 10:25:11 GMT

Knowing when to quit and when to stick is a LOT easier in hindsight. :-)

On one hand, I know a lot of entrepreneurs who I look at and say, “Man—that business/idea is a dead end. He should run screaming!”

I probably know MORE entrepreneurs who fail on the other side of the coin—quitting too often. We’ve all seen it—entrepreneurial ADD. They latch onto an idea, work like crazy on it to the point where it’s no longer any fun. Instead of a barrel of promise and potential, it’s a warty alpha product that needs a LOT of work. About that time, a new idea pops into their head that is decidedly wart free! And it’d be easy! And oh-so-viral!

I think we’re pretty well trained by the media to think that a “dip” is a sign of failure (Did YouTube have one? Facebook?). But I think 99% of startups have ‘em.

Tony Wright — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 12:12:18 GMT

Makes you wonder about all these stealth startups who are jealously protecting their first-mover “advantage”.